“Your Future City” Digital Showcase demos latest technology

Free to enter event in the Round Room at the Mansion House, Dublin open Monday May 20th and Tuesday May 21st

A captivating interactive free public Digital Showcase will opens in The Round Room of Dublin’s Mansion House from noon on Monday May 20th until 7pm on Tuesday May 21st. The event will show the public a ‘window on the future’ showcasing how technological advances are affecting everyday life. A highlight of the event is an innovative workshop by Lego, entitled “Build the Change”, which will allow schoolchildren the opportunity to build their vision of the Dublin of the future with Lego. This will take place in a specially constructed marquee in the forecourt of the Mansion House on Dawson Street, Dublin. This will be the first time this workshop has taken place outside of Scandinavia.

This dynamic, fascinating showcase, hosted by Dublin City Council, Intel Labs Europe and Trinity College Dublin, will unveil 20 groundbreaking new technological advances and developments to the public, demonstrating how these will have a positive impact on life in Dublin city. The showcase will be broken into zones – home; work; school; city; environment and garden, and each zone will include demonstrations displaying the innovation being developed in Ireland and internationally.

A remarkable giant interactive social media wall, PIXEE, will allow the public to view and interact with up-to-the-minute social media commentary on the event and ideas on how Dublin can engage more with digital technology. This project was developed to promote greater emotional expression in image-based social media and has proved irresistible to visitors at other events across the world.

The result of a three year research programme, the Global First technology Toolkit, will also be unveiled at the showcase. This is the first ever toolkit to measure a city’s ‘digital maturity’. The digital maturity of a city can be measured and can help city leaders make decisions about investment in infrastructure, and the use of technology in the city. With increasing numbers of people living in cities a challenge is to make cities digitally friendly and active.

The Digital City Maturity Scorecard provides a means to evaluate a city like Dublin in terms of how well it is embracing digital technologies to develop a smart economy, enhance sustainable city living, improve quality of life and enrich the skill base of citizens of all ages. This project is a collaboration between Intel Labs Europe, the Innovation Value Institute at NUI Maynooth, Business Informatics Group at Dublin City University and Dublin City Council, and was funded by the Irish Research Council and Intel Labs Europe. The Scorecard will be part of Dublin’s Digital Masterplan which will provide a roadmap for the journey towards making Dublin one of the world’s great Smart Cities.

Naoise Ó Muirí, Lord Mayor of Dublin invited the public to attend this unique event: “This amazing Showcase will allow Dubliners to experience extraordinary new developments in technology, and see how they can have practical positive results for us in everyday life. This Showcase is another milestone in the development of our Digital Masterplan for Dublin, which I will be launching next month. Technology is changing every aspect of our lives, and these demonstrations, open free to the public, will show how every citizen can engage with new technology for the benefit of everyday life.”

The Irish-led initiative ‘Behavioural Prediction’, developed by Intel, ESB Networks, SAP and M2C shows how by analysing available data peoples behaviour can be effectively predicted from the time they wake in the morning and when they leave the house to when they arrive home and like to cook their dinner. This demo shows how these predictions can be used to set someone’s alarm clock, open & heat their car before they get in and set timings for switching on lights in anticipation of them arriving home.

Another demonstration taking place at the showcase is CityWatch, a project developed by Intel, Dublin City Council and Trinity College Dublin. This project allows citizens to interact on issues that affect their lives by ensuring that public services meet their needs. CityWatch demonstrates how the power of the crowd can be harnessed to signal wasteful practices and highlight green initiatives, turning citizens into “reporters” creating a dynamic green map of Dublin and creating the impetus for a greener Dublin.

Tying in with CityWatch is Intel’s Urban Garden Monitoring project, which will place sensors in community gardens in Dublin. The CityWatch “app” will display real-time data such as soil temperature, soil moisture and weather. Members of each garden will be able to tag upcoming events in their garden and their city which may be of interest to others.

Other demonstrations focus on how to combine a number of apps into one set-top box to run devices at home; a building energy management system to manage electricity, water and gas consumption more efficiently; a solution to predict which rooms are most frequently used in a home in order to effectively heat or cool these rooms to reduce energy bills; and an Irish developed solar-powered device allowing teachers to monitor CO2, temperature and humidity in classrooms to ensure a more comfortable and healthy environment for pupils.

Further information on a selection of key demonstrations:

Emotional expression in image-based social media
An interactive system, PIXEE, was developed to promote greater emotional expression in image-based social media. Images shared on social media were projected onto a large interactive display at public events. A multimodal interface displayed the sentiment analysis of images and invited viewers to express their emotional responses. Viewers could adjust the emotional classification and thereby change the colour and sound associated with a picture, and experiment with emotion-based composition. An interdisciplinary team deployed this system around the world to explore new ways for technology to catalyze emotional connectedness.

Set top box manages multiple services in the home
Today homes have an ever increasing number of devices for things like, security alarms, set top boxes, home energy management, smart metering etc. This demo shows a simple low cost set top box on which all these services (Apps) can run and on which new Apps can be loaded as and when you want.

Sense technology to manage energy usage in buildings Intelligent Building Energy Management
This demonstration illustrates some of the existing state of the art sensing and control technologies that can be deployed throughout a building in order to monitor and manage electricity, water and gas consumption more effectively and efficiently.

Reduce home energy bills through predictive technology
Are your heating/ cooling bills too high? Have you ever been too hot or too cold in your house? Are you fed up with paying for heating or cooling of rooms when you are not using them? By predicting when and which rooms you use in your house, by understanding when you are home this solution developed by Intel Labs can address these issues for you.

Enhance classroom environment by managing heat, CO2 Airducate
High occupancy ratio’s in buildings, such as in class rooms, can result in elevated levels of CO2 causing headaches, respiratory issues and nausea. Schools & offices must operate to guidelines they often have no visibility to. Airducate is a solar-powered prototype which will alert a teacher or a building management system re CO2, temperature and humidity levels

Full information on all demonstrations taking place is available.