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MIT experts share their knowledge with Catalan researchers and entrepreneurs

The business, study and administration of energy, water and transport converge as lines of development these days in Barcelona’s fifth annual Tech Summer Sessions (TSS). As part of these conferences, organized by the Foundation b_TEC, the first of two sessions took place yesterday that make up the MIT Conference, where experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. shared their knowledge on the three main topics of the conference with Catalonia’s researchers and entrepreneurs.

Octavi Planells, Clara Cardona | 15 june de 2010

To inaugurate the Tech Summer Sessions (TSS), Miquel Barceló, president of the Foundation b_TEC, explained the origin, intended purposes and the current state of the creation of the Diagonal-Besòs Campus. Barceló recalled that “this project was born five years ago from the desire of local governments to foster a creative environment.” The Campus is conceived, he said, as a technology district for research into efficient and sustainable development in the areas of energy, water and transport, especially in urban settings, with the goal of improving the quality of life of citizens and reducing the environmental impact of their activities.

In the context of the physical construction of the Diagonal-Besós Campus, the TSS are presented as a provisional method to stimulate discussion and create a synergy of knowledge transfer between the different actors who will occupy the future district. That is to say, the organizers have not waited until the physical space and facilities are available to implement the activities of the Campus. The TSS have served, therefore, as a meeting point of these actors since the very beginning of the project. Still, the Campus is closer to becoming a reality, as Barceló said, “currently nine buildings of the projected total of 12 are under construction to ensure space for businesses, a strong university impact with more than 5,000 Industrial Engineering students and an important space for investigation.” The B_TEC President added, “taking advantage of this transformation of the Besós area we help give form to an economic development strategy based on knowledge for the entire northern section of Barcelona.”

Daniel G. Nocera, named one of the most important researchers of 2009 by Time magazine and one of the most anticipated speakers at the TSS, was forced to cancel his appearance due to health problems. Instead, the Italian architect and engineer, Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, gave a lesson in innovation and the creative use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for a more efficient and clean urban transport system. “The digital and physical spaces are recombining,” Ratti said yesterday in order to understand how cities are beginning to integrate ICT in their operations and, consequently, how ICTs are transforming cities. “Bits and data are being combined, and that has enormous potential for architecture, design, planning, traffic engineering," he said.

To give an example, the architect cited the Real Time Rome project, a study conducted in Rome that was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2006. In collaboration with Telecom Italia, Google and Rome’s public transport company (buses and taxis), the project’s researchers used data from cell phones to understand the dynamics of the city in real time. The (anonymous) data allows, for example, for the analysis of movements of people and their relationship with the bus routes. This analysis allows the carrier to optimize its routes. “In the future, it will be the buses that follow the movements of people,” said Ratti.

The aim of SENSEable City Lab is, as its name suggests, to equip the city with sensors that provide real time information and allow the readjustment of the urban setting so that it is the more efficient in terms of citizens’ consumption and comfort. Ratti gave other examples similar to Real Time Rome: how Seattle tracked where its garbage ended up by placing 3,000 sensors in the trash; smart bus stops with interactive maps that let users know where the vehicles are and suggest how to arrive to a specific location; a GPS for cars that learns the most common routes of the driver; or the Copenhagen Wheel, a bike design inspired by last UN summit on climate change that captures its own energy and thus saves effort and also provides information about the city or on the physical state of cycling via mobile phone.

Energy and water

The first day of the MIT Conference also included the participation of two MIT researchers associated with the future Diagonal-Besos Campus. First, Robert Stoner, associate director of the MIT Energy Initiative, unveiled the main lines of his research center specializing in energy resources and some of its objectives, including the fight against climate change, which ranks as one of the priorities. John H. Leinhard, director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy, also of MIT, presented some of the technologies being developed to reduce energy consumption in the processes of desalination and water purification, promising advances in areas like Catalonia (costal and subject to severe drought) but still very costly from an environmental standpoint.

Apart from the MIT researchers, yesterday morning also featured a talk by Charles E. Hunt, director of the California Lightning Technology Center and the Lighting Group of the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research, which will be located in the future Campus. Hunt explained the research his group is carrying out towards inventing highly efficient lamps yet whose light still has the same aesthetic appeal to consumers, the same color as the light emitted by incandescent bulbs.

Knowledge, media and citizens

Concluding the plenary session of the morning, Miquel Barceló engaged in a dialogue with the journalist Lluís Foix, in which both reflected on the perception that society has of scientific and technological advances. According to Foix, the current revolution in communication and information “spreads ignorance more than knowledge.” The journalist said that while it was positive that the Internet can include all possible voices, he criticized it at the same time for allowing the participation of all possible displays of ignorance. Foix thinks the media discourse is too conditioned by political correctness, and in the case of issues that people are not familiar with, such as many issues of scientific or technological basis, “the average citizen is greatly swayed by public opinion, which is created by politicians, media, NGOs, all with laudable goals but that can sometimes be wrong.”

In this same line, both speakers agreed on the need for accurate and quality scientific and technological communication. Barceló made reference to the work of the researchers. “Given the complexity of the issue, here we should have the great challenge for communication professionals, one which we do not pose to ourselves because we are too focused on the object of our work, which is very complex,” he said. Foix spoke of the media as an agent whose mission is to provide rigorous and proven scientific information, but Barceló attributed part of this responsibility to the scientific community itself. “Knowledge centers should be able to correctly communicate to a population that is often misinformed, suspicious of power and that attracts certain conspiratorial views that accentuate this mistrust.”

In the afternoon, attendees were able to expand their knowledge about more specialized areas in workshops on energy and water. The MIT Conference continues through Friday morning with several plenary sessions that will run until noon. The TSS, for their part, will continue until early July.

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