Next time you detour around a backhoe digging up a broken water line, ask yourself whether the emergency could have been avoided. James Garrett and Wayne Balta are working on a way to answer, yes. Since they met at Carnegie Mellon in 1979 as second-year civil engineering students, Garrett and Balta have enjoyed pushing each other to be the best they can be. Apparently, the friendly pushing worked, because today Garrett (E'82, '86) heads the university's department of civil and environmental engineering and Balta (E'82) is vice president of corporate environmental affairs and product safety at IBM.
Through the years, as the pair's careers took form, their friendship endured. In 2009, while on a two-family ski weekend, the friends batted around ideas about how the university's Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR), in which Garrett was deeply involved, might fit with IBM initiatives, including Smarter Planet-which aims to make the world's systems sustainable with digital technology. It seemed to them that IBM could benefit from CenSCIR's focus on improving the maintenance and management of public structures like roads, bridges, tunnels, and pipelines by using sensors and advanced analytics to monitor their conditions.
When Balta went back to work at IBM, there were discussions about the compatible enterprises, and it has led to collaboration. Scheduled for completion this year is the 1,000-square-foot IBM Smarter Infrastructure Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon, which will reach out to decision makers, both public and private, to assist them in using digital technology to stretch their budgets and extend the life of their infrastructures.
-Tom Imerito
