IoT and the senior citizen

I have not written for a while,  spent a few days in vacation in Rhodes in a family trip - album is available on facebook, and then I was busy preparing a presentation for the board of directors of the college which sponsors the "Institute of Technological Empowerment" which I am now working on establishment.  The presentation is in Hebrew, have not made a lot of presentations in Hebrew recently, and intend to create an English version to share it with larger audience.  When I'll do, I'll post it on slideshare.

I came across a blog post by Stephenson Strategies entitled: "Seniors and the Internet of Things: Empowerment and Security".   As a matter of fact senior citizen are one of the target populations of the institute I am trying to establish, and we are working with experts in gerontology.  The Internet of Things provides opportunities to empower aging population to maintain independent life in various means, by using smart systems that receives events from sensors and determine actions, which are mostly alerts to the person, family, healthcare taker and more.   The cited post relates to health issues, but this can extend to other issues that can improve quality of life and increase the person's security.  I'll write more about concrete projects we are planning later. 

Workshop on event-based media integration and processing - the first day

This is the logo of the ACM multimedia 2013 conference that is taking place these days in Barcelona.

Co-located with this conference (we share the coffee in the coffee break) is the event-based media workshop which I am attending.  My talk is planned for today, so yesterday I was just a listener in the first day.   Here are some impressions:

The most interesting talk was the one by Ramesh Jain,  who is working on events in multimedia for a while.

Ramesh talked about cybernetics in society, and about smart systems defined as smart actions in respond to smartly detected situations.   He also talked about social networks and the Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Ramesh said that the social media concentrates on the third and fours layer - love/belonging and esteem,and posed as a challenge to get more focused on the basic needs - the two lower layers.  

Ramesh also talked about the 4V of big data,  Saying that the volume is the least important one -- as there are methods to partition the space, but the other three actually issue -- event processing in multimedia under uncertainty.  Ramesh mentioned  the Israeli company Waze (recently acquired by Google) as example of a smart social system.  

Some of the other talks concentrated about analysis of pictures that are put on social networks and try to identify the event they are describing, first see if they describe an event, and then identify the event - talking about sport events, public events, family events and more.   It is funny, since some of the event definitions view event as instantaneous occurrence - and then a sport event (say football game) is not an event since it takes (net) 90 minutes.  I guess that there are different views of events -- I'll mention it in my talk today.