Robin Hearn, director of strategic marketing at Qualcomm described how cellular communications are at the heart of IoT, showing numbers that — as Sheldrake gleefully remarked — actually agreed with those from Intel. He also showed a fascinating gamut of IoT applications, from smart grids to wireless cows, with this last one being also the subject of an apparently unbeatable ROI calculation: CowDetect, the application for networked cows, adds $350 per year to the yield of each animal. Sheldrake on Twitter was quick to comment that if the same were applied to the citizens of the U.K., the entire national debt could be quickly payed down!
Gert Kortuem, of Lancaster University, underlined the need for IoT to take into account the human factor, and to build a livable environment where people can make sense of the data that is collected. He also highlighted the unexpected nature of human behavior, exemplifying it with the counterintuitive result of an experiment, where those smart meter equipped homes, which were of Republicans who did not express specific interest for the environment, would increase their energy consumption, when told that they were using more electricity than their neighbors. He also spoke about the need of designing easy, understandable, non-geeky user interfaces for IoT applications.
Gus Hosein of Privacy International described a post-privacy world, remarking that there is no such a thing as non-personal information. Supposedly anonymized data sets, when connected with others, will always enable the pinpointing of the individual. Consequently all information has to be treated as sensitive. As an example he presented the consumer backlash against smart meters, when it became apparent how their readings could lead to fine grained analysis of behavior. Hosein concluded with a provocative call to design devices that can cheat. He said that if we don’t allow for anonymity, society will fail.
Philip Sheldrake shared a proposal about four levels of data treatment, from delete, sustain, stats, to archive, which combined with other parameters on sharing he cleverly represented on the Internetome Privacy Dial: a visual representation of contractual agreements between consumers, and service providers for a clear management of data collected.
[[ Embed http://slidesha.re/9lhvzL ]]
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Tinker London presented a wide range of stimulating, funny, provocative creations based on Arduino, the consumer level electronics prototyping platform, where smart objects, and networked sensors enter the everyday life.
Fraser Davidson, IBM VP and U.K. lead of the Smarter Cities initiative concluded the talks presenting a rich series of analyses about the flow of data, energy, and goods in a large, complex system as a city, when better understood by the applications of smart networks. He said “76% of the apples consumed in the U.K. come from overseas, traveling 3700 miles to reach us,” and pinpointed Peterborough as the leading smart city in the U.K., with fascinating visualizations.
Tony Fish followed moderating a panel, where he took the stance of the provocative contrarian, remarking the dangers of the complexity of the systems that compose IoT: “The iPhone is now so complicated that people don’t use it!”
The closing remarks of the conference were delivered by the author, David Orban, as a call for action. The Internet of Things will only happen, if we together, when the conference is over, put in practice what we heard, at our University, department, or enterprise, and through education, experimentation, and the application of open, interconnected systems build it one step at a time.
The next Internetome conference is planned for Spring 2011 on the West Coast in the USA!
Pages: 1 2
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.