Dr Ajith Parlikad, CSIC Co-Investigator and Senior Lecturer
Mark Enzer, Global Water Sector Leader
Mott MacDonald; Keith Bowers, Principal Tunnel Engineer, London Underground
Ross Dentten, Asset Information and Configuration Manager, Crossrail
Matt Edwards, Asset Maintenance and Information Manager, Anglian Water Services
Jerry England, Group Digital Railway Director, Network Rail
Volker Buscher, Director, Arup Digital
Smart Infrastructure is a global opportunity worth £2trn-4.8trn. The world is experiencing a fourth industrial revolution due to the rapid development of technologies and digital abundance.
Smart Infrastructure involves applying this to economic infrastructure for the benefit of all stakeholders. It will allow owners and operators to get more out of what they already have, increasing capacity, efficiency and resilience and improving services.
It brings better performance at lower cost. Gaining more from existing assets is the key to enhancing service provision despite constrained finance and growing resource scarcity. It will often be more cost-effective to add to the overall value of mature infrastructure via digital enhancements than by physical enhancements – physical enhancements add `more of the same’, whereas digital enhancements can transform the existing as well.
Smart Infrastructure will shape a better future. Greater understanding of the performance of our infrastructure will allow new infrastructure to be designed and delivered more efficiently and to provide better whole-life value.
Data is the key – the ownership of it and the ability to understand and act on it. Industry, organisations and professionals need to be ready to adjust in order to take advantage of the emerging opportunities. Early adopters stand to gain the most benefit. Everyone in the infrastructure sector has a choice as to how fast they respond to the changes that Smart Infrastructure will bring. But everyone will be affected.
Change is inevitable. Progress is optional. Now is the time for the infrastructure industry to choose to be Smart.
Perspective: Since this paper is general in its recommendations, we provide examples of specific campus infrastructure data points that are difficult, if not impossible, to identify and “make smart” — either willfully, for lack of funding, for lack of consensus, for lack of understanding or leadership:
Maintenance of the digital location of fire dampers in legacy buildings or even new buildings mapped with BIM. Doors and ceiling plenums are continually being modified and the As-Built information is usually not accurate. This leads to fire hazard and complicates air flow and assuring occupant temperature preferences (i.e. uncontrollable hot and cold spots)
Ampere readings of feeder breakers downstream from the electric service main. The power chain between the service substation and the end-use equipment is a “no-man’s land” in research facilities that everyone wants to meter but few ever recover the cost of the additional metering.
Optimal air flow rates in hospitals and commercial kitchens that satisfies both environmental air hazards and compartmentalized air pressure zones for fire safety.
Identification of students, staff and faculty directly affiliated with the campus versus visitors to the campus.
Standpipe pressure variations in municipal water systems
Pinch points in municipal sewer systems in order to avoid building flooding.
How much of university data center cost should be a shared (gateway) cost, and how much should be charged to individual academic and business units?
Should “net-zero” energy buildings be charged for power generated at the university central heating and electric generation plant?
How much staff parking should be allocated to academic faculty versus staff that supports the healthcare delivery enterprises; which in many cases provides more revenue to the university than the academic units?
Finally, a classical conundrum in facility management spreadsheets: Can we distinguish between maintenance cost (which should be covered under an O&M budget) and capital improvement cost (which can be financed by investors)
“The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858)
Thinking about how that groundhog lied to us 🤨🤨🤨 pic.twitter.com/ZQOzzteCzs— Penny Kmitt (@pennylikeacoin) April 4, 2024The non-alcoholic version of the Dirty Snowball:Ingredients:
1 oz Peppermint syrup
1 oz Chocolate syrup
4 oz Milk or a milk alternative (such as almond milk or oat milk)
Ice cubes
Instructions:
Fill a glass with ice cubes.
Pour the peppermint syrup and chocolate syrup over the ice.
