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Google Fiber
Columbia, MO: Connecting Google to Bright Ideas and Unique Capabilities
Columbia, MO is competing with cities around the country to take part in Google's Fiber for Communities initiative. RJI is playing a key role in facilitating the city's application and community support. Futures Lab Director Mike McKean, with help from some University of Missouri colleagues, has drafted an action plan that highlights why Columbia is uniquely positioned to partner with Google on next-generation media.
March 25, 2010
With a highly-educated, technically-skilled population of just more than 100,000 people, Columbia, Missouri is big enough to tackle complex problems, small enough to scale well with Google’s Fiber for Communities initiative, and representative enough to serve as an ideal model for other American cities, large and small. We believe Columbia and Google can work together on at least four key areas that will show the promise of fiber to the home: telehealth, expanded educational opportunities, civic engagement, and stronger business/consumer relationships.
Background
Columbia and Boone County have a history of early and aggressive support for community access to the Internet. In 1993 the University of Missouri, the City of Columbia, Columbia Public Schools and the Daniel Boone Regional Library created the Columbia Online Information Network (COIN) -- the first community information network in the state and one of the first in the country. When it began, COIN was the only Internet access provider for the general public in the mid-Missouri area. Though COIN discontinued dial-up access in 2006, the library continues to host the web sites of more than 200 local not-for-profit organizations.
More than 15 years ago, the University of Missouri also launched the Missouri Research and Education Network. MOREnet connects the state’s schools, libraries, state government and other organizations to the Internet. Over the years, MOREnet has added training, technical support and videoconferencing services.
MU is also home to the eMINTS National Center. In partnership with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Center provides multimedia resources to some 38,000 students in more than 200 public school districts in Missouri and five in the state of Utah. This month eMINTS celebrated its 10th anniversary.
The University of Missouri–Columbia is the flagship campus of the University of Missouri system and is one of the most comprehensive, land grant institutions in the country with a commitment to community outreach. MU is home to the Bond Life Sciences Center, a hub of interdisciplinary research on human, animal and plant health. The Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions are leaders in community health care and tele-medicine. Started more than 100 years ago, the Missouri School of Journalism is the world’s first and most respected journalism school. It houses the Reynolds Journalism Institute which tests new ideas and new technologies to better connect local media and their communities.
http://www.missouri.edu
http://bondlsc.missouri.edu
http://som.missouri.edu
http://www.journalism.missouri.edu
http://rjionline.org
Columbia has a progressive business community built around data-driven technology and new media. Regional Economic Development Inc (REDI) provides comprehensive support for companies wanting to launch in or relocate to Columbia. The Missouri Innovation Center at the University of Missouri runs a life sciences incubator and offers support to a variety of local startups, including those conceived by MU students.
http://www.columbiaredi.com
http://www.missouriinnovation.com
The City of Columbia is an innovator in energy conservation, managed growth, health and wellness. It is one of only four communities in the U.S. to receive a $25 million federal grant to create non-motorized transportation networks. The funds are being used to build sidewalks, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian and bicycle trails that connect directly with transit stations, schools, businesses, recreation areas and other community activity centers.
http://gocolumbiamo.com
http://www.pednet.org
Telehealth
Columbia offers many unique characteristics that could effectively demonstrate how ultra-high speed Internet connections could positively affect the delivery of healthcare services in under-served areas. Health care is the dominant industry in Columbia, with one in five employed residents working in a health-related profession. The city is home to nine hospitals and more than 700 practicing physicians. Columbia also has one of the highest rates of physicians per capita in the nation. With these resources and its already existing telehealth initiatives, Columbia is well-positioned to deliver high-quality healthcare services over the Internet.
1Gb Broadband Enables Broader Access and Better Service
Some of the existing telehealth initiatives in Columbia still require patients to travel a short distance to a telehealth facility that has an ultra-high speed (2Gb) connection. With a 1Gb connection to the home, these services would be able to expand to provide care to a greater number of under-served patients.
