Global citizenship

Amip Shah, based in Palo Alto, California, spends a lot of time gazing into the future. As a Principal Research Scientist at HP Labs, his job requires him to imagine how the cities of tomorrow will look. He often wonders: How will cities function in a world where sustainable, efficient systems are a necessity and everybody and everything is interconnected? What sorts of technologies will support them? How will the avalanche of data from smart appliances, buildings, and grids be managed?

The answers may lie in a city with a seamlessly integrated technology infrastructure, equipped with sensors delivering real-time data that allow efficient optimization of environments. Cooling a room right before its occupants get too warm, gradually brightening street lights as the sun begins to set, irrigating green space when the soil turns dry (and not moments before an anticipated rain), improving quality of life while reducing waste. This vision is not far away.

“In the future, it’s not going to be enough to separately build a thermostat, a smart phone, and a building management system,” says Amip. “All of these will need to be integrated together to create customizable, personalized, efficient, and sustainable buildings. Our customers will want full solutions... it’s not about a single piece of technology, or a single device. It’s about bringing it all together.”

This vision of future cities grew out of life cycle assessment and real-time environmental control systems that HP Labs had developed for data centers—taking into account carbon emissions, water use, resource consumption, and human health impacts to analyze and manage a data center’s environmental footprint from cradle-to-cradle. He and his colleagues quickly realized that the approach had broader implications, and could also be used in buildings and even cities. Amip and the HP Labs team are already conducting pilot programs.

Working with a multi-disciplinary team mapping out sophisticated solutions to complex problems puts Amip right where he wants to be. “I work with people who are experts in product design, control theory, data mining, machine learning, and engineering. I am really driven by the opportunity to learn and to work on complex problems,” says Amip. “Working with this team, I learn something new every day.”