SmartStuff: presentation to Ibm on internet of things
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This is a presentation I did to the IBM Smarter Cities Technical Community on overall Internet of Things strategy, based on my new SmartStuff e-book on the same subject. It includes a scenario for IoT-enabled life in the near future, examples of current IoT devices, and issues that must be addressed for the IoT to achieve its full potential
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SmartStuff: presentation to Ibm on internet of things
- 1. SmartStuff: The Internet of Things Presentation to the IBM Smarter Cities Technical Community W. David Stephenson Stephenson Strategies July 16, 2012
- 2. Someday…. cars will drive themselves.
- 3. Someday…. we’ll be healthier because we’ll have more contact with our doctors than just a hurried office visit.
- 4. Someday…. our appliances and an amazing variety of electricity sources will work together to meet our energy needs while reducing environmental impacts.
- 5. That some day is dawning, and it’s brought to you by the “Internet of Things” (IoT).
- 6. Will replace “stupid” devices with “smart” ones
- 7. What is the IoT? Now more things than people connected to the Internet. 1 trillion by 2015!
- 8. What is the IoT? A major priority in EU & China, but draws blank stares in US. Time that everyone understand & becomes involved.
- 9. A vision of 2017
- 10. A vision of 2017
- 11. A vision of 2017
- 12. A vision of 2017
- 13. What is the IoT? • SAP: • integratedwherethe information network, and where “A world into physical objects are seamlessly the physical objects can become active participants in business processes. Services are available to interact with these ‘smart objects’ over the Internet, query their state and any information associated with them, taking into account security and privacy issues.”
- 14. What is the IoT? • IBM: Instrumented, Interconnected, Intelligent
- 15. What is the IoT? • Cisco: “simply the point in time when more ‘things or objects’ were connected to the Internet than people”
- 16. What’s it made of? Everything will have its own unique address
- 17. What’s it made of? “Smart” devices
- 18. What’s it made of? Will function “Machine to Machine” (M2M)
- 19. What’s it made of? Will require cloud storage, advanced Business Intelligence analytics
- 20. Transformation!
- 21. Vital for current problems
- 22. Vital for current problems meet energy needs while reducing global warming
- 23. Vital for current problems transportation
- 24. Vital for current problems aging population.
- 25. Examples Arduino
- 31. Examples • 439 cities reduced travel delays by more than 700,000 hours yr. & saved $15 million each. • 4 cities: reduced traffic during peaks by up to 18%, CO2 emissions by up to 14% and public transit use increased up to 7%.
- 38. Obstacles Lack of IP Addresses
- 39. Obstacles Lack of Open Standards
- 40. Obstacles Sheer volume of data
- 41. Obstacles Need for low-power micro sensors
- 44. Obstacles Lack of government involvement
- 45. In conclusion…
- 46. For more information: W. David Stephenson D.Stephenson@stephensonstrategies.com 508 740-8918 … and, SmartStuff: an introduction to the Internet of Things http://amzn.to/My3kKm
Editor's Notes
- Despite the fact that you are all working in the trenches of the Internet of Things and intimately familiar with all of its details, I’m going to begin my talk with a strategic overview of the Internet of Things. That’s because by concentrating on a vision for the Internet of Things, rather than just the enabling technologies, I hope to inspire you to become evangelists for the IoT as a whole, not just for Smarter Cities. I believe that doing this will only draw more attention to the Smarter Planet as arguably the most mature and effective current Internet of Things implementation, strengthening your competitive position and creating synergies with other IoT initiatives that will make what you are doing even more effective. I won’t pander to you by reciting statistics ad nauseum about the Smarter Planet, but rest assured, I think it is light years beyond what anyone else is doing to make the Internet of Things a reality. I will conclude my talk with a review of some of the very real issues that must be attacked now if the IoT is to achieve its full potential. Without knowing the inner workings of the Smarter Planet, I assume either you have solved these problems for your own uses and can share your learning with others, or your own success may be limited if these issues aren’t solved.
- Someday … our cars will drive themselves.
- Someday … we’ll be healthier because we’ll have more contact with our doctors than just a hurried office visit.
- Our appliances and an amazing variety of electricity sources will work together to meet our energy needs while reducing environmental impacts.
- That day is dawning, and it is brought to you by the Internet of Things!
