̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - spotlight on cities

Cambridge and Nanjing break ground on 'smart cities' Centre

plc32 — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 04:03:44 +0000

Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen J Toope joined Zhang Jinghua, Party Secretary of Nanjing City Party Committee and Nanjing Deputy Mayor Jiang Yuejian to turn the first soil at the site where the Centre's dedicated building will rise in Nanjing's Jiangbei New Area.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge ̽��ֱ��-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation will establish a home for joint research and innovation in collaboration with the Chinese government, industry and China's global research universities that is dedicated to the future of creating 'smart' cities.

"Here in Nanjing, an ancient city and former imperial capital, we are embarking on a unique enterprise," Vice-Chancellor Toope said at the groundbreaking ceremony. " ̽��ֱ��innovations emerging from this Centre will enable the development of 'smart' cities in which sensors can enable sustainable lifestyles, improve healthcare, limit pollution and make efficient use of energy."

Cambridge and its Chinese partners will share revenue derived from the commercialisation of Intellectual Property (IP) developed at the Centre. It is the ̽��ֱ��’s first overseas enterprise at this scale.

Funded by the Nanjing Municipality for its first five years, the project will have its own dedicated building as a pilot urban development based on high levels of technological innovation.

At the heart of the new Centre’s activities will be research into technologies that support a modern 21st century city with integrated IT, health care and building management. Innovations emerging from the Centre will enable the development of 'smart' cities in which sensors – applied at the individual level and all the way through to the level of large infrastructure – will enable sustainable lifestyles.

As well as supporting health and wellbeing in new cities, the new Centre will help deliver efficient energy use through its academic and entrepreneurial activities.

̽��ֱ��agreement between Cambridge and Nanjing will fund positions in Nanjing, both academic and management, and will allow Cambridge-based academics to engage with specific, long-term projects in Nanjing. It will also support the establishment of a professorship, based in Cambridge, with responsibility as the Centre’s Academic Director.

̽��ֱ��project has been driven by Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, although it is hoped that there will be opportunities to widen participation to other departments and Schools. IP generated by research funded through the Centre will be licensed for commercialisation by Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s innovation branch, Cambridge Enterprise.

̽��ֱ��Centre will seek to demonstrate the power of collaboration with China’s universities, industry, government and other partners to conduct the kind of academic research of excellence today that will make life better for the city dwellers of tomorrow.

One of the two initial projects already approved is to create a high resolution scanner that can provide a low-cost easily accessible method for examining difficult areas of the body, such as bent spines, without using large and expensive CT scans.

That project will be led by Cambridge Engineering Department Professor Richard Prager, in collaboration with China's Southeast ̽��ֱ�� and established local ultrasonic manufacturer Vinno.

A second identified project led by Principal Investigator Professor Toni Vidal-Puig from Cambridge’s Clinical Biochemistry Department, will study the associated complications of increased obesity in China.

Both themes are closely linked to the focus area of local partner, NIHA (Nanjing International Healthcare Area).

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor was joined at the groundbreaking ceremony by representatives from partners Nanjing ̽��ֱ��, Southeast ̽��ֱ��, Peking ̽��ֱ��. Tsinghua ̽��ֱ��, Fudan ̽��ֱ�� and Zheijiang ̽��ֱ�� as well as the Academic Director of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��-Nanjing Centre, Professor Daping Chu of Cambridge's Electrical Engineering Department, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Relations Eilis Ferran.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Nanjing Municipal Government have broken ground on the Cambridge ̽��ֱ��-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation.

Here in Nanjing, an ancient city and former imperial capital, we are embarking on a unique enterprise.

Vice-Chancellor Stephen J Toope

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Cambridge researchers supporting world's largest air quality monitoring network in London

sc604 — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 16:58:53 +0000

Breathe London will use a range of cutting-edge fixed and mobile sensors to build up a real-time, hyperlocal image of London’s air quality. ̽��ֱ��data these monitors collect from across the capital will provide an unprecedented level of detail about London’s air quality crisis and deliver new insight into the sources of pollution.

Professor Rod Jones from Cambridge's Department of Chemistry and his group are leaders in the development and use of low-cost air quality sensors, which have been used in projects around the world from Heathrow Airport to Beijing and Dhakar. They are supporting the Breathe London project by providing their expertise in sensors and through the analysis and interpretation of results from the sensor networks and two Google Street View cars which have been equipped with air pollution monitoring equipment.

̽��ֱ��data generated by this new network will be available for the public to view on an interactive map on the Breathe London website. ̽��ֱ��map will show Londoners the condition of the air they are currently breathing and allow more accurate pollution forecasting.

̽��ֱ��Breathe London project was devised by City Hall and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a global alliance of 90 cities committed to addressing climate change. ̽��ֱ��project has brought together some of the UK’s top health and scientific experts with leading technology companies and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Baroness Bryony Worthington, Executive Director of the Environmental Defense Fund, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Breathe London partnership is breaking new ground. We’re developing new scientific approaches using the latest technologies to explore London’s air quality in unprecedented detail.

“This will provide information for both the public and decision makers that can help drive better solutions to a problem that affects every Londoner. ̽��ֱ��support of Mayor Khan, C40 Cities, CIFF and all the partners has been invaluable and together we hope to advance air quality management in London, the UK and cities worldwide."

“By combining fixed and mobile monitors, and by sampling air quality at so many locations, this project paints a far more accurate picture of air pollution across London,” said Jones. “Air pollution is a complex challenge, affected by many different factors, so getting the best possible data is vital. I’m especially looking forward to the possibility of replicating this project in other cities around the world.”

̽��ֱ��project is funded by the Clean Air Fund at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) and managed by C40 Cities.

Cambridge researchers are using their expertise in air quality sensors to support the new Breathe London project launched by Mayor Sadiq Khan earlier this week.

By combining fixed and mobile monitors, and by sampling air quality at so many locations, this project paints a far more accurate picture of air pollution across London

Rod Jones

Benjamin Davies

Winding through London

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Children of the city: tackling violence in the 21st century

fpjl2 — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 09:48:29 +0000

READ THE STORY HERE.

Read more about our research on the topic of children in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Up to one billion children worldwide are estimated to be victims of violence. Now, an intended study of 12,000 children in eight cities worldwide wants to discover what it really means to be a child of the city today – the adversities, the vulnerabilities, the resilience.

@AndyAitchison.uk

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Location, location, location: researchers develop model to predict retail failure

sc604 — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 23:01:44 +0000

Using information from ten different cities around the world, the researchers, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have developed a model that can predict with 80% accuracy whether a new business will fail within six months. ̽��ֱ��results will be presented at the ACM Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), taking place this week in Singapore.

While the retail sector has always been risky, the past several years have seen a transformation of high streets as more and more retailers fail. ̽��ֱ��model built by the researchers could be useful for both entrepreneurs and urban planners when determining where to locate their business or which areas to invest in.

“One of the most important questions for any new business is the amount of demand it will receive. This directly relates to how likely that business is to succeed,” said lead author Krittika D’Silva, a Gates Scholar and PhD student at Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. “What sort of metrics can we use to make those predictions?”

D’Silva and her colleagues used more than 74 million check-ins from the location technology platform Foursquare from Chicago, Helsinki, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore and Tokyo; and data from 181 million taxi trips from New York and Singapore.

Using this data, the researchers classified venues according to the properties of the neighbourhoods in which they were located, the visit patterns at different times of day, and whether a neighbourhood attracted visitors from other neighbourhoods.

“We wanted to better understand the predictive power that metrics about a place at a certain point in time have,” said D’Silva.

Whether a business succeeds or fails is normally based on a number of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Controllable factors might include the quality or price of the store’s product, its opening hours and its customer satisfaction. Uncontrollable factors might include unemployment rates of a city, overall economic conditions and urban policies.

“We found that even without information about any of these uncontrollable factors, we could still use venue-specific, location-related and mobility-based features in predicting the likely demise of a business,” said D’Silva.

̽��ֱ��data showed that across all ten cities, venues that are popular around the clock, rather than just at certain points of day, are more likely to succeed. Additionally, venues that are in demand outside of the typical popular hours of other venues in the neighbourhood tend to survive longer. ̽��ֱ��data also suggested that venues in diverse neighbourhoods, with multiple types of businesses, tend to survive longer.

While the ten cities had certain similarities, the researchers also had to account for their differences.

“ ̽��ֱ��metrics that were useful predictors vary from city to city, which suggests that factors affect cities in different ways,” said D’Silva. “As one example, that the speed of travel to a venue is a significant metric only in New York and Tokyo. This could relate to the speed of transit in those cities or perhaps to the rates of traffic.”

To test the predictive power of their model, the researchers first had to determine whether a particular venue had closed within the time window of their data set. They then ‘trained’ the model on a subset of venues, telling the model what the features of those venues were in the first time window and whether the venue was open or closed in a second time window. They then tested the trained model on another subset of the data to see how accurate it was.

According to the researchers, their model shows that when deciding when and where to open a business, it is important to look beyond the static features of a given neighbourhood and to consider the ways that people move to and through that neighbourhood at different times of day. They now want to consider how these features vary across different neighbourhoods in order to improve the accuracy of their model.

Reference:
Krittika D’Silva et al. ‘ ̽��ֱ��Role of Urban Mobility in Retail Business Survival.’ Paper presented to the Ubicomp 2018, Singapore, 8-12 October 2018. https://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2018/program/program.html

Researchers have used a combination of location and transport data to predict the likelihood that a given retail business will succeed or fail.

One of the most important questions for any new business is the amount of demand it will receive.

Krittika D’Silva

toastbrot81

Regent Street

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Attribution-Noncommerical

Cambridge and Nanjing launch strategic collaboration

ag236 — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Professor Stephen Toope, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor, today signed an agreement to formalise a strategic partnership with the Nanjing Municipal Government.

̽��ֱ��creation of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ��-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation will entail the establishment of a joint research centre and the sharing of revenue derived from the commercialisation of intellectual property. It is the ̽��ֱ��’s first overseas enterprise at this scale.

Funded by Nanjing Municipality for five years in the first instance, the project will have its own dedicated building in Nanjing’s Jiangbei New Area – a pilot urban development based on high levels of technological innovation.

At the heart of the new Centre’s activities will be research into technologies that support a modern 21^st century city with integrated IT, health care and building management. Innovations emerging from the Centre will enable the development of 'smart' cities in which sensors – applied at the individual level and all the way through to the level of large infrastructure – will enable sustainable lifestyles.

As well as supporting health and wellbeing in new cities, the new Centre will help deliver efficient energy use through its academic and entrepreneurial activities.

̽��ֱ��agreement will fund positions in Nanjing, both academic and management, and will allow Cambridge-based academics to engage with specific, long-term projects in Nanjing. It will also support the establishment of a professorship, based in Cambridge, with responsibility as the Centre’s Academic Director.

̽��ֱ��project has been driven by Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, although it is hoped that there will be opportunities to widen participation to other departments and Schools. IP generated by research funded through the Centre will be licensed for commercialisation by the ̽��ֱ��’s innovation branch, Cambridge Enterprise.

Speaking just before the official signing of the agreement, held at the British embassy in Beijing, Professor Toope said: “This is only the most recent example of our collaboration with Chinese partners – but it is by far the most ambitious to date. And it is very exciting indeed.”

“We see it as an essential part of Cambridge’s contribution to society to tackle some of the great world problems. But we cannot do this on our own. There is a proverb: ‘You cannot clap with just one hand’. To me this means that we can only accomplish great things by working together – which is what we will be doing with Nanjing.”

Mr. Luo Qun, a member of the Standing Committee of Nanjing's Municipal Party Committee, and Deputy Party Secretary of the Party Committee of Jiangbei New Area, added: "We sincerely hope that both sides will rely on this new Centre to push the world's technological frontiers and to promote the integration of science, technology, industry and financial innovation."

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor was joined by Professor Sir Mark Welland, Head of the ̽��ֱ��'s Electrical Engineering Division and Master of St Catharine's College. ̽��ֱ��signing of the agreement was witnessed by H.E. Dame Barbara Woodward, the United Kingdom's ambassador to China.

Knowledge and development

̽��ֱ��launch of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ��-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation came only a few days after the Vice-Chancellor addressed the annual China Development Forum, in Beijing.

Speaking on the subject of 'Knowledge Capital and development for all', Professor Toope said: "Of all the intangible assets that underpin our knowledge capital, the most precious is people. It is people who generate the new ideas; it is people who ask the searching questions, and collect the relevant data to answer them; it is people who make the discoveries; it is people who bring those discoveries to the market, and create the intellectual property. ̽��ֱ��conclusion I draw from this is that, for countries and institutions wishing to expand their knowledge capital, the single most important investment is in their human capital."

He singled out equality and diversity as essential to the sustainability of knowledge-based capital, before concluding: “'Knowledge itself is power' is a famous line attributed to one of Cambridge’s most famous graduates – 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon. ̽��ֱ��question before us – particularly those of us in universities – is how we build and deploy and share all that knowledge for the greater good."

̽��ֱ��new joint centre will support innovative research into smart cities and fully integrated urban environments.

We see it as an essential part of Cambridge’s contribution to society to tackle some of the great world problems. But we cannot do this on our own. We can only accomplish great things by working together – which is what we will be doing with Nanjing.

