urbancow, istockphoto.com

What’s the connection between public transit fares and high school graduation rates? Or obesity rates and carbon emissions?

IBM -- drawing in part on the research of SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West and External Professor Luis Bettencourt and their collaborators -- has introduced a simulator that models and analyzes complex data from seemingly disparate aspects of city life, and Portland, Oregon is the first customer.

IBM's Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities application is intended to help city planners use complexity science to analyze and model data on a community’s collective behavior. While most analytical tools attempt to break down data into small pieces and draw inferences from one or two factors, IBM's app can handle 3,000 computations to allow for the complex ways in which multiple factors interact within the urban system. 

Portland, Ore., will be the first city to use the app to inform policy decisions.

SFI's cities and urbanization team has studies cities as complex systems and found surprising mathematical regularities in nearly every quantifiable aspect of urban living. 

Read the FastCompany article (August 8, 2011)

Watch Geoffrey West's TEDGlobal talk