- The Internet of Things will replace “stupid” devices with “smart” ones, changing the energy grid, medicine transportation and every other field in the process.
- So what is the Internet of Things, and how will it work? Somewhere around 2008 we reached a milestore that went largely unobserved. For the first time there were more “things” --- smartphones, industrial sensors, “smart” electric meters, and so on – connected by the Internet than there were people using it. For the first time, the Internet of Things was a reality! By 2015 your company predicts that those “things” will total a trillion in number. A trillion! And, they will be linked, breaking down isolation between networks and forming a network of networks.
- While development of the Internet of Things is a major economic priority in the EU and China, mentioning the term results in blank stares in the U.S. It’s time that everyone understands this revolution that, by and large, has begun outside of the public eye, because it will have far-reading effects on everything we do and how we live our lives.
- Let me share with you a vision of the near future. You work in the newly-resurgent auto industry, and you’ve got a big day ahead of you! You set your alarm 15 minutes early because of an important meeting. Without you knowing it, the boss pushed the meeting back 45 minutes, and there was an accident on your commuting route to the train that’s resulting in a 15-minute detour. Your car is low on gas, and you’re going to have to fill up, which should take about 5 minutes. To compound things, your train is running 20 minutes late. All of this information is funneled directly to your alarm clock. An algorithm weighs the data and decides to give you an additional 5 minutes to sleep. Then the alarm clock tells the coffee maker to start 5 minutes later, and tells your car to start 10 minutes before you’ll leave to melt the ice that built up after the overnight storm.
- While you’re dressing in the bathroom you notice the bottle cap on your cholesterol medication is glowing. You take the cap off, take the pill, and a signal automatically goes via the web to your doctor’s office, saying that you’ve taken the pill. Then you head downstairs to your basement gym for a quick workout on the treadmill. At the end of your workout, the chip on your sneaker automatically sends your results to your personal website, where – you note with pride – the colorful graphic shows that you’ve increased your number of minutes this week while your blood pressure has continued to fall. Now to the kitchen, where the automatic controls had just cycled the refrigerator off briefly in response to a signal from your utility because the grid was experiencing heavy demand in the wake of last night’s storm. You glance over at your home energy monitor, which notes that the ice has already slid off your rooftop solar panels because of today’s bright sun, and they and your fully-charged vehicle-to-grid electric car are both feeding excess power to the central, “smart,” grid. Now to dash to the railroad station. Your car includes car-to-car sensing that’s now commonplace and alerts you instantly if you’re getting too close to the car in front of you. While you’re stopped at the intersection, you notice that the big banner sign on the street lamp has suddenly shifted from promoting the symphony concert to displaying details on the detour you will have to take. You reach the station and check your smartphone to see if the train will still be 20 minutes late. You’re glad that the smartphone app displays real-time information about the train’s actual location rather than those overly-optimistic scheduled arrival times that used to flash on the station displays.
- Arriving at work, you head to the meeting. Everyone’s smiling: the big plasma display on the wall flashes real-time information from your entire supply chain: it looks as if the switchover to your newest models is going seamlessly. You reflect on the not-too-distant past when each company in the supply chain acted pretty much in isolation from the others, and remember how frequently the assembly line used to slow just because one relatively unimportant part was delayed, or you had excess inventory because demand was cut but it took time for that information to filter through the supply chain. Now machine-to-machine data communication, based on wireless transmission of sensor data throughout the process, automates a lot of previously manual steps, keeps the assembly line humming, and lets every department share information seamlessly because it’s all fed into your company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program in real time. Replenishment is automated because you’ve given your supply chain partners the same information you have. You’re also proud that yours is the first car company to market a new kind of lease, where the cost of the lease is determined dynamically, based on the driver’s actual behavior in terms of number of miles driven, number of sudden stops, and other variables, as recorded by on-board sensors and relayed wirelessly to the local dealer. A good, cautious driver is more likely to avoid accidents and “baby” the car, keeping the resale value higher, so you’re able to reward good behavior -- and do it profitably. It’s also a lot simpler when you’re in the design phase for new models, because every parts supplier is linked in on a real-time basis, rather than designers coming up with an elegant new design only to have a supplier’s engineers report later that the new part you’re counting on can’t be ready in time. The process is seamless and cyclical.
