Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet of Things

Posts relating to the internet of things, IoT and M2M technologies

  • Driverless cars outrun the law

    Driverless cars outrun the law

    Tesla founder Elon Musk believes there will be driverless cars on US roads by the summer, the New York Times reports.

    One of the key factors in whether Musk’s prediction comes to and driverless cars are on the road by the middle of the year is the law with most people assuming autonomous vehicles are currently illegal.

    Some experts however believe current laws don’t prevent driverless cars, with the New York Times quoting one industry leader who suggests there’s no legal barrier to autonomous vehicles taking to the road.

    Tesla is not alone in pushing the envelope. Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, raised eyebrows at a January event in Detroit when he said Google did not believe there was currently a “regulatory block” that would prohibit self-driving cars, provided the vehicles themselves met crash-test and other safety standards.

    This view raises an interesting legal argument, who is the recognised driver of an autonomous vehicle? In the event of an accident or dispute does liability rest with the owner, the manufacturer or the passengers?

    What this debate over driverless vehicles illustrates is how laws specific to today’s society aren’t always applicable to tomorrow’s technologies; certainly many of the laws designed for the horse and buggy era became redundant as the motor car took over a hundred years ago.

    Another consequence of autonomous vehicles are the changes to occupations supporting the motor industry; it’s obvious that panel beaters and insurance lawyers may have their jobs at risk but Jay Zagorsky in The Conversation suggests nearly half of US police numbers would be redundant if there are no more car drivers.

    Given how the funds local and state governments raise from traffic offences, a shift to driverless technologies could even have an effect on city budgets.

    The motor car was the most far reaching technology of the Twentieth Century in the way it changed the economy and society over those years, it’s hardly surprising that we are only just beginning to comprehend how a shift to driverless vehicles may change our lives this century.

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  • Big sports data – how tech is changing the playing field

    Big sports data – how tech is changing the playing field

    “When you’re playing, it’s all about the winning but when you retire you realise there’s a lot more to the game,” says former cricketer Adam Gilchrist.

    Gilchrist was speaking at an event organised by software giant SAP ahead of a Cricket World Cup quarter final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground yesterday.

    SAP were using their sponsorship of the event to demonstrate their big data analytics capabilities and how they are applied to sports and the internet of things.

    Like most industries, the sports world is being radically affected by digitalisation as new technologies change everything from coaching and player welfare through to stadium management and fans’ experience.

    Enhancing the fan experience

    Two days earlier rival Melbourne stadium Etihad in the city’s Docklands district showed off their new connected ground where spectators will get hi-definition video and internet services through a partnership between Telstra and Cisco.

    While Etihad’s demonstration was specifically about ‘fan experience’, the use of the internet of things and pervasive wireless access in a stadium can range from paperless ticketing to managing the food and drink franchises.

    In the United States, the leader in rolling out connected stadiums, venues are increasingly rolling out beacon technologies allowing spectators to order deliveries to their seats and push special offers during the game.

    While neither of the two major Melbourne stadiums offer beacon services at present, the Cisco devices around the Etihad have the facility to add Bluetooth capabilities when the ground managements decide to roll them out.

    Looking after players

    Probably the greatest impact of technology in sport is with player welfare; while coaches and clubs have been enthusiastic adopters of video and tracking technologies for two decades, the rate of change is accelerating as wearable devices are changing game day tactics and how injuries are managed.

    One of the companies leading this has been Melbourne business Catapult Sports which has been placing tracking devices on Australian Rules football players and other codes for a decade.

    For coaches this data has been a boon as it’s allowed staff to monitor on field performance and tightly manage players’ health and fitness.

    Professional sports in general have been early adopters of new technologies as a small increase in performance can have immediate and lucrative benefits on the field. Over the last thirty years clubs have adopted the latest in video and data technology to help coaches and players.

    As the technology develops this adoption is accelerating, administrators are looking at placing tracking devices within the balls, goals and boundary lines to give even more information about what’s happening on the field.

    Managing the data flow

    The challenge for sports organisations, as with every other industry, is in managing all the data being generated.

    In sports managing that data has a number of unique imperatives; gamblers getting access to sensitive data, broadcast rights holders wanting access to game statistics and stadium managers gathering their own data all raise challenges for administrators.

    There’s also the question of who owns the data; the players themselves have a claim to their own personal performance data and there could potentially be conflicts when a competitor transfers between clubs.

    As the sports industry explores the limits of what they can do with data, the world is changing for players, coaches, administrators and supporters.

    Gilchrist’s observation that there’s a lot more to professional sports than just what happens on the field is going to become even more true as data science assumes an even greater role in the management of teams, clubs and stadiums.

    Paul travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Cisco and SAP.

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  • The high cost of distrust

    The high cost of distrust

    A lack of trust in technology’s security could be costing the global economy over a trillion dollars a panel at the Australian Cisco Live in Melbourne heard yesterday.

    The panel “how do we create trust?” featured some of Cisco’s executives including John Stewart, the company’s Security and Trust lead, along with Mike Burgess, Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer and Gary Blair, the CEO of the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute.

