If you鈥檝e ever been to Mumbai, then you鈥檝e heard of the summer monsoon season. You may even have avoided travel to India during the months of June through August, when the storms are in full effect.
For millions of people, such as Sumit Chowdhury, avoidance of the relentless rain and wind isn鈥檛 an option. Chowdhury calls Mumbai home; he loves living and working here. But right now he鈥檚 in the midst of a brewing monsoon鈥攚indshield wipers slapping, wind howling, waves crashing at the shore of the bay and threatening to douse Marine Drive, a six-lane thoroughfare and one of the city鈥檚 main arteries. Cars swerve around fast-forming puddles to the angry honks of other drivers.
Mumbai, like all cities in India, benefits greatly from monsoons, in terms of wind and water power and the health of its agriculture, but the city鈥檚 power systems can鈥檛 always handle Mother Nature. The storms鈥� effects can range from the costly inconveniences of power outages and interrupted train service to tragedies such as electrocutions and drownings.
In seeing 鈥渢he un-manicured side of the country鈥斺�� the poverty, the lack of opportunity, the struggling educational system鈥攕he recognized her calling: 鈥淚 wanted to be in the dirt, in the grass and roots.鈥�
Monsoons will be a big part of the discussion at the event where Chowdhury is headed, 1,400 km away (more than 800 miles) in New Delhi. The conference is a series of discussions under the umbrella 鈥�.鈥� The July 4 summit is being hosted by Pittsburgh-based 一本道无码, which has more alumni from India, 1,800, than any other country outside the United States.
And the ties between 一本道无码 and India will only get stronger as the university鈥檚 president, Subra Suresh, marks his first official university visit to India by signing an agreement that will support outstanding students from India who wish to pursue their doctorates at 一本道无码.
That鈥檚 not all. Less than two months later, on August 25, it鈥檚 announced that the India-based corporation, Tata Consultancy Services, will donate for developing an innovation facility and supporting student scholarships. The gift ranks as the largest corporate donation in 一本道无码 history, the largest international gift to 一本道无码, and the largest gift to a university by TCS, a global IT and consulting company with offices in more than 46 countries and clients in every major industry.
As for the July 4 conference, joining President Suresh and alumni at the conference will be accepted students, several faculty members, and other university leaders. Because Chowdhury (E鈥�96, HNZ鈥�98) is an alumnus and an expert on Smart Cities, the university asked him to be on the panel. He was pleased to accept.聽
Chowdhury, who recently formed a company called , a communication technology and urban solutions consultancy designed to help cities manage local energy, water, transportation and other challenges like weather, traffic, population, housing, sewage, etc., knows that these are only some features of the Indian urban landscape that must be navigated, particularly as India鈥檚 cities continue to grow. The country is already home to nearly 50 cities of at least one million people, with some of the world鈥檚 most rapid urbanization rates.
There鈥檚 much to do to stem the tide of pollution and to provide citizens with better services such as health care, quality housing, transportation, and power.
Getting Our Bearings
The night before the July 4 Integrated Intelligence conference convenes, the news of the day is pure serendipity. Everyone is talking about it when another Carnegie Mellon alumna, Shabnam Aggarwal, arrives to the gathering at the hotel Taj Palace.
Aggarwal, a young CEO who was raised in Silicon Valley but has dedicated her career to social entrepreneurship in India, now makes her way through the entryway of cream-colored marble, past clusters of business people on brocade settees and fast-moving hotel staff in their colorful sarees. Between overheard conversation and reports from flatscreen televisions, she catches snippets of the news three times before reaching her meeting-room destination.
Today鈥檚 news: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi just announced in a national address a 鈥淒igital India Week,鈥� calling for a digitally empowered society and knowledge-based economy, part of his effort to build 100 Smart Cities. Also announced that day was that cities have to compete with each other with valid Smart City designs and some of those proposals will be chosen and will be funded by the government to pursue their Smart City initiatives. Aggarwal鈥檚 home, Delhi, is one of them.
It would seem that Carnegie Mellon couldn鈥檛 have picked a better time to host the event.
