Tag: IoT-Sensors

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Events Internet of Things

IoT via Cloud Meetup in Zurich

The other day I traveled 2 hours and 45 minutes from Montreux to Zurich and 2 hours and 50 minutes home following a 2-hour meetup group meeting at the ETHZ. It was a classic case of my desire to meet and speak with interesting people being sufficiently strong to outweigh my feeling that I have too much to do in too little time. See Time Under Pressure. Fortunately, I could work while on the train and, in keeping with my thinking about Air Quality, I (probably) didn't contribute to the total Swiss CO2 emissions for the day. And what is really amazing is that the meetup was worth my investment. I previously mentioned that I was looking forward to catching up with Dominique Guinard, co-founder and CTO of EVRYTHNG, a young Zurich start up, and co-founder of Web-of-Things portal.

Dom did not disappoint me or the 20 people who joined the meetup. In addition to great content, he is an excellent presenter. He started out at a very high level and yet was quickly able to get into the details of implementations. He included a few demonstrations during the talk and a couple of interesting anecdotes. We learned that his sister doesn't really see the point to him sharing (via Facebook) the temperature readings from his sunspot gadget. And how he was inspired when WalMart IT management came to MIT for a visit and mentioned that they were considering a $200,000 project to connect security cameras to tags in objects in order to reduce theft. In 2 days, Dom (and others, I presume) had a prototype showing that the Web of Things could address the issue with open interfaces. My favorite story during the talk brought up the problems that can arise when you don't have sufficient security. Dom was giving a demonstration of Web of Things once when a hacker in the audience saw the IP address. He was able to go into Dom's server and within minutes (during Dom's talk) the power on his laptop shut off!

In addition to Dom's stage-setting talk, we had the pleasure of having Matthias Kovatsch, researcher in the Institute for Pervasive Computing at ETHZ, and the architect of Copper, a generic browser for the IoT based on Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Matthias presented the status of the projects on which he is working and the results of an ETSI/IETF plugfest to which he went in Paris. The consolidated slides of the IETF-83 CoRE meeting include the Plugtests wrap-up slides (slightly edited). It's really exciting to see how this project is directly contributing to part of the standards proving process!

In addition to these talks, Benjamin Wiederkehr, co-founder of Interactive Things, an experience design and architecture services firm based in Zurich, gave us great insights into the process and the tools they used to achieve the new interactive visualization of cell phone use in Geneva. Learn all about this project by visiting Ville Vivante web site, in collaboration with the City of Geneva.

Valuable evening, folks! Thank you for making another trip to Zurich worth the effort!

Categories
Internet of Things Research & Development

The Big Data Bandwagon

Big Data and I go way back. How can I get on the Big Data Bandwagon?

It's not a domain into which I regularly stray but nuclear physics was the focus of both my parents' careers so their use of computers comes to mind whenever the topic of Big Data comes up. I'm stepping out of my comfort zone but I am going to hypothesize that the study of physics and the Internet of Things share certain attributes and that both are sexy because they are part of Big Data. You're looking at Big Data in the illustration here.

Both physics and IoT begin with the assumption that there's more to the world than what the naked eye can see or can be detected by any of our other human senses. You can't see atoms, or electrons or quarks or any of those smaller particles. All you can use to know they are there are the measurements of their impacts on other particles using sensors.

And sensors are also at the heart of the Internet of Things. In addition to the human-detectable phenomena, sensors embedded where we can't see them detect attributes we can't see, don't have a smell, don't make a sound or otherwise are too small, too large, too fast or too far away for us to use our "native" human sensors to detect. The sensors monitoring the properties of materials in physics (like the sensors in our environment monitoring the air quality, the temperature, the number of cars passing over a pressure sensor on the roadbed) communicate their readings with time stamps and these contribute to other readings as a set of data forms.

You get the rest: the raw data then become the building material upon which analyses can be performed. It's difficult for the common man to discern patterns from the illustration above or millions of sensor readings from a nuclear power plant. Machine learning and algorithms extract the patterns from the data for us and we use these patterns to gain insights and make decisions.

So, my point is that the concept of using computers to analyze large data sets to answer all kinds of questions–the core of Big Data–has been around the research community for decades and applies to many, if not all, fields. IBM has long been leading the charge on this. Here's an interesting project led by Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist of IBM's Entity Analytics Group, that just celebrated its one year anniversary. A January 2012 HorizonWatching Trend Report presentation on Big Data points to lots of resources.