    Blair sees trust in technology being split into two aspects; “do I as an individual trust an organisation to keep my data secure; safe from harm, safe from breaches and so forth?” He asks, “the second is will they be transparent in using my data and will I have control of my data.”

    In turn Stewart sees security as being a big data problem rather than rules, patches and security software; “data driven security is the way forward.” He states, “we are constantly studying data to find out what our current risk profile is, what situations are we facing and what hacks we are facing.”

    This was the thrust of last year’s Splunk conference where the CISO of NASDAQ, Mark Graff, described how data analytics were now the front line of information security as threats are so diverse and systems so complex that it’s necessary to watch for abnormal activity rather than try to build fortresses.

    The stakes are high for both individual businesses and the economy as technology is now embedded in almost every activity.

    “If you suddenly lack confidence in going to online sites, what would happen?” Asks Stewart. “You start using the phone, you go into the bank branch to check your account.”

    “We have to get many of these things correct, because going backwards takes us to a place where we don’t know how to get back to.”

    Gary Blair described how the Boston Consulting Group forecast digital economy would be worth between 1.5 and 2.5 trillion dollars across the G20 economies by 2016.

    “The difference between the two numbers was trust. That’s how large a problem is in economic terms.”

    As we move into the internet of things, that trust is going to extend to the integrity of the sensors telling us the state of our crops, transport and energy systems.

    The stakes are only going to get higher and the issues more complex which in turn is going to demand well designed robust systems to retain the trust of businesses and users.

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  • Why Singapore is building a connected city

    Why Singapore is building a connected city

    “What if we were to wire up every corner of Singapore?” Asked Steve Leonard, the Executive Deputy Chairman of Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority, at the CommunicAsia 2013 Summit.

    Two years later that question has been answered as the island state has covered the entire island with a fibre network, putting the country on course to create what Leonard describes as a ‘sensor fabric network.’

    Speaking to Leonard ahead of his visit to Australia for the AIIA Internet of Things conference in Canberra later this month, it’s impressive what the IDA looks to do in building Singapore as a connected nation.

    “We think we have an opportunity to use some of the natural advantages Singapore has,” Leonard says. “In this case being relatively small and an island. The idea that constraints mean creativity.”

    One of the areas Leonard sees as an opportunity with the IoT is in the health care industry where chronic care care can be moved back into the community while hospitals and clinics can be used for acute patients.

    One of the challenges for every city rolling out an IoT infrastructure is the plethora of standards, “we’re trying to think about IEEE standards and we’re trying to think about interoperable as possible with technology as it evolves.”

    “Whether it’s East or West, Singapore wants to be a place where business can be done and people can be healthy,” says Leonard. “What we don’t want to do is develop a standard that might work for us but exclude us from something that originates in another part of the world. We want to be open to things that evolve.”

    Becoming a connected city is key to being a leader in a connected world, “we’re always making sure we seek to have more wireless access points.” Leonard says, “we also have one gig ninety-five percent fibre coverage across the island. We also want to enhance our capabilities through 4G and Wi-Fi.”

    “All of those things together in some sort of concert create that fabric that we’re working on.”

    Historically Singapore’s place in the world has revolved around being a trading hub which has led it to being one of the world’s biggest cargo shipping ports.

    With broadband internet access available pretty well throughout the island, it should open opportunities for entrepreneurs, businesses and government agencies to explore how ubiquitous internet creates opportunities.

     

    As the world becomes moves from physical goods to bytes, Singapore is looking to becoming as much a technological centre as a goods hub. For Steve Leonard and the IDA the task is to make sure the city takes its place in the connected economy.

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  • Video and the internet of things

    Video and the internet of things

    A few days ago we discussed how 4k video cameras are going to change the sports broadcasting industry.

    Yesterday executives from modular data center supplier VCE held a media lunch where they discussed some of their industrial applications. One of the areas they discussed was the monitoring of power stations with large resolution cameras.

    The 4k cameras are trained on machine rooms with software watching for irregular conditions such as excessive vibrations, leaks or smoke. Should something out of the ordinary be detected, warnings can be triggered and potentially affected equipment spun down.

    With the 4k resolution the cameras are able to watch large areas and like the sports coverage can zoom in for a detailed view of an affected area.

    The use of 4k video cameras shows how the internet of things won’t just be about the data gathered from smart devices but also matching the information coming from IoT equipment with that of other environmental factors.

    For companies like VCE these sort of applications are an opportunity as they need large amounts of data storage and processing power in local centres.

    In many respects these small scale data centers are a large scale example of the fog computing being touted by companies like Cisco where most of the operational tasks are carried out by local equipment with only reports and exceptions being transmitted to the cloud.

    This sort of application also shows the demands different industries are going to have for local data processing and storage with the VCE executives suggesting hospitals, mines and sports stadiums are also going to need these facilities.

    For VCE – a troubled joint venture between Cisco, storage company EMC and computer virtualisation firm VM Ware – these are the sort of clients they are hoping to find to keep their business running.

    Regardless of VCE’s prospects, the need for equipment to manage the data being collected by devices on the Internet of Things and 4k video is going to grow. That could give us one of the clues of where the jobs of the future are going to come from.

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