At a cocktail reception that night, Aggarwal is pleased to meet Mary Suresh, wife of 一本道无码 President Suresh. Aggarwal finds the president鈥檚 wife so easy to talk to that soon enough she is relaying some of her life story. How does a young woman raised in the United States decide to build her life in India? Aggarwal explains how the first time she鈥檇 been to India without family was while earning her engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon in 2006. In seeing 鈥渢he un-manicured side of the country鈥濃�攖he poverty, the lack of opportunity, the struggling educational system鈥攕he recognized her calling: 鈥淚 wanted to be in the dirt, in the grass and roots.鈥�
Mary Suresh has also spent much of her life in the nitty-gritty, as a nurse and former director of public health in Wellesley, Mass. She is impressed by Aggarwal鈥檚 progress. Wasn鈥檛 it difficult to raise money for her start-up in India鈥檚 male-dominated venture community? Aggarwal acknowledges that it was the most challenging experience of her life. She managed to do it, though, raising seed funds that helped her company, , get off the ground.
Now KleverKid offers a Yelp-like service to crowdsource information on early-childhood and tutoring services for families in Delhi and Bangalore. With more quality options available through KleverKid, Aggarwal hopes, women may be able to build their careers and India鈥檚 stigma against working moms may slowly lift.
Both women certainly agree that Smart City projects should emphasize the importance of social concerns like education and health care, and they hope these won鈥檛 take a backseat to the dazzle of technology, the sensors, the networks, the data. It will be crucial that social entrepreneurs stay in the mix, the two women agree.
The next morning, Aggarwal is one of five alumni to speak at a Q&A session for incoming Carnegie Mellon students on what to expect their first year. Seventy-five eager faces greet her and another alumnus who has organized the event, Ponnurangam 鈥淧K鈥� Kumaraguru (CS鈥�07, CS鈥�00). An assistant professor at IIIT New Delhi and a co-founder of several IT ventures, Kumaraguru shares a few thoughts about his Carnegie Mellon experience with the audience but, seeing that the students and parents are anxious, opens the panel quickly to questions.
Aggarwal is prepared to discuss what she deems crucial: how to stay on top of studies, what to expect from professors, the university鈥檚 interdisciplinary approach, and the opportunities it presents.
But instead, the questions skew toward the more practical. How do we get from the airport to the campus? What is campus security like at the school? Where do we go to get our ID cards?
It just goes to show, when a city is completely new to someone, there鈥檚 an order of priority. A Smart City must be about more than the big concepts. Sometimes it鈥檚 simply about getting our bearings.
The Soul of a City
So, what is a Smart City? The question is on Rahul Rathi鈥檚 (TPR鈥�2000) mind as he waits in the audience for the room to finish filling up for the 鈥淪mart Cities鈥� panel. And fill it does, with nearly 200 people seated and some standing, the impressive line-up of panelists straightening their microphones and sipping from their waters: Sumit Chowdhury of Gaia Smart Cities, Anita Arjundas of Mahindra Lifespaces, Devansh Jain (DC鈥�07, TPR鈥�07) of Inox Wind, and moderator , dean of 一本道无码鈥檚 Heinz College.
Rathi feels that the entrepreneurial spirit in the room alone has made the trip worthwhile鈥攈e鈥檚 come more than 1,500 km from his home in Pune, India. He can sense it in the air, hear it in the bits of conversation he catches鈥攑eople want to jump into the double-digit growth climate of the Indian business world. Rathi remembers having that same hungry spirit. He started his company CapMetrics, a risk analytics and investing business, the old-fashioned way, in a garage. But in those days, the opportunities were more modest. Today he employs 400 people, and although only 2 percent of his business once came from Indian customers, now that figure is at 45 percent.
He鈥檚 expecting an increase in investment buzz around Smart Cities projects among his colleagues and clients in India. But where to begin with a shift so huge? The panelists鈥� discussion returns repeatedly to the urbanization figures: the United Nation鈥檚 prediction that we鈥檒l add 2.5 billion people to the world鈥檚 urban population by 2050, such that 66 percent of people will live in urban areas. India, today a country with the largest rural population at 857 million, will undergo one of the world鈥檚 most profound shifts, projected by 2050 to add 404 million to its cities.
