The Smarter Planet: Built on Informatics and Cybernetics
Maymir-Ducharme Fred A., Angelelli Lee A.
IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is a multi-disciplined approach that integrates
the key tenets of the IMSCI 2014 (The 8th 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]
[1] Callaos, Nagib (March, 2013), http://www.iiis.org/Nagib-Callaos/Cognition-and-Knowledge
[2] Palmisano, Sam “A Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda,” Speech to
the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, 6 November 2008
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