Services that already deliver care to the home over existing broadband connections could be greatly strengthened and increased by higher quality video. Lower latency, higher resolutions for better visual diagnoses, and the ability for more and better interactions through a larger video display are just a few of the benefits that would be enabled through a 1Gb connection.
Telehealth initiatives in Columbia that could effectively utilize 1Gb broadband
TigerPlace
TigerPlace is an assisted living facility designed by the School of Nursing and Americare Corp. to provide independence and quality of life for elders while offering necessary assistance, monitoring, and care. The research team is exploring the challenge of how seniors can be both independent and safe, and how technology might be applied to support that effort. Some of the strategies the team has devised include installing passive sensors in residential units at TigerPlace to determine whether the residents are engaging in normal activities or whether subtle signs of decompensation call for early intervention. Types of sensors include motion detectors, vibration sensors on the floors to detect falls, heat sensors around the stove area and refrigerator door, sensors in the bed to measure respiration, heartbeat, and restlessness, and even silhouette video sensors that can be used to build models of normal versus deviation-from-normal behaviors.
HomeLinkNews
Scientists from the School of Medicine, School of Journalism and Department of Computer Science are also making plans to use TigerPlace as a facility to test the delivery of more relevant health news to the elderly, their families and caregivers. HomeLinkNews will combine sensor data with assessments from doctors and nurses as well as patient-supplied information so that health care journalists can deliver individually-targeted news stories on healthier lifestyles and disease prevention. Once experiments at TigerPlace are complete, the team of MU scientists plans to work with a private firm to test the concept in the homes of elderly Missourians.
Providing this level of service in the home will be prohibitive without a high-speed connection to stream the constant amount of data from video and other sensors.
Official Site:
http://www.americareusa.net/independent_living/Columbia_MO/zip_65201/americare/1335
Jim Keller on the use of sensors in TigerPlace
http://syndicate.missouri.edu/media/show/1
Tour of TigerPlace apartment with sensors
http://syndicate.missouri.edu/media/show/63
http://som.missouri.edu/Research/ICTS
HomePsych by Iconic Health
HomePsych connects mental health care professionals to communities and clients. From the client portal, users are one click away from starting HomePsych's TelePsych system, which enables simple, zero-configuration, face-to-face meetings with video and text chat from anywhere.
Missouri Telehealth Network
Missouri Telehealth Network began in 1994 as one of the nation's first public-private partnerships in telehealth. The Missouri Telehealth Network exists to enhance access to care to underserved areas of Missouri, to provide educational opportunities for health care providers, to further homeland security efforts related to disaster preparedness, to be available in the event of a disaster and to provide research opportunities to clinicians wanting to study via telehealth.
http://telehealth.muhealth.org
Project MUNCH
Scientists in the College of Human Environmental Sciences, School of Medicine, and College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources have teamed up to establish the MU Nutritional Center for Health (MUNCH). Their goal: to find new ways to improve how Americans eat and teach adults and children healthy eating and exercise habits. To study eating, MUNCH is creating a teaching kitchen and food choice lab on campus. This facility will be used to instruct children and their families on how to prepare high-quality, healthy foods. The observational lab will help researchers understand how children make food choices.
As for the utility of the Google test site, the teaching kitchen can be used to give live teaching and demonstrations in high def with an overlay of menu-driven resources to enrich the experience (complementary menus, food handling/storage advice, nutritional information of the recipe, an “ask the dietitian” component, etc.). In addition, dietetics students can provide interactive practice teaching to community groups from nursing homes to schools. Right now Nutrition Extension has programming that reaches two-thirds of all Missouri schoolchildren and the majority of WIC recipients with nutritional and physical activity programming. The Google network would allow us to pilot a new vision of how that programming could eventually be delivered.
Expanded Educational Opportunities
Fiber to the home would offer a wealth of opportunities to improve traditional and peer-to-peer education. Columbia has the resources to exploit these opportunities.