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OpenAI was founded in 2015 by a group of technology luminaries, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. The organization was created with the goal of developing advanced artificial intelligence technologies in a way that is safe and beneficial for humanity. It is written in multiple programming languages, but the primary language used to build the model is Python but relies on a range of other software tools and frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch for training and deploying the deep learning models, and various libraries for data preprocessing and postprocessing, such as spaCy, NLTK, and Transformers.
Since its founding, OpenAI has grown to become one of the world’s leading AI research organizations, with a team of hundreds of researchers and engineers working on a wide range of projects in areas such as natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, and more. Much like humans, ChatGPT will likely struggle negotiating “bias”. As of this posting it seems clear that the algorithm produces answers that are biased toward large central government; most likely the result of not having enough historical input about how a smaller central government is largely responsible for inventing it.
International Electrotechnical Commission Technical Committee TC 62 prepares international standards and other publications concerning electrical equipment, electrical systems and software used in healthcare and their effects on patients, operators, other persons and the environment. As such the work of this parent committee — which has broad implications for comparatively cash-rich multi-national medical equipment manufacturers — coordinates the work of several subcommittees; listed below:
62A Common aspects of medical equipment, software and systems
62B Medical imaging equipment, software and systems
62C Equipment for radiotherapy, nuclear medicine and radiation dosimetry
62D Particular medical equipment, software and systems
Germany is Global the Secretariat. The Business Plan is linked below:
The U.S National Committee of the International Electrotechnical Commission serves as the focal point for U.S parties who are interested in the development, promulgation, and use of globally relevant standards for the electrotechnical industry. The USNC is also engaged in the assessment of conformance to standards, undertaking work in areas such as testing, certification, and accreditation. Tony Zertuche is ANSI’s point person (zertuche@ansi.org) and we encourage you to communicate directly with Tony for the most up-to-date information.
We coordinate our response to the development of IEC titles in this domain with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee which meets 4 times monthly in European and American time zones. When there are Committee Draft for Votes released for public consultation (CDV) we coordinate our responses with experts active in IEEE globally.
Since the scope of this committee’s work involves products (in the main) we rank it in the middle of our priority tier. Our primary interest lies with interoperability standards, all the while recognizing that there is very little difference in the way education communities respond to IEC standard proposals than the way all other stakeholders would respond. At the risk of understatement medical research and clinical healthcare delivery are a large part of the revenue of many university systems so that is why we track these titles and others.
We maintain work flow of this committee on our Health, Electrical and Nursing colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
IEC 63120 ED1: Refurbishment of medical electrical equipment, medical electrical systems and sub-assemblies and reuse of components as part of the extended life-cycle.
We found similar concepts running through the literature among United States consensus product developers; notably the IEEE, NFPA and NEMA. Re-use, reconditioning, recycling of electrical equipment is a priority that can contribute to the safety and sustainability agenda of healthcare enterprises in education communities so we follow it; vigilant for excessive market-making by incumbent verticals.
The comment period lapsed on March 27th but we will likely see more action in the technical committees receiving proposals from vertical incumbents making markets in medical equipment replacement parts. We track development of this and other IEC titles on our provisional workspace*:
We encourage our colleagues working in university-affiliated healthcare enterprises to interact directly with the IEC by setting up a Commenting Account to access the redline linked below:
It is our custom to follow the lead of the the US National Committee to the International Electrotechnical Commission (USNA/IEC) primarily, though we have significant professional relationships with academic scholars in other nations through the IEEE Standards Association and the E&H Committee. We are happy to discuss any consensus product, any day at 11 AM Eastern time, however the expertise for responding to invitations for public comment like this is usually present during the E&H Committee meetings which take place four times monthly in European and American time zones.
Issue: [11-66]
Category: Electrical, Healthcare Facilities, International
*This is a carry-over workspace from the original University of Michigan facility standards enterprise — @StandardsUMich — and has been re-purposed for educational use and collaboration with the IEEE E&H Committee and the IEEE Engineering in Medical and Biology Society
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
