The Smarter Planet: Built on Informatics and Cybernetics

IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is a multi-disciplined approach that integrates the key tenets of the IMSCI 2014 (The 8^th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics, and Informatics) conference [1]. Industry has seen a tremendous explosion of data growth. Organizations that dealt with Terabytes (TB) and Petabytes (PB) just a couple of years ago are now faced with the challenge of dealing with Exabytes (EB) of data. An Exabyte is 10¹⁸ Bytes – a million times a billion bytes! The amount of information available today is truly remarkable; so much that it is considered by many in industry as a new "natural resource." Computing has similarly grown and made major advances. Today's fastest supercomputer is a 33.8 PFLOPS machine (33.8 x 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second) and applies analytics to predict weather to a degree that was unimaginable ten years ago. The Smarter Planet approach goes beyond the traditional data sources to include a plethora of sensor data (e.g., utility readings, concrete pressure sensors on a bridge, etc.) and applies analytics to provide new Informatics, which in turn can be used to advance new Cybernetics (e.g., Smarter Buildings, Smarter Cities) to address Societal needs in new, innovative ways. [2] <br> <br> [1] Callaos, Nagib (March, 2013), http://www.iiis.org/Nagib-Callaos/Cognition-and-Knowledge <br> <br> [2] Palmisano, Sam "A Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda," Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, 6 November 2008