Internet of Things - what's holding us back?

InformationWeek published an article this week by Chris Murphy entitled: "Internet Of Things: What's Holding Us Back".   In this article Murphy describes several reasons that hold us back from exploiting the potential of the IoT.  The reasons he mentions are:

1. The data is not good enough:  the claim is that the conception that all requested data is readily available is not consistent with reality, where data suffers from quality,  frequency and spatial coverage of the sensors, and data integration issues.
2. Networks aren't ubiquitous:   The product owners don't have control over the availability of networks
3. Integration is tougher than analysis:  The main problem is not to analyze the data, but to integrate all data needed for analysis
4. More sensor innovation needed: The stated areas of required innovation are - combine video sources which today are under-utilized; more-refined and more-affordable environmental sensors; software-defined sensor,a combination of multiple sensors plus computing power that sits out on a network and "calculates rather than measures."
5. Status quo security doesn't cut it.  Security systems for IoT should be radically different than those developed for traditional IP.

I agree that all of these contribute in one way or another to the difficulties around exploiting the potential of IoT.    Dealing with inexact or uncertain data is a major issue, a link to our tutorial on the topic can be obtained from this blog post.  What Murphy refers as "software defined sensor", is in fact, the ability to use multiple sensors and get sense out of it in real-time,  this is exactly what the event processing discipline produces, furthermore, our work on event modeling contributes to make it simpler. 

I am planned to deliver a tutorial on "Internet of Everything" in DEBS 2014 in Mumbai, where I'll discuss all these issues.  

More - later. 

A webinar on the Event Model with Barbara von Halle

On Tuesday,  May 6,  12:00pm  USA EDT,  Barbara von Halle is going to present a webinar on the "Event Model" that we have developed together (along with Fabian Fournier, Sarit Arcushin and Larry Goldberg).  You can register to the webinar using this link.   I was told that registration to the webinar so far has exceeded the expectation, and Barb is a great speaker.  I look forward to get any feedback on this webinar. 

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. 

DEBS 2014 tentative program was published

DEBS 2014 will take place in Mumbai, India at the last week of May.   

The tentative program of the conference was published recently on the conference's website. 

My tutorial on the "Internet of Everything" will be delivered on Monday, May 26th, between 10am - 1pm.

Hope to meet old and new friends there (I'll probably arrive couple of days earlier to tour around).    

Digital life in 2025

I came across a report entitled "Digital life in 2025", that was produced in Elon University. 

Some of the predictions are:

1. Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.
2.  The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters more planetary relationships and less ignorance.
3. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior. 
4. Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.
5. Political awareness and action will be facilitated and more peaceful change and public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge. 
6.  The spread of the ‘Ubernet’ will diminish the meaning of borders, and new ‘nations’ of those with shared interests may emerge and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control. 
7.  The Internet will become “the Internets” as access, systems, and principles are renegotiated
8. An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on real estate and teachers.
9.  Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.
10.   Abuses and abusers will ‘evolve and scale.’ Human nature isn’t changing; there’s laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks, crime, and those who practice them have new capacity to make life miserable for others.
11.  Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power -- and at times succeed – as they invoke security and cultural norms. 
12.  People will continue – sometimes grudgingly -- to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.
13.  Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.
14.  Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today’s communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future. 
15.  Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

I like the last one.  I think that the rest are also thought provoking.   Details about each of these predictions can be found in the full report - enjoy!

On latent data

I came across a post by EwanD from Microsoft entitled: “Latent Data” – the secret sauce of the Internet of Things. Since I am interested in both secret sauces and IoT, I was curious to understand what is this sauce. 

It seems that the term latent data refers to data that is typically not available, and also data that does not have any meaning on its own, and need to be aggregated, or joined with other data to be useful.  

Indeed IoT brings to the picture a lot of data that has not been available previously, and in my terminology, much of this data is about event that occur.   Sometimes the raw events are of interest, sometimes the interest is on derived events that are aggregation, transformation, or function that involve multiple events, and possibly also historical data and state information.   Note that when latent data becomes available it is not latent anymore,  and also that latent is a relative term, some piece of data can be available to somebody, and concealed from somebody else.     From this post one can learn what Microsoft sees its role in the IoT era, what I understood is that the role is twofold: both provider of OS for embedded systems, and as a cloud provider.   I am now trying to understand roles of different players in the IoT world, looking for sponsors for my recent activity.  

Big data - are we making a big mistake

I came across an interesting article by Tim Harford in FT Magazine.   This article in in line of several posts I have made on this Blog, which express some skeptics on the ability of merely looking at statistical correlation in the past to create "big insights". Harford brings some examples for that and concludes that there are some naive believes around the big data hypes.   I'll keep writing more insights about this topic.