Current projects at the University of Missouri with potential for expansion
iSocial
iSocial is a three dimensional virtual learning environment, developed using Sun Microsystem’s Project Wonderland toolkit for creating virtual worlds, for teaching social competence to youth who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The goal of iSocial is to provide learners with competencies that make social participation possible in both virtual and natural settings. To this end, iSocial enables social interaction and provides support for the development of social competence in a safe, completely controlled environment.
Because the proximity of families to the location of qualified trainers and the times available for physical meetings restrict access to social competence curricula, such training and instruction can be made accessible to only a small number of the youth who could benefit from it.
Fast and inexpensive broadband would allow more ASD youth in the area to access iSocial.
Star Light Reading Program
During the Star Light Reading Program, student athletes read a book to children in a classroom using videoconferencing technology. They discuss the book with the children and the children have the opportunity to ask the athletes questions.
Readings take place approximately once per week each semester. Representatives from the College of Education work with Athletic Department personnel to set up athletes to read each week, choose the book that will be read to the class, meet with the athlete to go over the book before it is read, and work with the teachers in the schools to schedule the videoconferences.
Fiber to the home would allow this and other literacy initiatives to be more frequent and more interactive with a robust peer-to-peer component.
http://education.missouri.edu/reflector/starlight/index.php
Saturday Morning Science
Hosted by the Bond Life Sciences Center, Saturday Morning Science allows top researchers to share their discoveries with the public in meaningful and interesting ways. Recent topics have included “How Game Theory Explains Stupid Behavior” and “Do We Really Need Sleep?”
Ubiquitous high-speed connections would kick this program into overdrive with video-enhanced connections into the home, the ability to illustrate concepts with high-end data visualizations and an opportunity to experiment with multi-player, serious gaming as a platform for science education around key topics such as energy conservation, health care, genetics, sustainable agriculture and the like. Again, peer-to-peer networking would greatly enhance sharing of knowledge.
http://satscience.missouri.edu/satscience_2004/schedule.html
Lifelong and Service Learning
Through its connections with the University of Missouri, Columbia acts on a strong commitment to lifelong learning and access to education for underserved residents.
The elderly population in mid-Missouri is increasingly active and interested in new learning opportunities that carry over into retirement. University of Missouri Extension’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute responds to these interests with inexpensive, weekly classes. While the institute takes some advantage of a statewide telecommunications network, most of the teaching and learning takes place at a few physical locations in and around Columbia.
Fiber to the home would significantly expand the audience for lifelong learning classes and enrich the experience through real-time, rich-media interactions.
MU also runs the second largest service-learning program in the country. Each year, more than 3,000 MU students serve over 120,000 hours with Columbia community agencies while earning academic credit. Service-Learning students are involved in projects such as mentoring and tutoring young people, visiting and assisting the elderly, working at animal shelters, designing websites for community agencies, and many other activities that are invaluable to the citizens of Columbia.
All of these initiatives would benefit from fiber to the home. The MU Office of Service-Learning could also help coordinate in-home and video training to support elderly and economically disadvantaged residents wanting to take advantage of the many services offered through the Google Fiber to Communities initiative.
http://extension.missouri.edu/learnforlife
http://servicelearning.missouri.edu
Local business in support of education
MBS Textbook Exchange, Inc.
MBS is the largest textbook wholesaler, bookstore systems provider, and distance learning distribution service in the United States. As one of mid-Missouri’s most established and esteemed private employers, MBS can offer a heightened learning environment through its interactive and enhanced eBooks and eContent tools to the secondary and higher education communities in Columbia.
The availability of Google’s ultra-high speed broadband would:
- Increase access to interactive eBooks and other digital learning materials
- Allow for course materials to be distributed and downloaded more quickly
- Heighten the learning experience for K-12 and higher education students
- Establish academic communities and networks
- Foster inventive learning methods
- Shorten the “digital divide” that currently exists
Civic Engagement
There are many ways in which Columbia aggressively pursues citizen participation. Just to highlight a few:
- It is home to the country’s premiere school of journalism, whose mission is to help inform the public sphere so that citizens can make better decisions for their communities.
