Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Talk to me. Information, news and entertainment on demand. WUS radio.com. 0:11 [on-hold music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world with your host, Peggy Smedley. [on-hold music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:27 My last guest today is involved in the planning and deployment of emerging solutions for smart grids and even smarter cities, and is also educating the next generation of leaders who will go on to help realize its full potential. 0:41 Please welcome Shay Bahramhrad, vice president of new initiatives at IEEE and director of distribution system planning at Smart Grid and Innovation. Shay, welcome to the show. Thank you, Peggy. I'm glad to join you. 0:57 Well, we're delighted to have you here. So we've been talking so much about smart cities today and everything that's going on. 1:04 I'd love to get your background a little bit and your company and what you guys are doing, how IEEE's doing some things. 1:12 So l-let's get a little understanding of you and your involvement in Itr-- IEEE and what you think about smart cities. Uh, just for our listeners who are trying to understand a little bit. Sure, Peggy. 1:23 Um, I'm, uh, the director of, uh, distribution engineering, smart grid and innovation at ComEd. 1:30 Um, ComEd is an electric utility in, um, Illinois, and we provide electricity to about, uh, three point million customers, uh, across Illinois, including City of Chicago. 1:42 And as part of my responsibilities, we look at, um, how we can utilize our infrastructure to provide, uh, services to our citizens and, um, ci-cities and municipalities in, um, smart city framework. 1:57 At IEEE, um, we are electrical engineers from around the world. 2:03 Yes, and so as a trusted broker of, uh, credible technical information, we are identifying both existing best practices and also the gaps where more work needs to be done in, um, I-Internet of things and smart city space. 2:24 So as, as a utility, you know, as one of the largest ones we have here looking at in Illinois, and you think about that in the Midwest, what you're doing, you understand the pressures of s-s-- trying to have smart cities, connected cities. 2:37 When you look at that as what you're doing, like with IEEE, you're now looking at what lots of companies come together and try to understand from, I guess, it would be more of a distribution kind of understanding. 2:49 Tell us when you think about what a smart city really needs to be, because I would imagine you're seeing a lot of trends. 2:56 You're seeing a lot of discussion about what people think that needs to be when you're looking at data and what all that means and privacy, and there seems to be a lot of pull and push. 3:08 Uh, I would imagine there's a lot of discussion going on and people's perceptions from a large util-utility that you're involved, plus being a member of a very large organization that's trying to accommodate a lot of people in a, in a lot of different ways. 3:23 Absolutely. Um, I, I absolutely agree with you, uh, Peggy. 3:27 Best in class smart city, uh, implementation is all about a robust collaboration strategy that, um, allows different organizations share successes and project de-details on, on an ongoing basis, allowing, uh, citizens and co-companies and government and municipalities to maximize the benefit of, uh, new technologies. 3:50 You will hear a lot the importance of partnership, um, that that's been a key to nearly all smart city projects globally as an effective means of sharing the risks, as well as gaining funding and expertise, um, across the board. 4:08 Um, funding for smart city projects has often been a combination of public grants to kickstart the programs as well as along with, uh, publ-- um, private funding. 4:21 Um, also many, uh, new technologies associated with smart cities like, uh, electric vehicle, for example, they require physical infrastructure to enable that. 4:30 So the role of a utility, uh, in, in the mix of, um, all those organizations working and collaborating is very important as well. 4:39 Do you see a lot of challenges in having like an organization like IEEE helping to move smart cities forward along with the role utilities are playing? 4:49 I mean, because it seems to me that, you know, as I just mentioned, you have the issue of data privacy. You have the issue of- Mm-hmm. -security. There just seems to be like there's just a lot going on. 5:00 And right now when we try to address these things, there's a lot of things and we just talked on the last segment about what really is a smart city. 5:08 You know, you've got congestion issues, you've got the expectation of what citizens want, you've got the expectation of what the city itself wants, government wants. 5:17 There just seems to be so much happening, and technology is changing so rapidly. It just seems to be that you have to keep up and keep pace because exponentially things are happening. That's a very good point. 5:32 Um, you know, cybersecurity is certainly n-n-near the top of the list as, um, m-most in the industry would agree. 