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For a global, sustainable and digitized Barcelona

Through the BDigital Global Congress 2010, Barcelona offered itself as a platform for companies specialized in intelligent infrastructures, energy networks and social media to come test different strategies for the future. These companies, meanwhile, refined their proposals for creating the city of tomorrow.

Jordi Montaner | 1 june 2010

The BDigital Global Congress has been celebrated for 12 years running, and in its most recent edition representatives of a dozen institutions and companies related to digitization and information and communication technologies (ICT) came together from May 17 to 20 in the CosmoCaixa museum in Barcelona along with official representatives from Barcelona City Hall, the Catalan Generalitat and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce. Today’s world presents a new scenario in which the concept of energy saving has been more highly focused on savings than on energy conservation and in which connectivity is no longer a privilege and is considered a basic right.

Experts from government and private companies began this year’s congress by discussing the future of the Internet and its impact on the urban social fabric and the city’s economy. An example is found in the medical field, for which ICT tools are already able to take on many predictive functions, controls and assessments that are traditionally performed in hospitals and clinics. Web 2.0 allows for the creation of social networking for health issues that, under qualified supervision, assist in the everyday lives of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities.

Representing the European Commission, Mercè Riera and Per Blixt commented on the usefulness of ICT for local government in widening their commitment to become sustainable, smart cities. Energy efficiency applied to buildings was the focus much of the debate.

Service economy

A major application of ICT is for the vertical service economy, such as banking and financial operations and in the fields of health and energy (gas and electricity). New evaluation methods, architectural approaches and business models were raised by the chairman of the Service Research and Innovation Institute (SRII), Kris Singh.

Mobile telephones and ad hoc applications are revolutionizing not only the media but also the way of doing politics, governing and exercising democracy. Raisej Andrew, founder of Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), raised the provocative question of “what government can exercise a mandate in a world where people can connect better and faster with each other than with government.” Raisej foresaw the emergence of a new generation of political organizations in a network that will end the hegemony of the vertical political hierarchy of the twentieth century. The participation of citizens in political decisions will be increasingly rotund, consolidating in this way the democratic will of societies.

Michio Kaku, professor of technical physics at the New York University, delighted the audience with examples of ICT applied to the domestic sphere: chips the size of a coin integrated into clothing or applied in contact lenses connected to the Internet that will allow us to read the full biography of the person we’re talking to, intelligent cars (without steering wheels), microscopic sensors capable of detecting and removing pre-cancerous cells long before the creation of a tumor, and new computer designs based on nanotechnology applied to artificial intelligence and telecommunications that will soon transform our environment.

Karl Koster of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke about innovative ecosystems in which universities, research centers and companies interact to generate new economic activity that instead of creating sustainability problems, solves them. He explained that cities and major metropolitan areas today are not only a magnet for the economic development initiatives for globalization, but also for knowledge networks.

Jésper Tégner, director of computerized medicine unit at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, explained how doctors use ICT to improve both diagnostic and therapeutic methods, “that allow them to accurately discern the anatomical details of a patient, the state of its functioning, and its metabolic and pathological processes.” He gave the example of the images (radiographs, CT, SPECT), which not only have increased surgical accuracy, but they can be examined in real time by various specialists in order to immediately evaluate the various treatment alternatives or risk factors to be taken into account.

Cyber Clouds

Cloud computing has revolutionized the business landscape of communications. Companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon have smashed the markets using “clouds” to govern the business atmosphere. The technical and scientific opportunities presented by this strategy are enormous, but so are the challenges for safety. A panel discussion moderated by Toni Falguera of Barcelona Digital addressed the paradigm of materialized services via the Internet that involves analyzing the information stored permanently in the hands of anyone (or everyone), counterbalancing the advantages and speed of business with the danger to the freedom or identity of users whose privacy data are, just like clouds, in the air.

Another panel, moderated on this occasion by Carles Sans of Barcelona Digital addressed the energy efficiency of buildings, noting that they represent approximately 40% of energy consumption and are responsible for a similar percentage of CO2 emissions. Sans estimated that the European Union could reduce its energy use by 11% if it achieved an efficient use of its lighting, heating, air conditioning, and power for televisions and computing needs by 2020.

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