What's new with Big Data in 2012 is the relative ease with which these very large data sets can be reliably collected, communicated, stored and processed, and, in some cases, visualized.

A feature article about Big Data's relevance in our lives in the New York Times frames the subject well and then explains why Big Data is trending: everyone wants to see the past and the present, and to understand the world more clearly. With our improved "visibility" we might be able to make better decisions. The "text book" example is the Oakland Athletics baseball team comeback on which the book and movie, Moneyball, are based.

With the help of coverage in books, motion picture, major news media and tech bloggers, Big Data is one of the big memes of 2012. Trends like the widespread adoption of Big Data usually lead to large financial gains.

Let's see if I can use this data to make better decisions! Maybe I should re-brand everything I do so that the relationships of my activities to Big Data are more clear to others. Big Spimes? What do you think?

Categories
Events Internet of Things

Makers at IoT ZH

The second meeting of the Internet of Things Zurich meetup group was an enormous success! In the audience, we had an excellent mix of artists, programmers, Do-it-Yourself-ers, students and academics, people from businesses interested in learning about IoT.

Now what?

Growth. To say that this group is large would be an exaggeration because Switzerland is a small country and we only began in earnest a few weeks ago. But by Swiss standards, this group of passionate people, the "makers" of the local IoT industry, is respectable (61 as of this morning). And there were over 50 people gathered in the ETHZ venue to learn from entrepreneurs. 

Experience. Few have it and everyone wants it. The goal of this session was to hear from those with experience in the IoT about lessons learned to date.

We began with great content from Cuno Pfister, Oberon microsystems (slides), Thomas Amberg, Yaler.net (slides) and Simon Mayer, not technically an entrepreneur (he's a PhD candidate at the ETHZ Distributed Systems Group) but a real good guy who shared with us what's happening on the Web of Things side (slides).

During his introduction, Cuno framed the world (loosely speaking) as those who are "corporates" and have a set of characteristics that make them risk averse, although they have (or perhaps as a result of their) resources, and the "tinkerers" those he called "makers." Makers are characterized by:

  • no legacy business models
  • focus on personal growth
  • generating new ideas
  • cost-sensitive (low financial resources) and work on their projects in their spare time
  • attracted to and frequently adopt open systems

After the talks, I took a poll of the people in the room to ascertain the composition of this community. Approximately 30% of us are already "makers" in some fashion. We didn't define this or require people to demonstrate that they have this status through an exam! Presumably even those who are already experimenting want to improve. Of the remainder, many–over half of the room–aspire to become "makers."

With this in mind, there's an excellent opportunity to organize more community meetings and to explore other programs that will permit people to get proficient with IoT tools quickly and with limited resources. I'll be talking to our local experts and more makers in coming weeks to see what we can do about fulfilling this desire and addressing the needs.

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

Do you believe (in IoT)?

Larry Smarr’s early December article in the New York Times, An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe, poetically explains how over the next ten years we and everything around us will be connected. The potential societal, economic and health benefits of the Internet of Things come bursting out of Smarr’s paragraphs like from a pastor on the pulpit. While I’m firmly persuaded that such benefits are possible, I also anticipate that there might be risks.

Another example of the NYT’s campaign to raise public awareness of the IoT was published on December 17. The Internet Get Physical rose to be most popular article of the day (or week, I’m not sure). As the author, Steve Lohr, points out, the Internet of Things is relevant to the general population because it can have an impact on both the health of our planet and business health.

Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.

Sensors on fruit and vegetable cartons can track location and sniff the produce, warning in advance of spoilage, so shipments can be rerouted or rescheduled. Computers pull GPS data from railway locomotives, taking into account the weight and length of trains, the terrain and turns, to reduce unnecessary braking and curb fuel consumption by up to 10 percent.

Thomas Friedman’s thought piece early this week about technology (and network-connected things) in cities (smart cities) is asking readers (especially those in the GOP) to consider how technology innovation produces employment and fuels economic recovery.

When taken individually, each of these is beautifully formulated. Together they read like a hymn book of future (particularly IoT) technology.

I point out the trend because I wonder what is behind it, and what readers who are not following this field closely, but who closely take in every NYT feature and editorial, think of these repeated praises. Is there an element of faith in the goodness of technology resembling the faith some place in God? Have there in the past been similar, concentrated efforts to promote one technology sector as the savior of the planet? Are readers reassured by the thought that technology is going to come to their rescue? Will the general public be disillusioned if (when) such benefits take longer than predicted to materialize?