- Now it’s time for lunch in the cafeteria. You wonder for a moment whether to have that roast beef sandwich, since there’s just been another mad cow outbreak, but then you remember that all cattle in the country are now tagged and their health is monitored in real time, maximizing the farmer’s yield, but also making sure any illness is detected in time to keep it out of the food chain. Between bites you check on your smartphone to make sure all the systems in your house are working well. Then it’s back to your office, where you’re able to call up sales figures instantly and visualize them in easy-to-read graphic displays. Again, it’s all in real time. When you get home you plop down in front of the TV, but no longer have to search for a collection of three remotes: your new TV is controlled by a combination of voice commands and gestures, making it simple to navigate through all the choices. Now it’s time for bed, and while you’re sleeping, the sensor clipped to your pajamas is analyzing your sleep patterns, ready to let you know the next morning about why you’ve been having a hard time sleeping recently. Welcome to the Internet of Things!
- So what is the Internet of Things? Let me give you three definitions, in reverse order of complexity. According to SAP, it’s: “A world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into the information network, and where the physical objects can become active participants in business processes. Services are available to interact with these ‘smart objects’ over the Internet, query their state and any information associated with them, taking into account security and privacy issues.”
- But I like to apply one to the Internet of Things as a whole that your marketing people have created to describe the Smarter Planet program: Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent. The elaboration of the 3 I’s gives a good overview of the components: “ The bottom level is called ‘Instrumented,’ which means connected to the real world, where there are both physical and virtual sensors and sensing systems. The second layer is called ‘Interconnected,’ which means two different things: interconnected through networks, acknowledging the pervasiveness of wireless and wired networks that enable access to the Instrumented layer; and semantically interconnected, the integration of information from very diverse systems, such as transportation and water, into a common information model. The third level is ‘Intelligent.’ which means that computational power and efficient algorithms can now be applied to real-world information to perform complex analysis or to drive complex models in near real time, which was unthinkable only a few years ago.”
- And, most basically, from Cisco: “simply the point in time when more ‘things or objects’ were connected to the Internet than people”
- Let’s get specific. First of all, with the IoT, everything, from assembly line gauges to smartphones to refrigerators, wil have their own unique address – more often than not an Internet Protocol one – which will in turn allow information sharing between everything else with a unique address.
- Also, physical objects such as gauges will no longer be “dumb.” They will have their own minute computer chips built in, combined with wireless communications capabilities. Many will include sensors that will gauge a wide range of real-time conditions, from fluid flow to temperature. Others will have RFID tags attached to them, joining billions of the tags already in use.
- Physical objects will be able to function, in many cases, with no human intervention, interacting and communicating among themselves while reacting autonomously to the real/physical world events and influencing it by running processes that trigger actions and create services with or without direct human intervention.
- The Internet of Things will also require two important Web tools whose use is currently expanding at a rapid pace: cloud storage to handle the massive quantities of data that will be generated by sensors and other sources and advanced Business Intelligence (BI) analytics, which will be necessary to find patterns in that data and translate it into actionable information for decision making. Increasingly, the quantity of data from sensors and other sources will require that much of the analysis will be pushed to the edge of the network, with only the most salient data passed along to data hubs.
- All of this will have a transformative effect. According to Cisco Futurist Dave Evans, the Internet of Things is “the first real evolution of the Internet – a leap that will lead to revolutionary applications that have the potential to dramatically improve the way people live, learn, work, and entertain themselves.” Your IBM Fellow Nagui Halim says it will be part of the “Third great age of computing: machines that can make detailed observations and make recommendations to people.”
- Our global needs are such that if we didn’t have the Internet of Things, we’d have to invent it. The Internet of Things is emerging at a critical time in world economic and social development. Part of its allure is that it offers great potential to deal with a variety of crucial issues in ways that conventional approaches fail to. It is perfectly matched to problems such as generation and distribution of energy, reducing environmental impacts and eliminating hunger that don’t respect natural boundaries and can only be solved through coordinated, synergistic approaches such as the IoT. My hat is off to those of you who have shaped the Smarter Planet program to respond to these issues.|
- Perhaps no single issue is more suited to an IoT approach than meeting the world’s growing energy demands in a way that not only doesn’t increase, but also hopefully reduces, global warming. There are estimates that the current electrical grid and other processes waste as much as 2/3 of the power they create, and the generating process creates high levels of greenhouse gases. As the grid evolves from just central generating facilities to a combination that also includes distributed renewable sources such as rooftop photovoltaic arrays, wind, and cars that can both feed into the grid and tap it, the need to switch to a “smart” grid becomes even more important, to capitalize on the most efficient sources and eliminate waste. Also, the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other developing areas will require that the new cities created to house this growth and industries to drive it be as efficient as possible.
