IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative aims to show how increasingly smart systems can increase efficiency and progress. This is done by monitoring sometimes complex data from the physical world, interpreting meaning from it and then reacting to this and changing the physical world in some way. An example of this would be to ease congestion by automatically redirecting vehicles to different routes or adjusting the flow through a city by manipulating traffic light timings.

At the university the main room we use for the Digital Art and Technology course in the Babbage building is an IBM Smarter Planet lab, although we still call it the DAT Cave. The room has been set up to make use of some of this IBM technology. The Smarter Planet concept meshes closely with both the work we have been doing  in the Everyware and Realtime modules.