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IBM awards 16 cities with free teams of consultants

19 May 2015

by Richard Forster

IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge programme has chosen 16 cities that will receive teams of company experts throughout 2016 to help them with critical issues ranging from jobs creation, transport, and public safety, to healthcare, revenue, social services, and public works.

The 16 winners for 2015-16 were selected from a competitive pool of more than 100 cities around the world that applied for a grant of consulting services from IBM for three weeks. Each consulting engagement has a commercial value of US$500,000.

“Over the last four years we’ve had 600 mayors from around the world apply for this grant,” said Jennifer Crozier, IBM’s Vice President of Global Citizenship Initiatives. “We’ve now delivered to 115 cities representing a value of almost US$70 million. With the help of our experts, cities around the world are now able to better use data and transform the way they engage citizens, deliver services, and make their cities more liveable.”

Six IBM experts will spend three weeks working closely with city staff in each winning city, analysing data about a critical issue facing the municipality. Team members meet with local officials, citizens, businesses, and not-for-profits and study best practices used by other cities. After working closely with city leadership, the IBM team then recommends innovative and specifically tailored ways to address the issue and provide a road map on how the city can improve.

For the first time, in addition to providing pro bono consulting services, the company will use IBM Watson Analytics Professional Edition to uncover trends in city data. This could include studying travel patterns, public health, or the effects of man-made and weather events. The tool can understand questions posed in natural, non-technical language, and help its users collaborate, predict and plan.

IBM partner Twitter has also agreed to give grants of data, past and present, to three of the winning cities, Memphis, Detroit and Melbourne where it will assist the city with disaster preparedness. In at least one of the three cities, an expert from Twitter will join the IBM team on the ground to perform deep analysis of the Twitter data. Providing the social media data and related services of Twitter’s experts is valued at US$50,000.

The 16 winners include; Allahabad, Amsterdam, Denver, Athens, Detroit, Melbourne, Santiago de Chile, Rochester, San Isidro, Sekondi, Surat, Taichun, Vizag, Surat, Huizhou and Xuzhou.

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