- City government has its own television channel for broadcasting live city council meetings and offering a wide-range of consumer-friendly, pre-taped programs.
- The PedNet Coalition is a consortium of government, business, education and citizen members working to enhance non-motorized transportation and quality of life in Columbia.
- The University of Missouri School of Law runs the foremost center for dispute resolution in the country. A local business, Mediateme LLC, is also bringing mediation into the mainstream via video-enabled web services.
Future Media/Reynolds Journalism Institute
The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism is funded by $46 million from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. RJI’s mission is to reconnect journalists and the citizens they serve through the development and testing of advanced technologies and business models. The journalism business faces daunting challenges because of a collapsing business model, more nimble competitors and changing expectations on the part of a more socially-connected audience.
RJI is engaged in a variety of initiatives to tackle these challenges, all of which would be enhanced by fiber to the home.
Student Competitions
RJI has sponsored three annual competitions involving team collaborations between journalism, computer science and business students. The first was built on Adobe’s AIR platform, the second around the development of iPhone applications and the third using Adobe’s Flash Catalyst software as a base for building new products and services for Hearst Interactive. Next year, RJI intends to launch a national competition connecting University of Missouri student mentors with high school students interested in journalism and technology. The iPhone competition has morphed into a regular course where students currently build iPhone apps for real clients and, in future semesters, will produce Android apps as well.
http://www.rjionline.org/projects/student-competitions/index.php
RJI Media Partners
The Missouri School of Journalism operates its own professional media outlets. The Columbia Missourian is the city’s morning newspaper. KBIA-FM is among the nation’s highest-rated NPR affiliates. And KOMU-TV, the area’s NBC affiliate, is the only commercial station in the country where students, faculty and staff produce all local news programming.
RJI is also collaborating actively with forward-leaning new media companies in Columbia, including Newsy.com (a multi-perspective video news service – see below) and Pure (a digital media agency). Through these entrepreneurial businesses and students, RJI and the city of Columbia have access to bright minds and big ideas to exploit super high-speed Internet services.
The Reynolds Journalism Institute is also a principal business partner with CircLabs, a Palo Alto, CA-based company working on a platform to manage payments for delivery of hyperpersonalized news and information content from a variety of media firms. Access to a community of fiber-linked homes would allow CircLabs to experiment with the most immersive opportunities for customized news delivery and social interaction around local news content.
One of the most exciting potential applications of the fiber project is multimedia-enhanced crowdsourcing of local news stories with the ability of citizen journalists to upload content or be interviewed in real time. There are many possible models for such an effort. For example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced today a grant to fund a Midwest “Food, Fuel and Society” reporting network comprised of public media organizations in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Texas. RJI and Columbia’s NPR station, KBIA-FM, are key partners in this initiative. The ability to tap the expertise of local residents and university experts through the Google platform will allow more timely, more compelling and more relevant coverage of issues that matter to all of us: what we eat, how we generate and consume energy, and how science and technology affect food and fuel.
http://www.columbiamissourian.com
http://www.kbia.org
http://www.komu.com
http://www.newsy.com
http://www.puremidmo.com
http://www.circlabs.com
http://kbia.org
Strategic Communication and Youth Media Initiatives
The Strategic Communication Faculty in the Missouri School of Journalism operate two fee-based marketing communication agencies offering expertise in digital and legacy promotion and working with major national clients such as Best Buy, AOL, Purina, Hallmark, Long John Silver’s, A&W and many more. The agencies, Mojo-Ad.com and AdZou, have served over 200 clients in just the past five years including dozens of charities and not-for-profit organizations locally, regionally and nationally. Mojo Ad specializes in the Youth and Young Adult (YAYA) market and offers key insights into how media companies and advertisers can reach the 18-26 segment. YayaMediaNow.com aggregates research and insights from many sources. In addition, strategic communication faculty and students conduct ongoing marketing research in media preferences of the youth market providing valuable data to news companies, advertising agencies, and health professionals.