- One component of energy waste and greenhouse gas emissions is the inefficiency of the transportation system. A Texas Transportation Institute study concluded that congested roads in 2007 cost the US 4.2 billion working hours and 2.8 million gallons of wasted gas.
- Another major trend bolstering the case for an Internet of Things is the graying of the global population (2 billion people worldwide will be over 60 by the middle of the centur y ) combined with soaring health-care costs. The United States spends far more per person on health care than any other nation, yet ranks only 27 th in longevity.
- Because the Internet of Things has been evolving for more than a decade, there are already exciting examples from around the world of devices that are linked by the Internet and have unprecedented power as a result. They will give you some indication of the IoT’s transformative power. Much of the most exciting work toward building the Internet of Things is being done by the “Maker Movement” hackers, artists, and other hobbyists, using cheap, easy-to-use components. None of these is as important as the Arduino board, a cheap, hand-sized, open-source microcontroller board that can both receive input about the surrounding environment from a variety of sensors, and that can also control lights, motors, and other actuators. It can be programmed using a simple, free language that was developed to introduce artists and other beginners to software development. Some of the projects that tinkerers have developed using the Arduino that will give you an idea of its versatility include:| Intrusion alarm Whole house climate control: Control HVAC and ceiling fans, watch for differences between upstairs/downstairs, ceiling/floor and outside temperature. Through the Arduino web site, users are building a global community of experimenters who are sharing ideas and expanding the number of Internet of Things devices.
- Commercial Internet of Things products are also already in use, which make it possible to see how far-reaching its effects will be. Consider the humble umbrella. Invented 4,000 years ago in Egypt, today’s umbrellas have more in common with their ancestors than differences. Except, perhaps, the one designed by Ambient Devices of Cambridge, MA. No longer in production, it had a built-in receiver in the handle that received satellite data from Accu-Weather. When it is going to rain or snow the handle glowed – a subtle reminder to take it with you. If a “dumb” umbrella can be made “smart,” almost any product is fair game for an IoT makeover!
- Energy in general may do more to drive development of the Internet of Things than any other field, because there are simultaneously the need to meet growing demands and the need to do so without adding to – and preferably, reducing – the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during the generation process, since an estimated 65% of greenhouse gases are emitted during the electricity production process. The current needs have led to a global push for smart grids, in which all parts of the system talk to each other on a continuing basis, and demand is met in the most efficient way possible, including by decentralized, renewable sources and by reducing consumption.
- Closely related to the smart grid projects (and, in fact, integrated into them in cases where the residents buy plug-in electric vehicles) is the transportation sector, which wastes both time and energy because of congestion, detours, etc. The average car today includes 50 to 100 computers that monitor and control most of the systems. Now there’s a whole branch of the IoT devoted to creative combinations of sensors, micro-controllers and activators in cars: telematics. Several brands of cars now park themselves, and in 2014 Ford plans to introduce sensor-laden cars that can even take the driver’s blood pressure and advise drivers with allergies on alternative routes to work where the pollen count may be lower. Google has successfully tested a fleet of self-driving robotic cars – with more than 200,000 miles driven.
- Participating policyholders of Progressive Insurance in the US and numerous European companies receive a special device that plugs into their car’s diagnostic port and records number of miles actual driven, time of day, and number of sharp stops. When this information is uploaded to the company’s computers, the policyholder can earn up to a 30% discount for safe driving – the discount is based on the car’s actual record, not just some sort of vague, non-evidence based statements.
