“The Delhi government is taking bold and futuristic steps to transform the city’s air quality and we are committed to help them with our most advanced technologies and best talent from around the world”. “The study will help policy makers come up with ways to deal with it”, said Ramesh Gopinath, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IBM Research India. The objective is to uncover greater insight about the nature and causes of air pollution as well as model the effectiveness of intervention strategies.
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A Watson-like forecaster from IBM Research (China) called Green Horizons not only forecasts pollution to mitigate its effects, but also forecasts energy usage in energy-stressed cities in order to better integrate renewable energy sources without the need for grid-scale batteries.
The new Green Horizons engagements apply IBM’s advanced machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to ingest and learn from vast amounts of Big Data, constantly self-configuring and improving in accuracy to create some of the world’s most accurate energy and environmental forecasting systems.
IBM will be utilizing Big Data generated by sensors in environmental monitoring stations, traffic systems and meteorological satellites; Cognitive technologies that understand this data, and use it to tune a predictive model, allowing more informed decisions about how to improve air quality. In the United Kingdom, energy giant SSE is piloting IBM technology to help forecast the power generation of each individual turbine at its wind farms, including tools to show expected performance up to several days in advance.
“Air pollution is now the world’s largest environmental health risk. Advanced technologies can provide crucial insights about our impacts on the environment – today and in the future”. Two types of recommendations were made: the first to permanently “clean-up” repeated offenders so as to minimize the constant pollution emitted every day; and secondly to give 15 minute to 72-hour notice to pollution producers to cut down on emissions during forecasted peaks, thus leveling out the pollution level to 20% less that just a year ago. “The combined power of Internet of Things and cognitive computing means that understanding, managing and forecasting air quality today is more technically and economically feasible than ever before”. The Beijing EPB also uses a colored alert system to warn citizens when harmful levels of pollution are forecast for the coming days.
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Now in its 70th year, IBM Research continues to define the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. “For example, we can require that heavily polluting enterprises install filtering systems, or in some cases, we can close or relocate factories and power plants”.