Google Fiber for Communities would enhance the research and collaboration among students and faculty who frequently work in virtual teams communicating with partners locally and around the world. Many of their team projects involve massive graphics files and video, so high speed connections are critical to positive outcomes.
http://www.Mojo-Ad.com
http://www.YayaMediaNow.com
The fiber project would further enhance social capital and strengthen the community by reinforcing “EverythingMidMo.com.” EverythingMidMo is an online searchable network of businesses, health and medical resources, churches, civic organizations, charities and government entities. It is a partnership that includes The Columbia Daily Tribune (a privately owned daily newspaper), The Columbia Missourian, (the Missouri School of Journalism daily newspaper), KOMU, the University-owned NBC affiliate, and the Strategic Communication faculty and students at the School of Journalism. The goal of EverythingMidMo is to create a virtual town square, helping citizens find the goods, support and help they need. Its further goal is to bring together disparate elements of the population thus fostering a stronger and healthier community.
Engaging with City Government
The City of Columbia already broadcasts city council meetings live and provides many hours of pre-recorded programming via The City Channel. The channel’s website also offers an extensive archive of video content. The Google fiber initiative would, of course, allow the city to deliver these services in HD. But more importantly, it would make possible two-way public meetings, candidate forums and the like. Apps running on the network could aggregate ideas in real time so that representative citizen input from home could be a significant part of those events. Data feeds could show poll results or intensity ratings for comments made by politicians, government officials and citizens.
One big project on which the city is working to engage residents is the PedNet initiative. In 2005, Congress provided $25 million grants to four cities, including Columbia, to create non-motorized transportation networks as part of a federal pilot program to reduce energy consumption and assist with managed growth and quality of life. The funds are being used in Columbia to build sidewalks, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian and bicycle trails that connect directly with transit stations, schools, businesses, recreation areas and other community activity centers. With fiber to the home, PedNet could offer a variety of data-intensive services, including real time traffic monitoring.
http://www.gocolumbiamo.com/TCC
http://www.pednet.org
Dispute Resolution
As the current state of Washington, DC gridlock illustrates dramatically, it’s hard to engage in serious political discourse when political disputes are so polarized. One response, both in public and private spaces, is the formal practice of dispute resolution. The University of Missouri School of Law operates the top-rated dispute resolution center in the country.
To see how the Google Fiber for Communities initiative would improve the conflict resolution process one needs go no further than a Columbia-based business called MediateMe LLC. The firm identifies mediators based on their professionalism, creativity and fairness then allows people or businesses in conflict to access those mediators to resolve disputes. The conflict resolution sessions take place via webcam and chatroom. While this kind of Internet-enabled mediation can work with existing bandwidth, it would be significantly enhanced with HD video conferencing and customized apps.
http://law.missouri.edu/csdr
http://www.mediateme.com
Stronger Business/Consumer Relationships
Many Columbia businesses are already making key development and distribution decisions based on the available bandwidth of their customers. These companies are either making compromises on the quality of media they are distributing and/or are stuck with higher development and distribution costs as a result of their inability to move certain services to the cloud.
Several area companies are uniquely positioned to provide excellent test beds for measuring how ultra-high speed broadband connections could affect their product development, customer experiences, and business models.
Miller's Professional Imaging
Miller's Professional Imaging is the largest digital imaging lab in the United States for professional photographers. Between their professional customers and their consumer brand, Mpix, they receive massive amounts of high-resolution images per day. They are equipped with multiple fiber lines to accept incoming image uploads from their customers, but they still have to make many decisions based on the bandwidth limitations of those customers. Many services that would be web-based and exist in the cloud are currently distributed as desktop applications so that customers can "configure first, upload later." Although Miller's has customers throughout North America, they have a significant number of local customers that would be able to test such high-speed connections. If bandwidth were not an issue, then they would have the ability to demonstrate the following:
- Cost-savings on moving traditionally desktop-based apps to the cloud.