5:40 Um, utilities are very well positioned on, on this front given their expertise managing different IT/OT systems for the critical infrastructure and then treat, um... 5:52 And, and the threat continues to evolve and therefore there's a, there's a, there's a need to revisit the approaches to make sure that the systems are secure and the data isPrivacy, um, has been seen. 6:06 Also, I would add, um, interoperability and system integration are m-- there's significant challenges associated with that in smart city deployments. Um, 6:20 w-in, in modern day, we have point solutions that they can easily detect the type of things we are trying to, to detect, and we have developed algorithms capable of making sense of, um, incredibly complex datasets. 6:33 Um, it is at the intersection of all these sources of data that we will find the valuable new insights for all these partners across the board. 6:42 And IEEE, what we do, what we've done is we have developed a, um, an smart city program to bring, uh, together, um, IEEE's broad array of, uh, technical societies and organizations to, uh, advance the state-of-the-art for, um, smart city technologies and start looking at developing standards and frameworks for these challenges that, um, you, you, you already mentioned. 7:09 And, and that's an interesting point that you said because you described interoperability, and that's everybody talks about, right? In the Internet of Things- Mm-hmm... we, we've got an interoperability issue. 7:18 But that would seem to me that those are technical challenges that, as you described, that IEEE is trying to help overcome as an association because of the various things that are there, right? 7:30 There are so many technical challenges that need to be c- overcome like what you described as interoperability. 7:36 Are there many others that you're constantly looking at that saying, "We find these new hurdles that come into play as we're trying to figure out how we bring this perfect..." 7:45 I, I don't know that you could have a perfect smart city, but the-- a better smart city, I should say. Y-yes. We, we [chuckles] we are. 7:53 So, um, a, a very good example of it is, for example, detecting pressure loss at a pumping station, uh, let us know there may be an issue, but combining this with alerts from flood sensors on streetlights, it would allow us, um, pinpoint the location of water main break. 8:13 This is just an example of how we make different infrastructure owners work together and then they, the data needs to get processed somehow and get to, um, end user and citizens. 8:24 And, and what's happening at IEEE is we are looking into different use cases such as smart streetlight or electric vehicle ridesharing or as like application domain and, um, looking into the functions that would enable those type of, um, domains. 8:42 For example, sensor and intelligent electronic devices, um, the integration of all those technologies, uh, intelligence and data analytics and management and control platforms. 8:54 And on particular use cases, um, like sensors or intelligent electronic devices, we are doing some of the, uh, important research both to make sure that the tech-- to, to, to understand the technology be-better, and we are also developing standards to make it easier for a wide range of cities to use best available technologies. 9:18 Shea Beramarad, vice president of New Initiatives at IEEE and d-director of Distribution System Planning, Smart Grid, and Innovation at ComEd, thank you so much for all your time today. 9:28 I really think it was delightful to have you help us understand this. I really appreciate it. [outro music] Thanks for having me. 9:34 All right, listeners, you know we're out of time, and remember, we are broadcast live every Tuesday at twelve PM Central. 9:41 You can check us out at connectedworld.com or always The Peggy Smedley Show at www.peggySmedleyShow.com. Thanks for listening. Send us your tweets. We'd be happy to respond to them. 9:51 This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT. Have a wonderful week, and remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. [upbeat music] With great technology comes great responsibility. 10:05 Follow Internet of Things tech expert and futurist Peggy Smedley, repeatedly ranked as a top IoT and M2M influencer. 10:13 Go to Peggy_Smedley on Twitter for her take on the latest tech news and lively interviews with other industry insiders on her weekly radio show. Visit twitter.com and search for Peggy_Smedley to follow her today. 10:27 [upbeat music] Video consumption is on the rise, so to reach this audience, Constructek Magazine created Constructek TV. 10:39 Constructek TV helps construction professionals leverage emerging solutions to better their business. Tune in to constructek.tv to catch the latest show on the first and third Tuesday of each month. 10:50 Like, view, and subscribe to constructek.tv, bringing dynamic video to construction. [upbeat music] Signal to noise, an electronic term with new relevance on the internet. 11:05 Connected World Media cuts through the noise of data overload and finds you the signal of important information, information that will keep you current and aware of context in the Internet of Things. 11:16 Peggy Smedley shares her insights on The Peggy Smedley Show and in Connected World Magazine, all online at connectedworld.com. 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