IBM announced an interesting initiative — called Smarter Planet.
What they show is that we’re all connected, today like never before: economically, socially and technically. When a crisis occurs on one part of the planet, it can bring problems to another part, within days or even hours.
Yet this challenge is also an opportunity, and now is the time to seize it. People around the world are ready for change. And the planet is ready for it, too. Today, we are seeing the infusion of intelligence into the way the world literally works—the systems and processes that enable…
physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold;
services to be delivered;
everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move;
and billions of people to work and live.
This project and the Planetary Skin project mentioned earlier on this blog suggest that we need to view the word we live in as a gigantic EventWeb and develop techniques to analyze these. A real nice challenge for researchers in computer science.