思科发力争夺“智能城市”蛋糕

    如果这一切听起来非常像IBM的智慧城市（Smarter Cities）技术眼下已经在为全球各地的城市客户所做的事情，那是因为，事实的确如此。但AGT国际公司创始人兼首席执行官马蒂•柯查威说，思科与AGT联盟是从一个不同的地点和时间开始的，它们与IBM两者的差异更多地体现在理念方面。虽然两家公司都依赖于廉价传感器的扩散和安装，但思科和AGT致力于连接已经安装到位的传感器，希望以这种方式减轻与安装新传感器相关的成本。【未来，所有这些数据的存储和其中一部分计算将通过云技术（准确地说，是思科公司的云计算服务）来完成，以达到进一步降低成本、减轻IT负担的目的。】

    公民自身将成为传感器数据的主要来源——传感器将通过一系列智能手机和平板电脑应用程序把人们直接与市政府连接在一起（反之亦然）。这种数据收集方式需要确保公民必须参与这套系统才能解决自己碰到的问题；由于公民与市政府通过数字技术直接联系在一起，相关机构不能忽视公民向它们提出的议题。柯查威说，这将自然而然地导致人们更加关注个人隐私——鉴于尚未平息的国家安全局(NSA)数据收集丑闻，政府和公众对这个问题都非常敏感。未来可能收集到的数据将进行匿名化处理，没有用处的数据可能会被丢弃，而不是存储，民众将掌控自身数据被共享的数量和精确度。

    “我相信，等到我们进入物联网时代，我们要讨论的将是另一个层级的信息，它的规模将远大于社交网络，”柯查威说。“我们不希望在5年后的某天醒来时，发现我们又做了不该做的事。”

    对个人数据（通过接入物联网的公民设备获得）的这种依赖性可能会使思科和AGT架构对人们分享信息的意愿产生一种危险的依赖，但柯查威认为人们肯定愿意，特别是因为这样做意味着他们也将获得来自市政府的信息和服务，有助于他们改善自己的生活。这套系统将对政府工作的透明度提出强制性的要求，从而将“形成城市和公民之间完整的循环，”柯查威说。

    思科与AGT联盟尚未透露他们打算率先在哪里推出这项技术，但柯查威透露说，第一位城市客户将在大约两个月内公布。随后，这项联盟计划在未来3至5年迅速扩展到其他几十座城市，欧洲、亚洲、南美洲和中美洲将成为重点推进区域。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒

    If all that sounds a lot like what IBM's Smarter Cities already does for its civic clients around the globe, that's because it is. But the Cisco/AGT partnership is starting from a different place and time, and the differences between the two are more philosophical, says AGT founder and CEO Mati Kochavi. While both companies rely on the proliferation and installation of inexpensive sensors, Cisco and AGT aim to alleviate the costs associated with installing new sensors by instead focusing on connecting the sensors that are already out there. (Further cost and IT burden will be alleviated by hosting all that data and some of the computation in the cloud -- Cisco's cloud, to be precise.)

    One primary source of sensor data will be citizens themselves via a series of smartphone and tablet apps that will connect people directly to their city governments (and vice versa) in a way that ensures citizens have to participate in the system to solve their own problems and that -- because of the direct digital link between citizen and city government -- agencies can't ignore those issues that citizens bring to their attention. Corollary to this, Kochavi says, will be a stringent focus on individual privacy -- something both governments and citizens are keenly aware of in the wake of the ongoing NSA data collection scandal. Where possible data will be anonymized, that data which is not needed could be discarded rather than stored, and citizens would have control over how much of their own data they share and how precise that data is.

    "I believe when we enter the Internet of Things we're talking about another layer of information that's bigger than social media," Kochavi says. "We don't want to wake up in five years and find out again that we should have done things differently."

    That reliance on personal data via citizen-owned devices plugged into the Internet of Things could make Cisco/AGT's architecture precariously dependent on peoples' willingness to share information, but Kochavi thinks they will, especially since doing so means they'll also get information and services in return that will help improve their own lives. Such a system will impose transparency on government, Kochavi says, "closing the circle" between cities and citizens.

    The partnership hasn't yet disclosed where it will begin the rollout of its technology, but Kochavi says the first client city will be announced in roughly two months. From there it plans to expand rapidly to dozens of cities over the next three to five years, focused largely in Europe, Asia, and South and Central America.