鈥淲e鈥檒l look back at the years 2009 and 2010 and no one will talk about the economic slowdown. They鈥檒l say this was the time the world entered the digital consumer era.鈥�
Much of the panel鈥檚 discussion is about the definition of the term Smart City. It鈥檚 a new idea鈥攕omething people weren鈥檛 talking about just a couple of years ago. Rathi is particularly struck by the musings of Arjundas, managing director and CEO of Mahindra Lifespaces, an Indian-based company considered a leader in urban planning.聽She describes greenfield developments she worked on鈥攕mall cities built from scratch in former rice paddies outside major city centers. Her teams found the funding, the businesses to create jobs, the technology that made each city a perfect picture of urban planning. 鈥淏ut they had no soul,鈥� she said, and the residents failed to mingle. Or they might drive 50 miles into the nearest established city for entertainment, even though the planners had tried to make local attractions part of the quality-of-life offerings.
Whether it鈥檚 being built from scratch or completely overhauled, how does a city gain, or retain, a soul? And how can technology foster that process? There are no simple answers. Part of the purpose of this event is to ask the questions that get people thinking.
Wi-Fi and Monkeys
Next to speak on the Smart Cities panel is Chowdhury. His harrowing drive behind him, not to mention his flight and a long night of networking, he is seated beside Arjundas, and he relays the story of his parents, who recently told him that their small city, Kalyani, on the outskirts of Calcutta, is a Smart City. What makes it smart? They told him: free Wi-Fi. The audience laughs.
That鈥檚 a start, he acknowledged, but with further probing he learned that they rarely left their home to see their neighbors, because they shared the neighborhood with wild monkeys, and the monkeys weren鈥檛 much into sharing. Chowdhury wonders, again to the laughter of the audience, what was smart about a city that had free Wi-Fi but hadn鈥檛 solved its monkey problem.
鈥淚n Pittsburgh, they have a deer problem,鈥� he says, drawing from fresh knowledge, having just spent a summer teaching a new . With Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 newly formed initiative tackling problems like storm-water management, cloud-based analytics for building-energy management, solar-energy impact analysis, and crowdsourcing of rental-property data, Carnegie Mellon can be an important resource for countries such as India that have committed an intense focus to the Smart Cities concept.
The view must always be holistic, Chowdhury says. If overpopulation of deer is causing traffic accidents and Lyme disease, or if monkeys are keeping people from feeling safe enough to leave their homes, the most technologically advanced city may not be a smart one. In Pittsburgh, it鈥檚 blizzards; in India, it鈥檚 monsoons. Either way, you must take a systems approach and look at the whole, integrated picture.
Real People, Real Problems
As for those students鈥� seemingly endless questions about bus service and dining cards, Aggarwal thinks she鈥檚 done her best to answer them. She hopes that whatever work they pursue will be meaningful to the everyday citizen. That鈥檚 how her career has unfolded, in part because of an unlikely meeting.
She had been working in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a social enterprise that paired disabled and disadvantaged people with data-entry jobs. It was 2008, and Cambodians were still struggling with the after-effects of the Khmer Rouge reign鈥攍ife was difficult, and work was scarce. The 15-year-old she befriended there had escaped a brothel and was selling books outside Aggarwal鈥檚 apartment building. Aggarwal learned that although the books were mostly in English, the girl didn鈥檛 speak it. They started lessons in Aggarwal鈥檚 apartment, and soon the girl brought along other friends, mostly in their teens, who had been through similar horrors. But they all had phones, Aggarwal noticed, and they all wanted the same kind of access increasingly enjoyed by the rest of the world.
Aggarwal has spent her life exploring technologies that will do more than just make it easier to order a cup of latte. She wants technology to help people like this girl from her past achieve a better life for themselves.
