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Information Technologies

Jordi Torres

UPC-Barcelona Tech and BSC Professor

How ICTs promote sustainable development

OCTOBER 27TH, 2010

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are destined to play a major role in achieving the sustainable development goals that our society needs, improving energy efficiency and making transportation systems, buildings and cities more intelligent.

For example, today about 40% of the electrical power produced is lost on its way to the consumer. But the Internet, digital sensors and remote control transmission systems can help create more intelligent and efficient energy distribution networks known as “smart grids.” In these new smart grids, consumers will get information about the energy they use in real time from the supplier so as to enable its more efficient generation and distribution.

In addition, the smart grid can integrate new renewable energy sources automatically. For instance, wind power is a form of very efficient technology, but the fact is that its production is not necessarily in sync with consumer demand because production depends on the wind, something which makes distribution difficult. In this case, the solution is a sophisticated ICT system designed by a power distribution company, which processes data every 12 seconds from 500 wind farms generating over 10mw each. Without this ICT system, it would be impossible to anticipate and maximize the amount of renewable energy that is integrated safely into the current electrical grid.

More efficient lifestyles and work methods

On the other hand, ICTs will contribute decisively to finding new and more efficient business models, work practices and lifestyles. This transformation is denominated by the “e-” prefix, as in e-government, e-work and e-health, among many others. For example, in e-health, health care experts are already testing technologies capable of enabling a patient’s surroundings to aid in his of her treatment and remote monitoring in order to reduce medical costs and improve services.

ICTs will contribute decisively to finding new and more efficient business models, work practices and lifestylesBut this is just the beginning. The area that will see the greatest short-term impact will surely be e-commerce, leading to a profound transformation of the marketplace. E-commerce is already big business and is expected to grow dramatically in coming years. There will be increasingly more services that will disappear from the physical world and will only be available online. For example, digital content and software are now delivered through the Internet, when not long ago everything was distributed by CDs and DVDs.

It is therefore necessary that software applications cease to be simple automated processes and become real autonomous, online decisions-making systems so as to meet the new needs mentioned above. That is to say, society is need of more intelligent ICTs, the so-called “smart ICTs,” that meet the needs of citizens and the social challenges they face.

Managing the complexity of real time

But the impact of these smart ICTs goes beyond what has been presented here and will have enormous power to transform our society, which is becoming more and more digitized. Consider that today there are already about two billion Internet users (estimated annual growth could reach 9%) with access to a vast range of available services such as social networks, search engines for information, online shopping, etc. And all these users together make for a real explosion of digital information available with content created or captured by all types of devices such as PCs, cameras, phones, sensors, etc. In addition, higher levels of connectivity and penetration of the Internet will enable services to be globally accessible on any device, not just computers.

This increasing interaction of people, devices, sensors, computers and companies will not be possible without these smart ICTs to manage this complexity in real time. In addition, advanced multimedia and virtual reality applications to customize and tailor services to the real needs of users will bring with them completely new and innovative services and, above all, make real life expand into a virtual world through the Internet, transforming the way people do business and interact.

But for all this to be possible we must achieve something very important: that technological and socio-economic advances go forward in unison.

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