Notes from Meetup #7: Tech and the City
The December 2017 edition of the SmartSheffield meetup was probably our biggest to date, with tickets selling out over a week before the event, people on the waitlist and 8 speakers. We nearly finished all the pizza this time!! (Thanks Arup as ever for laying on such a generous spread :)
The talks were definitely shorter and more succinct this time, but with so much to get through it was still a squeeze to be finished by 9pm. We’ll continue to tweak and improve, but it’s also a measure of how much activity there now is going on across the city, and the popularity of our event, that there is more and more content to get through. And some of the topics cannot be covered in just a few minutes, so it’s all good.
There was also much talk around funding bids again, which is good to note. Unfortunately the planned 5g testbed bid workshop that was planned for November didn’t happen in the end, but we still very much want to arrange monthly open bid workshops to alternate with the meetup proper. We’ll look to see whether we can get one booked in for January, with the next meetup pencilled in for Monday February 5th.
We also, as per usual, organised a meeting of the Sheffield Things Network before the meetup, which was excellently attended. And with Things Network LoRaWAN gateways now being shipped, we’re confident there will be a significant network up and running in Sheffield by the Spring. I should also note that the Sheffield Honey Company have put the first Gateway in the field (well done Jez Daughtry!) and also that Sheffield Hallam University have teamed up with the Digital Catapult and have commissioned a Things Connected LoRaWAN gateway in the city centre, so we now have two IoT platforms to play around with, as well as the SigFox network which WNDUK is also rolling out.
Speaking of which, I should point readers at the Urban Flows Observatory’s first innovation competition, which is focussed on building a prototype to capture new data. There more about this in Steve Jubb’s talk below, but the deadline is very short, and it’s worth highlighting here - so get you’re expressions of interest tout suite.
Right, now without further ado, here are the talks from the event:
Ben Atha from Milk Lab
Smart Kiosks and Transparent Screens
Ben Atha is the director of Milk Lab, a creative design agency based at the Electric Works, and in Istanbul, which specialises in applying interactive technologies for advertising. Ben explains how the company has been developing smart kiosks for retail applications, that could also find uses in cities, and also how new transparent OLED screen technologies are making new kinds of static augmented reality applications possible, which also have potential applications in cities.
Stephen Elliot from Llama Digital
Location-based apps for cultural heritage and behaviour change
Stephen is the founder and CEO of Llama Digital a Sheffield agency that specialises in location based applications and experiences, and were one of the first agencies to explore and exploit bluetooth beacons.
Stephen introduced us to two of their applications:
Situate, which allows museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations to create their own location-based tours and experiences, giving ‘non-technical’ curators the ability to easily manage their visitors’ digital experience of the physical location.
Bicycle Island - an app developed for the Isle of Wight, designed to encourage people to cycle along the route between Cowes and Newport in order to promote a healthier lifestyle and reduce congestion along the route. It’s a gamified active travel app, that engages cyclists in a collective effort to beat monthly distance targets in order to unlock charitable donations to local causes, and shows what can be done by building bespoke interaction on top of Llama’s underlying .Situate engine and backend.
Jonny Douglas
Update on Mount Pleasant and Avenues to Zero project
Back in July, Pennie Raven introduced us to the plans for the development of the Mount Pleasant estate in Sharrow, and the Avenues to Zero project that presents a holistic vision of a community where living, working and play are all integrated. This time her business partner Jonny Douglas presented us with an update on the project and how the SmartSheffield community can get involved.
Fabio Ciravegna
A Data Ecosystem Proposal to Model Sheffield City Region Mobility Patterns
Fabio is Professor of Language and Knowledge Technology at the University of Sheffield’s Computer Science Department. He is also a co-founder of successful University spin-outs The Floow and K-NOW. Fabio has a proposal to bring data together from a number of sources across the city region in order to analyse movement and transport patterns. He also raises important points about how the city should be doing more to enabling projects like this, and how the SmartSheffield community can play a role in reducing the friction.
Steve Jubb from The University of Sheffield
The Urban Flows Observatory’s Sensor Challenge Competition
Steve is Technical Manager of the Urban Flows Observatory at the University of Sheffield (see our February and July editions for more background on UFlO), and provided us with details on the observatory’s first innovation competition. They will be running one of these in each of the three years of the project, and this first one is intended to get new kinds of data in to the observatory.
The winning entry will receive £4k worth of kit to develop “a prototype to capture data (e.g. a sensor, sensor network or another novel way to capture digital data) about how energy and resources flow through the city.”