Prof Stephen Toope

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: How the UK and India can lead the development of ecologically smart cities

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 15:23:56 +0000

British Prime Minister Theresa May is visiting India on her first significant overseas visit outside the EU – and there is real interest in how it could be a harbinger of Britain’s post-Brexit future. Analysts are cautious about any major breakthroughs or significant trade deals, especially given strained relations between the UK and India over issues of immigration, which affect students and professionals in particular.

But part of the UK’s agenda is to work bilaterally with India on a number of areas of mutual interest at the UK-India Tech Summit. Discussions will include the technological possibilities for “smart cities”, an area that has been identified by the UK delegation as a major focus for the event. This also resonates with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high profile smart cities initiative, launched last year.

Plans focus on making these urban settlements technologically-enabled, to ensure connectivity and communication using the latest information technologies. But what is missing is a sense of how cities may also be “ecologically smart” by securing the essential needs of their inhabitants – particularly clean air, especially important in smog-hit Delhi, and drinking water. It is also important to recognise that “ecological smartness” must include an understanding of the interests, aspirations and current circumstances of the different groups that live in these places.

Bidur town in Nepal, facing pressures after the 2015 earthquake reduced water flows

Water wisdom

Over the past three years, a project jointly funded by the UK Department for International Development, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, has investigated the ways in which people living in and around six small towns in the Western Himalaya access water through a diversity of sources. These range from springs to piped supply, and the project also examined the sustainability challenges faced by these sources.

Through these multiple and far-ranging case studies in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Nepal, the team highlighted important lessons relevant to understanding water supply and how it is used and sourced in the urbanising hills. It has also outlined the policy options for securing water supplies for the needs of these hill residents.

Nainital, a tourist town in Uttarakhand, which faces severe water shortage during the summer tourist season

There are a number of key lessons that emerge from this project, which provide helpful guidance on how to make all cities ecologically, as well as technologically, “smart”. These are:

̽��ֱ��importance of critical water zones. ̽��ֱ��long-term sustainability of water sources is essential for the maintenance and growth of urban settlements. Urban planning and development occurs within city boundaries – but we must also proactively identify, manage and protect the critical water zones – the areas that are essential for the maintenance and regeneration of water flows across all landscapes, and which are often under threat due to rapid urban expansion, encroachment, changes in land use and deforestation.

Inequality and the politics of water distribution. Within towns, cities and surrounding rural settlements, water is highly unequally distributed. Access is determined by a range of historical and socio-economic factors – and negotiations and conflicts around water access, distribution and quality between up- and downstream settlements characterise life in the hills. ̽��ֱ��diversion and appropriation of water to urban areas could create new conflicts – and we need to understand them.

Local preferences and diverse water strategies. Households in the hills depend on multiple water sources, complementary to piped water connections. This is to do with cultural preferences – such as a belief that spring water in the mountains is sweeter – and risk management, due to the unreliability of municipal supplies. This continued preference for traditional sources alongside technological innovations should inform interventions to improve water availability, especially in small towns.

Rajgarh in Himachal Pradesh, a rapidly growing small town which transports water through a 18km pipeline across mountainous terrain

Large infrastructure decisions and management choices. States and donors are increasingly developing top-down, large-investment infrastructure projects to supply water in mountain areas. These so-called “solutions” don’t always consider the full range of possible options – especially those that are more local, small-scale and relevant to those they serve.

Multiple overlapping institutions for water supply. Water supply systems to address the needs of small towns are adopting new and varied governance structures. Donor and state-led systems should engage with local people and institutions both up and downstream, to ensure that development is useful to the communities it affects.

Decision-making and research in the hills often takes place with little access to data, as most of the areas do not have long term monitoring and records. In such contexts, different forms of knowledge are required – these include local wisdom, experience over generations, expert opinion, as well as more innovative approaches to address data gaps (such as modelling). As India and the UK look to each other for areas of mutual dialogue, a focus on ecological smartness might provide a unique opportunity for harnessing the considerable wealth of research on these issues in both countries, as well as responding to the challenges that both India and the UK face as they become increasingly urbanised.

̽��ֱ��dialogue around technology involving Britain and India must expand to include the importance of finding ways for living well and sustainably in the rapidly urbanising 21st century.

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Eszter Kovacs, Postdoctoral Researcher in Conservation, Agriculture and Water Management Policy and Practice, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Bhaskar Vira and Eszter Kovacs (Department of Geography and ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute) discuss how lessons learned about water management in Nepal and India can guide how cities can be made "ecologically smart".

Bhaskar Vira

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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