With his team at SENSEable City Lab, MIT’s Carlo Ratti makes cool things by sensing the data we create. He pulls from passive data sets — like the calls we make, the garbage we throw away — to create surprising visualizations of city life.

Vlad Trifa, a PhD candidate at the Institute for Pervasive Computing at ETH Zürich, talks about a new generation of urban-scale applications that tap the real-time data our cities generate, to make our cities more open, efficient and sustainable.

IBM has create a short video showing how cities can increase energy efficiency with smart grids and sensors. These smart grids use sensors, meters, digital controls and analytic tools to automate, monitor and control the two-way flow of energy across operations’”from power plant to plug.

“Intelligent city is a city focused on innovation; a city of global competitiveness”. View the Video from TIME VIDEO

IBM unveils its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” — a list of innovations with the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years in 4 Minutes shows the great capacity of visualisation to capture and reveal knowledge hidden into data.

Cisco’ s chief globalization officer says that we will need to build 200 cities in the next 50 years to support the urbanization of our world, but it presents a great opportunity to transform how we live by building Internet-enabled and networked cities from the start.