Page 74 - Security Today, September 2019

Paving the Way with Analytics
Turning information overload into actionable intelligence
BHy Kevin Taylor
ow many of you remember learning about the Great Chi- cago Fire of 1871? Some of you might even recall the ditty that sprung from the legend of its origin:
Late last night when we were all in bed Mrs. O’Leary hung a lantern in the shed And when the cow kicked it over
She winked her eye and said,
“It’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.
Fire! Fire! Fire!”
While there’s no irrefutable proof that the cow was the culprit in
the devastation that left miles of the Windy City in ruins, imagine how different the outcome might have been if Mrs. O’Leary had been connected to an electric grid to light her property or if she had a monitored system that detected the situation and communicated out to emergency responders.
Technology—from street lights to telephones—has been at the heart of modern cities for more than a century. Even the idea of “Smart Cities” isn’t new. There is a publication on the concept dat- ing back more than a quarter century. (The Technopolis Phenome- non: Smart Cities, Fast Systems, Global Networks, D.V. Gibson, G. Kozmetsky, and R.W. Smilor, eds., Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little- field Publishers, 1992). Though actual implementation of the con- cept is far more recent, cities have been using advanced technology to address the challenges of densely populated urban centers for years.
Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), there are now rapidly emerging platforms that leverage interconnected devices to help cities oversee everything from power plants and water supply networks to mass transit, emergency communications, and law enforcement.
The unfortunate downside to all this interconnectivity is that amassing these large, and seldom uniform, data sets can lead to or-
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SMART CITIES
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