- New user interaction models for traditionally high-bandwidth media.
- More immersive consumer-facing imaging applications which would have implications for services in the broader digital imaging industry such as Picasa, Picnik, Shutterfly, Smugmug, and more.
http://millerslab.com
http://mpix.com
Newsy
Newsy.com is a multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and distributes to viewers around the world the world's news coverage. Headed by industry veteran Jim Spencer (formerly VP for Answers and Content at Ask.com, GM of News and Information Programming at AOL, and director of strategic partnerships at NBC for MSNBC.com), Newsy is delivering high-quality original content to a broad audience of news consumers. The Columbia startup currently generates each piece of video content into nine different formats to accommodate different platforms and connection speeds. Having customers with a 1Gb broadband connection would have a dramatic impact on not only the quality of product Newsy could produce, but also the different opportunities for interaction with their viewers.
Foliotek
Foliotek is one of the leading electronic portfolio systems for colleges and universities across the world. It specializes in the ability to collect digital assets from students in a manner that corresponds to the goals of the various individual academic programs. Those assets are then viewed assessed by faculty and other evaluators to show progress toward school, state, and national standards. The ability use of video, audio, and images to demonstrate competence against certain standards is becoming increasingly important not only for educators and students, but also for the companies and organizations these students will eventually work for.
In addition to being a repository of digital assets, Foliotek also provides a three-way bridge between student, educational faculty and staff, and early employers of the student. This bridge can have a profound impact on ongoing professional development and the continued evaluation of the success of the student and ultimately the educational institution.
The availability of ultra-high speed broadband would do the following:
- Increase the quality and diversity of artifacts to be stored in student repositories.
- Increase access to these artifacts by other key users.
- Open up opportunities for video-based professional development between students, educational organizations, and prospective employers.
Distributed Processing
The ability to do distributed processing locally over a 1G network would provide significant cost advantages to companies such as telematter.com, a three-person software development firm located in Columbia. Telematter has identified three different applications of use to small businesses:
- Purchasing distributed software using spare computer cycles to help subsidize the cost of establishing an ultra-high speed network into the home. This model would greatly enhance the ability to bridge the “digital divide” and serve at-risk families in the community.
- Not being located near a big datacenter, companies such as Telematter have to resort to paying high server costs in remote locations outside of their control. Using a local connection would enable them to host their own hardware, significantly reducing their costs.
- Telematter does a lot of text parsing and xml processing on the order of millions of small xml/txt files. To scale this out they have to use distributed file systems and distributed programming techniques that require tens to hundreds of thousands of computers. Hosting these remotely is possible but extremely expensive -- hosting on commodity hardware locally would take the cost factor down significantly and allow many local development startups to take advantage of producing applications by small teams that can scale quickly and inexpensively.
Improved Customer Relationship Management
Local businesses often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage with large retailers and service companies that have a significant presence on the Internet. Google’s Fiber for Communities could allow local firms to:
- Provide enhanced customer service through home video links
- Distribute location-aware and interactive advertising directly to customers
- Reduce phone costs by handling customer communications through VOIP and video conferencing
- Allow peer-to-peer, multimedia product and service evaluations that would provide companies better, more actionable feedback.
Conclusion
Columbia, Missouri has a long history of improving the lives of its citizens through online services. The city has access to forward-thinking experts and established programs in higher education, government and business that are directly relevant to Google’s goals. Its size and diversity make Columbia an ideal Fiber for Communities partner.
Authors:
Mike McKean – Associate Professor, Missouri School of Journalism; Futures Lab Director, Reynolds Journalism Institute, http://www.journalism.missouri.edu/faculty/mike-mckean.html
Jamie Stephens – Owner, Blueroot Studios, http://www.blueroot.com
Aaron Moss – Programmer/Analyst, School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri, http://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondmoss
Marc Strid – Director of Educational Technologies, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of Missouri, http://cafnr.missouri.edu/about/strid-m.php