Actian Corporation, creators of the innovative performance analytic database Vectorwise, today announced that Meme Media Laboratory of Hokkaido University has selected Vectorwise to power their Social Cyber Physical System (CPS) Platform for Efficient Social Services. The Social CPS Platform will allow the Japanese city of Sapporo to optimize social services such as snow plowing and removal, and develop improved plans for disaster management and response.

One of Japan’s most prestigious universities founded in 1876, Hokkaido University is the nation’s first institute of higher education to award bachelor’s degrees. Now in the process of transforming the university into a global base for education and research, the faculty is using the Social CPS Platform as part of its transformation. This platform will enable fast analysis of snow fall, weather mesh data, road network data, public transport data, and probe car data to optimize social services such as the timing and routes of snow plowing and removal.

“The Social CPS Platform will allow us to monitor, share, and analyze our social services so we can make better decisions to cope with different disaster scenarios,” said Professor Yuzuru Tanaka, project leader and director of Meme Media Laboratory at Hokkaido University Group. “This is truly a collaborative project that analyzes many external data sources and Vectorwise will enable our researchers and third parties to mine this data quickly in order to optimize social services and make better disaster preparedness plans. In addition, researchers will also be able to analyze citizens’ reactions and find ways to modify behaviors by changing routes and times.”

Data collected for the Social CPS Platform includes:

• Real-time snow plowing and removal records, claim texts from residents, and statistical subway data provided by the city of Sapporo;
• Probe Car data used to analyze traffic movement, measure surface freezing, drifting snow and the number of effective lanes provided by Honda and Fujitsu;
• Weather and snowfall mesh data provided by the Japan Weather Association; and
• Meteorological multi-sensor data in 52 locations provided by the Sapporo Information Network.

“We estimate the Social CPS Platform will collect approximately 250GB of data per month, measuring for six months a year, for six years,” said Dr. Hajime Imura, specially appointed assistant professor at Hokkaido University. “The CPS Platform was originally tested on other SQL servers; however we found it too slow and unable to handle the large amount of data being collected. After evaluating a number of high performance databases we selected Vectorwise because it is significantly faster, more affordable, and can handle our growing Big Data needs.”

“The CPS Platform at Hokkaido University is a valuable research platform and a great example of how data now touches every aspect of our lives,” said Fred Gallagher, general manager of Vectorwise for Actian. “Hokkaido University joins a growing number of world class research institutions choosing Vectorwise to power research analytics, such as Oxford University, who use Vectorwise to research chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and strokes. By breaking down barriers for cost and performance, we can enable researchers to not only analyze Big Data faster, but also share their important findings with the masses interactively.”

Hokkaido University plans to share data from the first snow season in 2012.

About Actian: Take Action on Big Data

Actian Corporation enables organizations to transform big data into business value with data management solutions to transact, analyze, and take automated action across their business operations. Actian helps 14,000 customers worldwide take action on their big data with Action Apps, Vectorwise, the analytical database, and Ingres, an independent mission-critical OLTP database. Actian is headquartered in California with offices in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Stay connected with Actian Corporation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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