- One example from transportation demonstrates how much of the Internet of Things can be brought about through virtuous competition, in which cities worldwide share strategies to make their transportation systems more efficient. Take transit schedules. In the past they’ve always been notoriously inaccurate, making it chancy to guide your personal transportation choices by them. Today individuals can have real-time information on their smart phones about when a subway or bus is actually going to arrive. One of the winners in the first “Apps for Democracy” competition in the District of Columbia took real-time data gleaned by the transit authority from sensors on buses and subway trains and converted it into an app letting commuters know the actual time the bus or subway on their route would arrive. Since then, transit authorities worldwide – even for the leviathan New York City system – have started to release similar real-time data and encouraged local developers to create their own apps to interpret the data. .
- Cities that are now integrating their transportation data are already realizing amazing benefits. According to your former CEO, Sam Palmisano: “ In a study of 439 cities, those that employ transportation congestion solutions —including ramp metering, signal coordination and incident management—reduced travel delays on average by more than 700,000 hours annually and saved nearly $15 million each. In four cities where IBM has helped deploy congestion management solutions, traffic volume during peak periods has been reduced by up to 18 percent, CO2 emissions from motor vehicles were reduced by up to 14 percent, and public transit use increased by up to 7 percent.
- One current telematics research project is noteworthy not only in its own right, but because it addresses one of the prime obstacles to the IoT: lack of global communication standards. The goal of the CloudCar project, initiated by MIT’s Field Intelligence Lab, is to create a universal, open standard that can be used throughout the automotive telematics industry. That’s important, because currently there is a bewildering array of communications protocols, since each of the car manufacturers and other vendors are working on proprietary projects, ranging from Ford and Microsoft’s Sync to GM’s OnStar. If any of the truly remarkable telematics applications, such as ones that automatically warn of impending road danger, are to become a reality, a common standard is needed. As Erik J. Wilhelm of the Field Intelligence Lab says, “Manufacturers have no compulsion to share with other manufacturers, so there’s no opportunity for really great applications such as hyper-accurate traffic mapping which would only work if everyone is talking the same language.” The CloudCar project resembles Arduino in several important ways: the heart of the system is a simpler controller, now in it’s fourth generation, which would plug into the car’s diagnostic port, would be user-friendly, and would allow streaming of data from the car to a wide range of 3 rd party vendors, who could use it for everything from car sharing applications to automated roadside assistance systems. This hardware will be open-source, and the standard underpinning the data server will also be open. Users would pay a modest fee, with the remainder of the cost picked up by third parties that would be able to use the data the boxes yield if drivers grant them permission. “Everyone needs the same data for all of these potential applications. Safety and security is central to our design efforts because we have to make certain cars won’t just stop in the middle of the road,” Wilhelm says. If the CloudCar standard is widely adopted, application developers could be gathering and sharing information from millions and millions of cars. The mindset fostered by the CloudCar project could be as valuable as the standard itself. “Ford and GM both have announced they were opening up their proprietary products such as OnStar, but they are only giving access to big companies, not the creative commons space. If you’re all speaking the same language, everyone wins and it’s still possible to have a survival-of-the-fittest application market that mobile phone users have come to expect, only this time with many more data streams and possibilities,” Wilhelm says. Wilhelm hopes that the CloudCar standard will have value beyond telematics, since other crucial segments of the IoT, such as medical reporting and home applications are also handicapped by the lack of communication standards. “CloudCars are nearer term, offers the most immediate gains, and faster adoption rates than these fields,” he says. “We hope to further apply our learning to CloudHome and CloudMe.”
- Logistics is a natural extension of transportation Internet of Things research and development: the more streamlined the transportation network is the more streamlined logistics will be. The more that materials and products can flow seamlessly throughout the supply chain and that information can be shared by all parties, the more production costs can be cut, as well as time-to-market, and product design can be improved through greater communication among everyone involved in the design and production processes. FedEx’s SenseAware tag is one logistics enabler that is already creating value. It was designed specifically for high-value cargoes: organs for transplant that be maintained at a certain temperature while on their way to an operation, pharmaceutical companies that must assure secure and temperature-sensitive distribution from the plant to doctors’ offices, or all participants in a clinical trial where both protection of the samples and precise record-keeping is critical. Given how sensitive these kinds of items can be to any variations in conditions during shipment, if FedEx can document that they were handled within acceptable parameters, that information would be of tremendous value to shippers. Equally important, the data is shared instantly between all involved: shipper, FedEx, and recipient. A browser-based collaboration tool allows all parties to work together immediately if they must react to changing conditions such as an increase in temperature.
