The Internet of Things(IoT)

The Internet of Things definition: “Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects are linked through wired and wireless networks”

What is IoT and how does it work?

The “things” in Internet of Things are everyday objects/machines in your living space with the capability of connecting to the internet. In essence, the Internet of Things is one huge cloud. The picture above displays some of the most common types of IoT devices. Traditionally, common connected home things is computers, laptops, tablets, smartphone, streaming boxes, television sets because they all have the same common components: processor; memory/ram; network card(NIC); software. What we are doing is integrating those basic computer components into your everyday machines while adding internet for self evolvement and update. IoT is all about improving smarter connected objects with a purpose to evolve. By allowing these machines to co-exist within your home, they can interconnect with each other and automate your daily needs, receive assistants from a super AI brain through Cloud, so that way you can focus on other important things.

Think of a thermostat that can be controlled from a smartphone/tablet app or over the web on computer, anywhere. You can control automated features like, preheating, your temperature ranges, auto turn on/off, who is at home and which range to choose. Maybe that home thermostat can connect to your shower thermostat and also set your prefer shower temperature settings

I am a coffee drinker, it is the first daily consumption when starting the day. To save money, I mostly brew coffee at home which require either waking up earlier or prepping the night before. I have a machine(thing) to grind coffee beans, another to brew the coffee, but both process requires manually inputted settings. I usually wait by them to make sure both process is finish because occasionally I will fall back to sleep. But if they are internet connected, they can be controlled from an app on your smartphone to auto grind or brew on x amount of cups, alert when done, auto on and off, what to do when waking up, what to do when within preset time range and senses your at home, auto software updates for new features. The possibilities is endless since devices with internet capabilities will have a NIC(network internet controller), memory, a low powered processor which mean they can be preprogrammed with software update capabilities. What if both my machines is from the same brand? Chances are they can connect, collaborate and update each other. Though the tiny chip in that coffeemaker is dumb as a rock, it’s as smart as any supercomputer, allowing it to do its thinking other than in its own brain, through Cloud.

More advanced examples that you may end up seeing in your household within the next couple of years are fridges that remind you to reload eggs when you’re out or expired, possibly by scanning the RFID chips in products. Another example is garage doors that can open when it detects your vehicle’s GPS location is nearby or from the inside, if your smart car can signal to open from inside once your car starts.

Some other well-known examples for Internet of Things applications today are:

Wearable devices/fitness trackers (e.g., Jawbone Up, Fitbit, Pebble)

Home Automation (Examples: Nest, 4Control, Lifx)

Industrial asset monitoring (GE, AGT Intl.)

Smart energy meters

Birth of IoT

The term Internet of Things is about 20 years old. But the actual idea of connected devices had been around much longer, at least since the 70s. Back then, the idea was often called “embedded internet” or “pervasive computing”. But the actual term “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 during his work at Procter & Gamble. He was working in supply chain optimization and wanted to attract senior management’s attention to a new exciting technology called RFID. Because the internet was the hottest new trend in 1999 and it somehow made sense, so he called his presentation “Internet of Things”.

The first considered IoT device was a toaster created by John Romkey that could be turned on and off over the internet for the October ’89 INTEROP conference. The device was connected to a computer with TCP/IP networking. It then used an information base(SNMP MIB) to turn the power on. Even though it was a very simple feature, today’s modern toasters still do not have this feature. This was meant to showcase what was possible with upcoming connected devices. Keep in mind the first web page was created in 1991.

The Rise of Robots

The concept of IoT started gaining popularity during the summer of 2010 when Google’s StreetView service had not only made 360 degree pictures but had also stored tons of data of people’s Wifi networks. People started wondering and debated whether this was the start of a new Google strategy to not only index the internet but also index the physical world.

That same year, the Chinese government announced a Five-Year-Plan to make the Internet of Things a strategic priority.