They are looking for expressions of interest to be received before Xmas (so get entries in quick). Their website hasn’t yet been launched, at least not at time of writing, but you can find out more about the competition along with the form to declare your expression of interest at UFlO’s twitter account.
David Oliver from Sheffield City Council
Public Wifi and the DCMS Local Full Fibre Networks Challenge Fun
David Oliver is a Solutions Architect at Sheffield City Council, and was finally able to announce that the Public WiFi contract has been signed off (hooray!) and IDAQ Networks will be the provider. He outlined the parameters of the roll out (pretty much as Mark Gannon did back in September, but we weren’t able to publish the video at the time). One important thing to note is that there will be a city app developed alongside the WiFi, which will a) be open source and b) is intended to provide a jumping off point for other applications and services - like an app-store for the city (if you will).
Much more on this to follow in the new year, I’m sure!
In addition to the WiFi project, David also provided an outline of the DCMS Full Fibre bid which is currently underway.
Sam Chapman from The Floow
Funding opportunities and getting the community to bid
Sam Chapman is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at The Floow, the Sheffield-based telematics firm who are also one of Tech Nation’s Future 50 cohort, which tracks the most promising late-stage startups in the country. Sam wanted to direct our attention to a number of funding opportunities and encourage the community to collaborate on bids, as we are missing out on opportunities as a region and not securing as much investment as other comparable cities in the UK.
Sam particularly wanted to draw our attention to the ERDF funded “Sheffield City Region – Integrated Actions for Sustainable Urban Development” fund which has nearly £9m allocated to the region, with deadlines for calls on the 12 January and end of March next year? The Sheffield City Region did advertise for projects back at the beginning of November, but Is anyone bidding for this money, or aware of a bid? Because we’ll lose it if not.
The second opportunity Sam referred to is the upcoming GovTech Catalyst which is opening next year and will have a £20m fund to support innovations in government tech.
Chris Dymond from Unfolding
SmartSheffield News.
Finally, I presented the usual SmartSheffield News segment, to highlight some of the other things that have happened recently.
Firstly, on the IoT front, in addition to the Things Network Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam’s Things Connected partnership, Siemens and the University of Sheffield have opened a new innovation space in the Diamond building called the MindSphere Lounge, around Siemens’ industrial IoT platform; and Barnsley Digital Media Centre have launched the IoT Tribe North accelerator programme for internet of things startups.
The main thing I spoke about, though, was the recent Digital Conference, and the plans for Sheffield’s Digital Coalition, which is going to be branded dotSHF. As Mark Gannon outlined back in September, this is essentially a coalition of digital leaders across the city who are involved in applying technology to developing Sheffield’s capabilities across seven domains: People, Living, Economy, Mobility, Governance, Resources and Infrastructure.
While the conference was really the first experiment in bringing this coalition together to engage with the challenges and opportunities in these seven areas (and the various sub-domains within them), 2018 will see much more of this activity, and will hopefully begin to accelerate Sheffield’s digital development using an open, flexible framework of cooperation and information sharing. As those who attended the conference will know, this is underpinned by a series of Trello boards, one for each of the domains, which members of the coalition are encouraged to use to record and track projects and useful information for the benefit of the whole community.
This was the 7th SmartSheffield meetup event Matt Proctor and I have run together, the 5th this calendar year. Our intention from the outset was to try to achieve four things:
Bring a community of people together who have an interest and a stake in Sheffield’s development as a smart city.
Provide a forum for local businesses, the public sector and academia to present their plans and projects, get feedback and encourage engagement.
Build the profile of those projects amongst the wider tech and community and further.
Encourage the community to develop more impactful project concepts and bid for funds to realise them.
I think we have certainly managed to achieve the first two of those things and touched on the others, but I think there is still a lot more to do to make the wider tech community aware of what is going on around these topics, let alone the general public.
And I think we have, as yet, barely scratched the surface of what we can achieve together when we put our minds to it and collaborate outside of the events.
That said, this year has seen a significant step up in the volume and quality of smart city activity in Sheffield, and in the attention it has received, and we are looking forward to continuing to push the agenda forward next year enormously!
So huge thanks to Arup, without who’s support we couldn’t make this event what it is, and a massive thank you also to everyone who has engaged, supported and contributed to SmartSheffield this year, have an excellent Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2018 :)
Chris Dymond
Sheffield Digital and Unfolding
Matt Proctor
Arup
