Smart Cities: People, Processes, & Tech w/ Mike Barlow & Dan Wu - a podcast by IBM thinkLeaders

Is a smart city more about people or technology? What would a smarter New York City look like? How can we ensure that a smart city is not a nightmare for privacy? In this episode of IBM thinkLeaders podcast, we are joined by Mike Barlow (coauthor of Smart Cities, Smart Future, managing partner at Cumulus Partners) & Dan Wu (Privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta). We talk sensors, optimization, and the need for greater civic engagement when building smart cities. We also get into whether smart cities will usher in a Utopia or Dystopia, and how smart cities may reinvent democracy.

Connect with us + the guests:
@IBMthinkLeaders
@ImmutaData
@mike7pilot

“For me, a smart city is about thinking about the process of making smarter decisions and more capacity. And that includes not only physical technological infrastructure but also, and a lot of people forget this, it's the scientific and civic infrastructure. How we make decisions.” -Dan Wu

“I would define smart cities as places that use digital technologies, and this is key, 21st-century marketing techniques to communicate with citizens, to engage with citizens and to inspire higher levels of citizen engagement in the ongoing development of public policy. This is absolutely essential. In other words, they have to be democracy incubators. We have to reinvent democracy and grassroots participation in the city.” -Mike Barlow

BIOS

Mike Barlow is an award-winning journalist, prolific author, and business strategy consultant. He is the author of Learning to Love Data Science (O’Reilly 2015), and co-author of Smart Cities, Smart Future (Wiley 2019), The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy (Wiley 2011), and Partnering with the CIO (Wiley 2007). He is also the author of many articles, reports, and white papers on numerous topics including AI, machine learning, IoT governance, ambient computing, predictive maintenance, advanced data analytics, and digital transformation.

Over the course of a long career, he was a reporter and editor at several respected suburban daily newspapers, including The Journal News and the Stamford Advocate. His feature stories and columns appeared regularly in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Newsday, and other major US dailies. He has written extensively on data science topics for O’Reilly Media and other publishers.

Dan Wu is the privacy counsel and legal engineer at Immuta. Immuta lets companies share data safely and quickly -- to accelerate ethical analytics and protect trust. All without writing code, the platform helps companies restrict who can access data, apply privacy-protecting algorithms, enable purpose restrictions, and audit processing.

Wu received his JD/PhD from Harvard, with a research focus on urban innovation. He’s privacy counsel and legal engineer at a data management platform for artificial intelligence. Through this work, he’s engaged with governance and IT personnel of large multinational companies on data governance and published pieces in Dataversity, Tech Pro IT, and Healthcare Business Today.

Further episodes of IBM thinkLeaders

Further podcasts by IBM thinkLeaders

Website of IBM thinkLeaders