Applying Artificial Intelligence into the Internet of Things
Forecasting the future is never easy, and there’s nothing unusual about analysts and companies who change their predictions from day to day. However, the projections concerning the Internet of Things (IoT) found on the Internet vary extremely significantly. If you follow discussions about the IoT, you must have heard the speculations that by 2020 there will have been 50 billion connected devices. Today it is 2017 and the estimate keeps getting closer to this number.
World Economic Forum shows that the number of the connected devices worldwide is 22.9 billions now. But no matter how many IoT devices there will be in the future, the possibilities that IoT is going to bring are endless. It is not without reason that the Internet of Things has even been labelled as “the next Industrial Revolution” — it is going to bring about great changes to the way people live, work, spend free time and interact with the world and people around. The Internet of Things is going to change the world, or rather it will merge two worlds — the physical world and the digital one. It is expected that we will have smart objects in healthcare, retailing, transportation, education, smart cities, connected homes, fashion and even farming.
Why Artificial Intelligence?
Definitely, all these changes will be about creating a quantifiable and measurable world where all devices are connected into an intelligent network which serves people to better manage their time, to make better decision based on the data collected in the past. This connected and well-informed new world will, undeniably, bring about many practical conveniences to our lives. It will improve our health, increase safety and comfort, save time and energy.
But wait! This IoT network must generate astronomical amounts of information! Is it easy to make sense of all this data collected by smart objects? Of course not. Now, it seems that everyone is troubled by the questions of how to deal with such huge amounts of data collected by all devices and sensors of IoT. Over time, the quantity of data will increase to even greater amounts — thus, what we really need now is to find a viable way to draw insights from all this information. We have to manipulate it in such a way as to find associations, correlations, similarities, patterns, but also incoherences and conflicts in order to see the bigger picture, and to be able to predict the future consequences of our actions or the possibilities in front of us. In this case, traditional methods of analysis are not adequate — they are rather time-consuming and most probably not so accurate.
Hopefully, we already have a solution at hand. It seems that the only and the best way to make sense out of all this IoT-generated data is using Artificial Intelligence (AI). We may find many definitions of AI on the Internet, Techopedia says that:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include: speech recognition, learning, planning, problem solving.
And it is not just about automatically turning off the lights in your house. Thanks to AI, the collected data improves the quality of life: enables intelligent automation, prediction and intervention. Terabytes of random data alone is nothing — the clue to the smart world is only meaningful data.
Where to find AI applications?
For many people Artificial Intelligence may sound like a fine piece of science fiction, but there could be nothing more wrong! We already live in such a world. There are a number of examples to mention. For instance, applications that recommend music and movies that you will probably like based on your interests and opinions you have expressed (e.g., Spotify), online customer support bots, which are automated responders able to interact with the customers visiting websites or, yet another example, well-known question-answering applications that you use on your smartphone.
Enorasis
Turning back to the core of the discussion, there are constantly emerging new technological solutions that challenge the field of AI-enhanced IoT. Some interesting examples may be found in farming — there appear projects, like Enorasis, which make use of sensors placed in the field which define how much water or fertilizers the crops need. The mechanism is very simple — the sensors gather the information about the temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall, weather forecast and the the crops themselves in order to prepare a detailed irrigation schedule which perfectly fulfils the demands of crops. What is more, these intelligent systems can even inform the farmers how much irrigation the crops need in order to increase the profits.
Lumiata
Wearable devices are yet another example worth writing about. In the past few years, there have been a lot of hype around smart bands which track your health. There have already appeared first devices which send real-time notifications on your body condition directly to your doctor. Thanks to it health service are able to act immediately and properly when they see alerts about life threatening conditions. Such situation is a palpable reality thanks to the AI which has the power to analyze the data it receives immediately and combining it with the general medical knowledge and other similar cases from the past. We can even say that AI is a kind of brain for machines and thanks to AI machines may think even better than people. A fine example of such a solution is Lumiata.
Without a doubt, we are entering into the world of omnipresent intelligence — we are surrounded by sensors, sophisticated systems and software which collects, stores, and analyzes huge amounts of data easily. Certainly, without Artificial intelligence we would not be able to make sense of the vast number of data collected by smart objects and that the real value of the Internet of Things lies in the insights.
The connection of the Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things will play a significant role in the future. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to become the most powerful technology, since it promises to solve the most complex problems, reduce human effort and automate time-consuming tasks and turn huge amounts of data into useful and fascinating insights.
— Jakub Probola, head of hub:raum Kraków
— Natalia Sokal, IoT creators
