Data Driving the Smart City in Canberra

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Future of the Web: Data drives the Smart City, just started. This is in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This will be repeated Thursday 10 May in Sydney. I consider the "Smart City" to be like the smart home: mostly marketing hype. It will be interesting to see if today's speakers can change my view.

The first speaker was Dr Ole Nielsen, Deputy Chief Digital Officer and Director of Digital Transformation, ACT Government. I asked Dr Nielsen if the ACT Government was securing system sufficiently against cyber attack. He replied that data should not be stored on drives connected to people's email and data stored in the basement of offices is no more secure than on Amazon Web Services.
 

9.35am	Industry Keynote	Dr Mukesh Mohania (IBM Distinguished Engineer in IBM Research)
10.05am	Ubiquitous sensing, located	Dr Kerry Taylor (Chair, W3C Spatial Data on the Web)
10.35am	Break
10.50am	Smart Grid	Dr Lachlan Blackhall (Head of the Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, ANU) Dr Armin Haller (W3C Office Manager, ANU)
11.30am	Power to the People: Privacy in the smart city	(in Melbourne) Dr David Hyland-Wood (Blockchain Protocol Architect, Consensys) (in Canberra) Dr Peter Christen (Professor, Data Mining and Matching, ANU) (in Sydney) Christine Cowper (Principal Consultant, Information Integrity Solutions)
12.00pm	Panel: “How do we best enable smart cities?” round-up of W3C activities and value proposition capacity building – what skills do we need? what issues should we consider? How do we solve them? Discussion with all earlier speakers	chaired by  J. Alan Bird (W3C Global Business Development Lead) All above speakers as participants Interactive audience