In 2012, the theme of Europe’s biggest internet conference LeWeb was the “Internet of Things” and at the same time majority of tech-focused magazines started using IoT as their vocabulary.

In October of 2013, IDC published a report stating that the Internet of Things would be a $8.9 trillion market in 2020.

In 2014, Google purchased Nest for $3.2 billion, a manufacturer of smart home thermostats while one of the biggest tech expo, Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in Las Vegas was held under the theme of IoT.

The Rise of Robots in manufacturing industry

Preprogram robots to perform specific tasks is more efficient with less error, so they are replacing humans in the manufacturing industry. Since machines started talking to each other directly than through humans has brought about a serious increase in production across the board. Because of that some factories basically can run themselves with little to no guidance and with machines telling each other what they need and when.

They don’t need a salary, health insurance, union, food but electricity and can continue churning out consistent products non stop except for maintenance. Because of this, it’s been positively great for the business owners to offer products at a lower costs. The rise of robots will influence the labor market very strongly over the next few decades.

What technologies in IoT?

Whenever talking about IoT, couple of technologies serves as the backbone. IoT primarily exploits standard protocols and networking technologies. Below is a couple of the most important ones:

RFID is a radio-frequency identification system that uses tags, or labels attached to the objects to be identified. Two- way radio transmitters-receivers called interrogators or readers send a signal to the tag and read its response. The readers generally is included to transmit their observations to a computer system by running RFID software or RFID middleware.

NFC consists of communication protocols for electronic devices, typically a mobile device and a standard device. Similar applications uses for example is when paying for items at a retailer by placing your phone or what smartwatch next to the payment machine.

Low-Energy Bluetooth supports the low power, long-use need of IoT function while exploiting a standard technology with native support across systems

Radio Protocols for creating low-rate private area networks. These technologies are low-power, but offer high throughput unlike many similar options. This increases the power of small local device networks without the typical costs.

LTE-A(Advanced) gives IoT tremendous power through expanding its range through 4g wireless technology, same as in your smartphone cellular network. Example for IoT with LTE-A is self driving vehicles and UAV.

WiFi-Direct eliminates the need for an access point and allows P2P(peer-to-peer) connections with the speed of WiFi, but with lower latency. Wifi-Direct eliminates an element of a network that often bogs it down, and it does not compromise on speed or throughput.

How smart are they?

An IoT brain can decide what it needs to know and what it doesn’t. This process is often guided by human programmers, but more and more devices is deep learning. Instead of individually programming any new IoT machines. Most companies is applying Machine Learning through cloud which is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from its data fed environment and attach consequences to its choices in a limited manner. One important thing to mention is our chip industry is still keeping up with Moore’s Laws, processor speed will double every 18 months. Which means, they are getting smaller, more power efficient while faster. Meaning, we can pack more transistors which equate to more power with same amount of physical space or lower energy usage.

Securities & Concerns

One drawback to applying machine learning as the source of smart machines is they require massive amount of data to work or make smart choices. Currently most data privacy concern is about our phones, tablets and computers only. Imagine a house surrounded by machine(things) co-existing with each other and your family without knowing what data they are all collecting. If you watched “Terminator” series when growing up, the main event in the movie is a tone down version of our reality.

By letting an IoT device in your home, you are basically allowing a bot, that can gather data from other digital devices, maybe even listen and observe you. Certain IoT supporters have touted data gathering as a major plus to the Internet of Things for marketers, improving your habits by knowing and easier to target ads at you.

Bottom line is we all want to keep certain things private and it’s going to easier to find by having having all our data floating around.

Final Thoughts

I think overall IoT will change our lives for the better. Even with changing labor landscape in manufacturing, new generation of workers will have to adapt to learn how to communicate with machines by receiving higher form of education, programming. We also need to have set laws governing what features, capabilities is allow to exist in consumer products. We also need more public transparency with data collection and what will happen to it. Besides that, I am very excited to be a Star Trek style living headquarters.