- While I won’t dwell on them, your company’s Smarter Planet/Smarter Cities programs have provided both shining examples and the nuts and bolts of an effective Internet of Things. The “Instrumented Planet” was one of the early large-scale IoT projects, with all of the key components: sensors, capturing operational data from real-time control systems, and near-real-time data processing. Meanwhile, the company’s research wing was creating the necessary platform for such an initiative: System S, a stream computing program that would allow real-time analysis of massive amounts of data to improve real-time decision making. IBM says that: “System S is built for perpetual analytics – utilizing a new streaming architecture and breakthrough mathematical algorithms, to create a forward-looking analysis of data from any source – narrowing down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refining the answer as additional data is made available.” The system is matched to the IoT because it can analyze thousands of simultaneous data steams, such as stock prices, retail sales, weather reports, etc. IBM’s major IoT initiatives have been partnerships with government agencies worldwide (as well as some with the private sector) . The statistics claimed for improvements under the initiative are impressive. In addition to the savings for cities implementing transportation congestion solutions cited earlier: *8 hospitals and 470 primary care clinics that introduced changes such as making real-time information available to practitioners at the point of care improved clinical results and operating efficiency by up to 10% *Retailers have cut supply chain cost by up to 30%, reduced inventory levels by up to 24%, and increased sales by up to 10% through measures such as information sharing throughout their entire supply chains. The key to all of these changes is gathering, merging, and analyzing unheard of quantities of data using System S.
- As astonishing as your new control room for Rio is, perhaps one small city’s experience best typifies the results possible with the approach: Corpus Christi, Texas. Prior to IBM’s involvement, various city departments tracked work orders and maintenance in a variety of ways, especially paper-based ones. By merging information the city now knows citywide services’ real-time status, has been able to automate work orders and gaining an overview of city infrastructure. One example of how unifying information and automating processes has improved services is in the water department. First responders now get work orders on water main breaks or water quality problem as emails on their smartphones, while field crews get real-time work order updates and directly update the work order status on their phones without having to go through a dispatcher. Analysis of data from the system showed that 1.4% of the customer sites accounted for nearly one-third of all problems, so the city designed a repair program attacking these chronic problems and reducing costs.
- Medicine is a particularly fertile ground for IoT inventions, frequently attaining the Holy Grail of both improving quality of life and reducing the cost of providing care. By being connected to the web, they bridge the gap in contact that has historically existed in between the patient’s visits with the doctor, giving the doctor objective data about what the patient actually encounters living with a given illness. Partners Health Care’s Center for Connected Medicine in Boston uses technology to fundamentally change the doctor-patient relationship. According to its director, Dr. Joseph Kvedar: “ the [current] system is constructed to make the doctor’s work life as productive as possible, not to make it easy for patients. I expect that to change in the coming years. We’ll see more patient empowerment, more instances where consumers can make their own health care decisions without a physician and more opportunities to streamline care delivery making it simpler and more patient-friendly.” As part of the Center’s mHealth program using mobile devices, patients with atopic dermatitis, a form of eczema, received text messages reminding them to emollients and avoid skin irritants. Evidence has indicated that dermatology patients are unlikely to adhere to care plans. The Center sent daily text messages for six weeks to a pilot group of 20 adolescents and adults reminding them to take their medication and providing educational materials. 85% of participants said the texts were helpful. 80% said they increased the number of days a week they adhered to their prescribed treatment. The tests of severity of the participants’ conditions showed a reduction in 70% of the cases. The most popular health care-related IoT products relate to self-reporting of health and fitness indicators. At the time of this writing, the Quantified Self lists 185 health care apps, 25% of them available free. Commonly, these apps allow the users to record key indicators such as their blood pressure using sensors on a smartphone, then upload them to a website where they can track the numbers over time. Equally important, many of these web sites feature informative graphic displays of the data, making it easier for users to analyze trends in their health care than with numbers recorded in a notebook. Nike’s Nike+, a sensor that clips to your shoelace, is now used by millions of runners who either keep their uploaded stats private or share them with the community. The health and fitness apps have spawned a new movement that is a hopeful sign in the effort to contain health care costs and improve public health. The Quantified Self combines online resources such as a blog with physical “Show and Tell ” meetings to watch presentations on new tools and to compare notes on their own performance. The group’s motto is “self-knowledge through numbers,” and it compiles a comprehensive running list of IoT health apps, the “Guide to Self-Tracking Tools.” Many of the devices require the user to physically intervene to upload the statistics (such as plugging a USB drive into your computer), but a growing number, such as the popular Fitbit, automatically synch when the user is near the base station, making the process seamless and effortless.
- Governments too have provided varying degrees of incentives for the Internet of Things. The Great Recession of 2008 ironically gave a boost to the Internet of Things, as both the U.S. and China poured money into demonstration programs for IoT technologies. It is difficult to find financials for the amount invested in developing the Chinese IoT industry, but results are known: In 2011, the output value of China's IoT industry was RMB260 billion ($4.121 billion US). The major application fields were intelligent industry, intelligent logistics, intelligent transportation, smart grid, intelligent medical treatment, intelligent agriculture and intelligent environmental protection. Note that, among the Chinese priorities, only smart grid and medical treatment were specifically targeted in the U.S. In 2009 the European Union released a 14-point Action Plan for the IoT giving equal attention to encouraging the IoT and protecting personal information. It included demonstration programs to be carried out by the European Research Cluster on the IoT. The European Union issued a call for comment in April 2012, to begin the process of creating a IoT policy in 2013.
- Now, as I promised, to turn our attention to the obstacles to the Internet of Things. In doing so I relied heavily on two EU publications, “The Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap,” and “Vision and Challenges for Realizing the Internet of Things,” both of which I highly recommend to you as a laundry list of issues that must be addressed if the IoT is to achieve its full potential. The one with the potential to stop the Internet of Things in its tracks was the limit of approximately 4.2 billion internet addresses possible with the 32 bit system of IPv4, the current standard). That led to development of IPv6, which allows for 128-bit addresses, which should allow approximately 3.4×10 38 addresses or, as one estimate puts it, "If the earth were made entirely out of 1 cubic millimetre grains of sand, then you could give a unique [IPv6] address to each grain in 300 million planets the size of the earth" – plenty for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, IPv6 isn’t a simple extension of IPv4, so it requires completely new implementations by Internet hosts. The most recent available numbers on implementation of IPv6 still remain at best around 1%, with the U.S. lagging behind Asia. I urge you to lend your collective weight toward speeding the rollout of IPV6.
- Complementing the IP address issue is the need for global standards organizations to design the most open communication protocols possible, and for corporations such as IBM to avoid the temptation to develop proprietary protocols for your own technologies. The Web has shown us that the more open the standards, the quicker the adoption rate and the ease of interchange. It is probable that global standards won’t be adopted for the entire Internet of Things, so instead the emphasis must be on interoperability of standards, such as the MIT CloudCar standards.
- The sheer volume of data that will be generated would be impossible to handle with traditional centralized client-server processing. Instead, much of the processing will be done locally, on the edge of the enterprise, and algorithms will be needed to quickly sift through the volumes of data and discard the vast majority that is irrelevant to decision making. Data will only be passed along if it is relevant to the enterprise as a whole.
- The other most pressing problems to be solved relate to the widespread deployment of sensors, which must be both very small and require either very small batteries to operate or generate their own power. The devices continue to become smaller and smaller, and in 2011, scientists announced a commercially viable nanogenerator using body movements such as the pinch of a finger to generate electricity. In “The Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap,” the EU identified a number of other technical needs that I don’t have time to go into now. I urge you to read the document.
- Two problems facing the Internet of Things deserves a discussion all their own: privacy and security. I’m convinced that unless they are solved the Internet of Things will never achieve its full potential. CIA Director David Petraeus didn’t help things with an appearance in early 2012: … “ Petraeus mused about the emergence of an ‘Internet of Things’ — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. ‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,’ Petraeus enthused, ‘particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.’ “All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a ‘person of interest’ to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the ‘wired home,’ you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance. “’Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,’ Petraeus said.” “Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices ’change our notions of secrecy’ and prompt a rethink of ‘our notions of identity and secrecy.’” That should spark some discussion! The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is quick to respond to threats such as this one, calling on companies that collect information by whatever means online to protect users. They should: “ Tell you when the government is asking for your information so that you can protect yourself; *Disclose how often they share information with the government; *Stand up for user privacy in the courts and in Congress.” The ACLU calls for an update of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), which predates the public Internet, including an amendment that would require an agency to show probable cause to a judge before it could intercept your Internet transmissions of any kind. In January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court rule unanimously in U.S. v. Jones that attaching a GPS to a car and tracking someone violates the Fourth Amendment, constituting an illegal search. That would seem to mean that they would take a harsh view of evidence gained through any other type of IoT technologies.