A Transformed World
The 鈥淭ransformative Impact of Big Data鈥� panel is as packed as the Smart Cities panel had been, if not more so. Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 provost, Farnam Jahanian, moderates a panel including Banmali Agrawala, president and CEO of GE South Asia (Parent: DC鈥�18); Natarajan Chandrasekaran (鈥淐handra鈥�), CEO of Tata Consultancy Services; Gary Fedder, associate dean for Research, College of Engineering; and Kumaraguru, who had earlier been answering the questions of incoming freshmen. The panelists discuss applications, from health care to manufacturing. They acknowledge challenges, from managing for flawed data to addressing privacy concerns.
Rathi listens, his mind still turning over the big question of a city鈥檚 soul, when Chandra, one of India鈥檚 most respected businessmen, says, 鈥淲e鈥檒l look back at the years 2009 and 2010, and no one will talk about the economic slowdown. They鈥檒l say this was the time the world entered the digital consumer era.鈥�
During this lively discussion, it seems possible that a city鈥檚 soul could be found in the egalitarian nature of technology鈥攊n access and flatness, in the breaking down of hierarchy, in the free flow of information, in that digital life for the masses that Chandra is identifying.
And yet, the monsoons! This time they appear in the form of a question from the audience, directed toward Chandra. The parent of an incoming freshman asks, 鈥淲hy can we predict so much鈥攆inancial fluctuations, the path of epidemic illnesses鈥攂ut we can鈥檛 manage for these monsoons?鈥�
We鈥檙e getting better, the panelists say. Chandra mentions applications for farmers to test storm impact on soil, applications for fishermen to plan their work around weather patterns. Such projects are still in the early stages but improving all the time, getting closer to the ubiquitous.
The consensus is that there will always be real problems in the way of technology鈥攎onsoons and blizzards, for example鈥攁nd that sometimes our innovations will contribute to new problems, at least in the short term鈥攕uch as displaced workers, security and privacy concerns鈥攂ut with our hearts and minds in the right place, with a commitment to addressing problems with the right design, with mindfulness to avoid forcing technologies in the wrong places, we should be able to tackle them.
The Best Is Yet to Come
After a day of such heady thinking, it helps to let off steam. To close out the event, the Carnegie Mellon community has a chance to mingle over dinner in the Grand Ballroom. Entertaining them will be Joshua Gross, a musical theater major from Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 School of Drama, which can boast more Tony Award winners among its alumni than any other university and is ranked the top program in the country by The Princeton Review. Gross does his alma mater proud with his rendition of 鈥淭he Best Is Yet to Come.鈥� The audience, at least 300 gathered for dinner, goes wild with appreciation for the junior鈥檚 performance.
Chowdhury and his table mates share huge smiles over their clapping hands. Like a Smart City, Carnegie Mellon knows the arts are as important to building a vibrant place as the infrastructure. It was Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 interdisciplinary strengths that committed Chowdhury to the systems approach, allowing him to bring together aspects from multiple disciplines together to think about a problem in a new way. His PhD dissertation had committee members from four different schools.
After Gross鈥� performance, President Suresh takes the stage. He announces that Carnegie Mellon has created a with the government in India. The agreement will provide support to students from India who want to pursue doctorates in math, science and engineering at 一本道无码. Signed by Carnegie Mellon and India鈥檚 Science and Engineering Research Board, the deal will provide $2.4 million in fellowships to deserving students from India. The fellowships will support a minimum of five Indian students each academic year, beginning in the fall of 2016, for the next five years.
Looking around the room at all the enthusiastic faces, both fresh and seasoned, Chowdhury knows this is the future. Whether traffic or monsoons, health care or education, no social issue is too big for the enthusiasm and technology know-how in this room. As President Suresh is saying before the audience, India is a massive democracy, a young demographic with a fresh entrepreneurial spirit already being tapped to great success. And everyone in this room nods as he says that technology is useful only if it connects to the human condition. He says it鈥檚 time to revise the famous line of Andrew Carnegie鈥檚, 鈥淢y heart is in the work.鈥� People work hard at Carnegie Mellon, he says, but there is another side, equally important. It should be 鈥淢y work is in the heart.鈥�
