I’ll be live-blogging for the next two days from the 2nd Internet of Things Global Summit.
- Edith Ramirez, FTC chair:
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- potential for astounding benefits to society, transforming every activity
- risks: very technology that allows this can also gather info for companies and your next employer
- possible consumer loss of confidence in connected devices if they don’t think privacy w
- 3 challenges:
- adverse uses
- security of the data
- collection of the data
- key steps companies should take:
- security front and center
- deidentify data
- transparent policies
- data will provide “startlingly complete pictures of us” — sensors can already identify our moods, even progression of neurological diseases
- how will the data be used? will TV habits be shared with potential employers? Will it paint picture of you that others will see, but you won’t
- will it exacerbate current socio-economic disparities?
- potential for data breaches such as Target grows as more data is collected
- FTC found some companies don’t take even most basic protections. Small size and cheap cost of some sensors may inhibit data protections
- steps:
- build security in from beginning
- security risk assessment
- test security measures before launch
- implement defense and depth approach
- encryption, especially for health data.
- FTC action against TrendNet
- follow principle of “data minimization,” only what’s needed, and dispose of it afterwards.
- she’s skeptical of belief that there should be no limits on collection of data (because of possible benefits)
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- de-identified data: need dual approach — commit to not re-identify data
- clear and simple notice to consumers about possible use of data.
- Apple touting that it doesn’t sell data from Health App — critical to building consumer trust
- transparency: major FTC priority. FTC review of mobile apps showed broad and vague standards on data collection & use.
- Ilkka Lakaniemi, chair, FIWARE Future Internet PPP, EU perspective on IoT:
- lot easier to start IoT businesses in Silicon Valley because of redundant regulations in EU
- Open Standard Platform + Sustainable Innovation Ecosystem. “Synergy Platform”
- Mark Bartolomeo, vp of integrated solutions, Verizon:
- Bakken Shale area visit: “landscape of IoT” solutions — pipeline monitoring, water monitoring, etc.
- concerned about rapid urbanization: 30% of city congestion caused by drivers looking for parking. $120B wasted in time and fuel yearly.
- cars: “seamless nodes” of system.
- market drivers & barriers:
- increased operational efficiency, new revenue streams, better service, comply with regulators, build competitive edge
- fragmented ecosystem, complex development, significant back end obstacles
- they want integrated systems.
- need to remove barriers: aging infrastructure, congestion, public safety, economics
- remove complexity
- economies of scale: common services
- trend to car sharing, smart grid
- yea: highlighting intellistreets — one of my 1st fav IoT devices!!
- Verizon working primarily on parking & traffic congestion on the East Coast, and water management in CA.
Smart Cities:
- Nigel Cameron: nation-state receding, cities and corporations on ascendency
- Sokwoo Rhee, NIST: Cyber-Physical Systems — emphasis on systems dynamics, data fed back into system, makes it autonomous. Did Smart America Challenge with White House. Fragmentation on device level. Demonstrate tangible effects through collaborations. Examples: health care systems, transactive energy management, smart emergency response, water distribution, air quality. 24 projects. Round Two is application of the projects to actual cities. Now 26 teams.
- Joseph Bradley, VP, IoT Practice, Cisco Consulting: value isn’t in the devices, but the connections. Intersection of people, data, process, and things. Increase City of Nice’s parking revenue 40-60% without raising taxes through smart parking. They project $19 trillion in value over 10 years from combo of public and private innovations. Smart street lighting: reduces crime, property values increase, free wi-fi from the connected street lights. Barcelona is Exhibit A for benefits. Need: comprehensive strategy (privacy is a contextual issue: depends on the benefits you receive), scalability, apps, data analytics, transparency, powerful network foundation, IoT catalyst for breaking down silos, IoT must address people and process.
- Ron Sege, chair and ceo of Echelon Corp: got started with smart buildings, 25 yrs. old. Why now with IoT: ubiquitous communications, low cost, hyper-competition, cloud. They do outdoor & indoor lighting and building systems. Challenges: move to one infrastructure/multiple use cases, will IT learn about OT & visa-versa?, reliability: critical infrastructure can’t fail & must respond instantly.
- Christopher Wolf, Future of Privacy Forum: flexible, use-based privacy standards. Industry-wide approach to privacy: auto industry last week told NISTA about uniform privacy standards for connected cars (neat: will have to blog that…).
- Peter Marx, chief innovation officer, City of LA: big program to reduce street lights with LEDs: changed whole look of city at night & saves lot of money. 6 rail lines being built there. Adding smart meters for water & power. EV chargers on street lights. Held hackathon for young people to come up with ideas to improve city. Procurement cycles are sooo arcane that he suggests entrepreneurs don’t do business with city — he just tries to enable them.
Outside the City:
- Darrin Mylet, Adaptrum: Using “TV white space spectrum” in non-urban areas. Spectrum access critical:need mix of spectrum types. Where do we need spectrum? Most need in non-line-of-sight areas such as trees, etc. Examples: not only rural, but also some urban areas (San Jose); Singapore; Africa; redwood forests;
- Arturo Kuigami, World Bank: examples in developing nations: (he’s from Peru); most of global migration is to smaller cities; look at cities as ecosystems; “maker movement” is important — different business models: they partnered with Intel and MIT on “FabLabs” in Barcelona this year. MoMo — water access point monitoring in Tanzania. Miroculus: created by a global ad hoc team — cheap way to make cancer diagnosis: have identified 3-4 types of cancers it can diagnose. Spirometer to measure COPD, made by a 15-year old! “IoT can be a global level playing field.”
- Chris Rezendes, INEX Advisors: Profitable sustainability: by instrumenting the physical world, we can create huge opportunities for a wide range of people outside our companies. Focusing on doing a better job of instrumenting and monitoring our groundwater supplies: very little being done in SW US right now (INEX investing in a startup that is starting this monitoring). If we have better data on groundwater, we can do a better job of managing it. “Embrace complexity upfront” to be successful.
- Shudong Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences: talking about the Chinese food security crisis because of milk production without a food production license. Government launched “Wuxi Food Science & Technology Park.”
Smart Homes:
- Tobin Richardson, Zigbee Alliance: critical role of open, global standards. Zigbee LCD lights now down to $15.
- Cees Links, GreenPeak Technologies: Leader in Zigbee-based smart home devices. Smart home waay more complex than wi-fi. 1m chips a week, vs. 1 million for whole year of 2011. “Not scratching the surface.” Small data — many small packets.
- Todd Green, CEO PubNub: data stream network.
- no killer app for the smart home.. Controlling by your phone not really that great a method.
- FTC agrees with me: a few adverse stories (TrendNet baby cam example) can be really bad for an industry in its infancy.
- always hole in security. For example, you can tell if no one’s home because volume of wi-fi data drops.W
- FTC: consumer ed critical part of their work. Working now on best practices for home data protection.
- mitigation after a security breach? Always be open, communicate (but most hunker down!).
DAY TWO
Beyond Cost Savings: Forging a Path to Revenue Generation
- Eric Openshaw: (had tech problems during his preso: very important one — check the Deloitte The Internet of Things white paper for details) cost savings through IoT not enough for sustainable advantage: need to produce new revenue to do that. Defined ecosystem shaping up, which creates clarity, breaks down silos.
- areas: smart grid, health care, home automation, cars, industrial automation
- study the GE jet model for health care: what if doctors were paid to keep us healthy.
- need comprehensive understanding of the change issues
- be very specific: singular asset class, etc. — so you get early victories
- companies will have overarching, finite roadmap
- security & privacy dichotomy: differentiate between personal health care data and data from your washing machine. Most of us will share all sorts of information if there’s something in return
- get focused on customer and product life cycle — that’s where the money will be. Focus on operating metric level. This is most far-reaching tech change he’s seen.
Managing Spectrum Needs
- Julius Knapp, Chief, FCC Office of Engineering & Technology: new opportunity to combine licensed and unlicensed space. Described a number of FCC actions to reconsider role of various types of spectrum. “Hard to predict I0T’s long-term spectrum needs” because industry is new: they’ll watch developments in the field.
- Prof. H. Nwana, exec. director of Dynamic Spectrum Alliance: most spectrum usually not used in most places at most time. His group working to use changes to spectrum to end digital divide: (used incredible map showing how much of world, including US, China, India, W. Europe, could be fitted into Africa).
- Carla Rath, VP for Wireless Policy, Verizon: “in my world, the network is assumed.” Need for more spectrum — because of growth in mobile demand. Praises US govt. for trying to make more spectrum available. Don’t want to pigeonhole IoT in certain part of spectrum: allow flexibility. Tension between flexibility and desire for global standards when it comes to IoT.
- Philip Marnick, group director of spectrum policy, Ofcom UK: no single solution. Market determines best use. Some applications become critical (public safety, etc.) — must make sure people using those are aware of chance of interference.
- Hazem Moakkit, vp of spectrum development for 03b (UK satellite provider for underserved areas of developing world): “digital divide widened by IoT if all are not on board.” Fair allocation of spectrum vital.
- interesting question: referred to executive of a major farm equipment manufacturer whose products are now sensor-laden (must be John Deere…) and is frustrated because the equipment won’t work in countries such as Germany due to different bands.
Architecting the IoT: Sensing, Networking & Analytics:
- Tom Davenport: IoT highly unpredictable. “Great things about standards is there’s so many to choose from” — LOL. Will IoT revolution be more top down or bottom up?
- Gary Butler, CEO, Camgian: announcing an edge system for IoT. Driven by sensor info. Need new networking architecture to combine sensing and analytics to optimize business processes, manage risk. Systems now built from legacy equipment, not scalable. They’re announcing new platform: Egburt. Applicable to smart cities, retailing, ifrastructure (I’ll blog more about this soon!!). “Intelligence out of chaos.” Anomaly detection. Real-time analysis at the device level. Focus on edge computing. Must strengthen the ROI.
- Xiaolin Lu, Texas Instruments fellow & director of IoT Lab: Working in wearables, smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart manufacturing, health care, automotive. TI claims it has all IoT building blocks: nodes, gateway/bridge or router/cloud. Power needs are really critical, with real emphasis on energy harvesting from your body heat, vibration, etc. Challenges: sensing and data analytics, robust connectivity, power, security, complexity, consolidation of infrastructure and data. Big advocates for standards. They work on smart grid.
- Steve Halliday, president, RAIN RFID: very involved in standards. 4 BILLION RFID tags shipped last year. Don’t always want IP devices. Power not an issue w/ RFID because they get their power from the reader. Think RFID will be underpinning of IoT for long time. Lot of confusion in many areas about IoT, especially in manufacturing.
- Sky Mathews, IBM CTO: IBM was one of earliest in the field, with Smarter Planet. Lot of early ones were RFID. A variety of patterns emerging for where and how data is processed. What APIs do you want to expose to the world? “That’s where the real leaps of magnitude will occur” — so design that in from beginning.
‘People’ Side of the IoT: meeting consumer expectations:
- Mark Eichorn, asst. director, Consumer Protection Bureau, FTC: companies that have made traditional appliances & now web-enable them aren’t always ready to deal with data theft. Security and privacy: a lot don’t have privacy policies at all. At their workshop, talk about people being able to hack your insulin readings.
- Daniel Castro, sr. analyst, Center for Data Innovation: thinks that privacy issue has been misconstrued: what people really care about is keeping data from government intrusion. Can car be designed so a cop could pull it over automatically (wow: that’s a thought!). Chance for more liability with misuse of #IoT data.
- Linda Sherry, director of national priorities, Consumer Action: “convenience, expectations and trust.” “What is the IoT doing beside working?” Connecting everything may disenfranchise those who aren’t connected. Need to register those who collect data – hmm. Hadn’t heard that one before. Even human rights risks, stalking, etc. — these issues must be thought about. Can algorithms really be trusted on issues such as insurance coverage? How do you define particularly sensitive personal data? “Hobbling the unconnected” when most are connected? “Saving consumers from themselves.” “Document the harms.” Make sure groups with less $ can really participate in multi-stakeholder negotiations.
- Stephen Pattison, vp of public affairs, ARM Holdings: disagrees with Linda about slowing things down: we want to speed up IoT as instrument of transformation. We need business model for it. Talks about how smart phone didn’t explode until providers started subsidizing purchase. He suspects that one model might be that a company would provide you whole range of smart appliances in return for your data. “Getting data right matters.” “Freak events” drive concerns about data security & privacy: they generate concern and, sometimes, “heavy-handed” regulation.
Industry must work together on framework for data that creates confidence by public. Concerns about data are holding back investment in the field. They’re working with AMD on a framework: consumers own their own data — must start with that (if they do, people will cooperate); not all data equally sensitive — need chain of custody to keep data anomyzed; security must be right at the edge; simplify terms and conditions.
Sometimes thinks that, in talking about IoT, it’s like talking about cars in 1900, but we managed to create a set of standards that allowed it to grow: “rules of the road,” etc.