- The other issue mentioned in the same breath as privacy is security of the Internet of Things. This issue must be treated in the context of the broader issue of cyber-security in general, which, in my opinion, simply has not been given enough attention by the business community, which seems to rely too heavily on governments’ efforts to protect them. Perhaps the ubiquitous nature of the Internet of Things will finally convince the business community that cyber-security is essential to their business continuity.
- Finally, there is another problem: the United States government, other than limited funding for smart grid and other demonstration programs and a report by the US National Intelligence Council on six “Disruptive Civil Technologies” with potential impacts on US, has totally ignored the Internet of Things. It is literally impossible to find a single use of the term by President Obama. Contrast that to China, where Premier Wen Jiabao made two speeches in 2009 urging rapid development of the Internet of Things. One of them included the prescient formula: Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth. After the Obama Administration was stung by criticism for channeling money to the solar industry, only to see it lose out to its Chinese counterpart, it was understandably gun-shy about policies that try to pick technology winners. However, to avoid major investments in Internet of Things would be shortsighted, since it is an enabling technology that will affect every industry. Without quick action, the US is likely to be importing most of its IoT components in the future. Equally important, the Administration and Congress would be negligent if they don’t begin to form policies to oversee privacy and security with the IoT, since these are issues that could threaten the technology’s growth and development.
- In conclusion, it would seem that the Internet of Things has an aura of inevitability about it that should result in its widespread use and public awareness of its within the next decade: the technology is already advanced enough and in use in niches such as logistics and the IoT is so ideally matched to the pressing social and economic problems we face globally such as the need for more, cleaner energy and the graying of populations. However, choices we make now will have a major impact on whether we will be masters or victims of the transition. Here are a few steps that your clients can take now to fully capitalize on the IoT – and perhaps hasten its full implementation. It will require fundamentally different management practices than we have seen in the past. In the past the “siloed” nature of information available to management tended to foster linear and hierarchical management approaches: the information would be passed along from one department by gatekeepers, who also frequently served as filters, so that people on the departmental level not only didn’t have timely access to new information, but also didn’t get access to the raw information – only as it was interpreted by senior management. With the IoT, by contrast, it will be possible to break down those silos, and have information flow seamlessly companywide. Workers on all levels in a variety of departments will be able to have simultaneous access to real-time information. That in turn will tend to break down barriers between the departments, and, coupled with Web 2.0 collaborative tools such as wikis, will encourage collaborative responses to that data. It will also mean that decision-making will become much more data based than based on intuition. Managers should begin to ask: Which employees would be able to make better decisions if they have real-time information? What new forms of marketing could we introduce if there was a constant flow of data? For example, could products be leased, with the price depending on actual usage, instead of selling them? Which customers and suppliers should we integrate into an IoT strategy, i.e. where else besides our company could this data provide value? What processes could be streamlined or eliminated if data flowed automatically and/or previously manual processes could be automated? The problems we face as a global society, most notably global warming, the need to power increasing industrialization, increasing manufacturing efficiency, eliminating poverty and hunger, and providing affordable healthcare for an aging population, call for imaginative, collaborative solutions that break down barriers between previously “siloed” programs. The IoT, by its very nature is holistic, encourages communication, automates previously manual processes, and encourages sharing of information in the broadest ways possible. While the Internet of Things is already technically a reality, there is still a long way to go before we are able to realize its full transformative potential. The Smarter Planet already is arguably the most ambitious and concrete initiative to make the Internet of Things a reality, but I hope that you will place increasing emphasis on the totality of the Internet of Things going forward, in order to realize its full potential and avoid a Balkanization in which there are isolated pockets of Smarter Cities excellence surrounded by an increasingly intolerable business as usual. THANK YOU.