Internet of Things: The Top 5 IoT Trends for 2018
Internet of Things technologies and applications are trending for more than five years. At the beginning of the current decade, the hype of IoT was driven by predictions about billions of Internet-connected devices by 2020. These predictions have turned out to be true to a significant extent as there are already several billions of connected devices on the planet — in 2016 it was already around 6.38 billion.
Last year, in November 2017, during hub:raum IoT Academy in Athens, we had a pleasure to meet John Soldatos - Associate Professor at Athens Information Technology. He was our speaker at the event and spoke about the emerging Edge Computing & 5G technology, which prove to be a powerful digital mix for IoT. Today, we would like to share his predictions on the Top IoT Trends for 2018.
IoT is nowadays driven by accelerated advances in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchains. The latter boost the autonomy and smartness of Internet-connected objects, while at the same time enabling sophisticated applications that were hardly possible a few years ago. However, IoT is no longer about interconnecting and integrating numerous things within a cloud in a scalable, reliable and cost-effective way. Rather, it also stems from the employment and orchestration of smart objects (e.g., industrial robots and cyber-physical systems) and smart contents (e.g., augmented reality). A relevant paradigm shift is on-going and discussed during major IoT events, such as the hub:raum IoT Academy that was organized by hub:raum (the incubator of Deutsche Telekom) and COSMOTE in Athens last November, where I had the honor to be a speaker.
At the dawn of 2018, I have much better outline of the trends that will be shaping IoT technologies and applications during the year, but also in the years to come.
- Smart Objects
In 2018 we will see a proliferation of IoT applications that use smart objects i.e. “things” with semi-autonomous behavior. Typical examples of such “things” include industrial and socially assistive robots, autonomous vehicles, smart machines and more. Smart objects will open a new horizons to automation in industrial plants, factories, warehouses, smart homes and more. At the same time, they will introduce changes to conventional cloud architectures for IoT systems, as they latter need to be revised in order to enable the integration and cooperation of between cloud-based deployments of numerous passive sensors and the emerging smart objects.
2. Artificial Intelligence and IoT Applications
Recent advances in AI will influence the development of IoT applications. Deep learning systems will be blended into IoT platforms in order to enable the detection of complex patterns in IoT data. This integration will have to deal with the high velocity of IoT streams, which feature very high ingestion rates. In 2018, we will see tangible deployments of AI systems within industrial IoT applications such as predictive maintenance and zero-defect production.
3. Augmented Reality
Augmented reality can be used to provide cyber representations of the physical world based on IoT data. These cyber representations will provide insights that will facilitate field tasks. In 2018 we expect that the integration of IoT and AR will become more systematic in the areas such as field service engineering and worker safety. Likewise, IoT platforms will expand in this direction following early examples that emerged in 2017 (read more here).
4. CyberSecurity
During last couple of years the world has witnessed the first large scale security attacks against IoT devices, such as the denial of service attack against Dyn’s infrastructure (read more here) back in October 2016. In 2018 the IoT community will get more serious about IoT security based on tangible innovations in several directions:
- More and better integration with physical security as a result of the close affiliation of IoT applications with physical devices and physical world.
- Employment of novel data-driven techniques (including AI) for predicting and anticipating asymmetric and complex attacks against IoT infrastructures.
- User-friendly IoT security solutions, which will be destined for use by individuals of SMBs (Small Medium Businesses).
5. IoT Blockchains
Already in 2017, there were intense discussions about the potential applications of distributed ledger and blockchain technology in sectors other than the financial services industry. In 2018, we will see a wave of blockchain implementations for IoT applications in sectors like energy and healthcare. Blockchains provide some distinct advantages over centralized cloud systems, when it comes to enabling transactions between smart objects and across supply chains at scale. Furthermore, the crypto-features of blockchains can be also useful when it comes to protecting personal or industrial data. Implementations will take advantage of established blockchain infrastructures and projects, such as the Hyperledger Fabric project that eases the implementation of smart contracts.
At the networking forefront, these trends will be empowered by advances in Low Power Wide Area Networks (i.e. NB-IoT, LoRa) and the rising 4G/5G developments, which were presented in detailed during hub:raum IoT Academy workshop.
These are also the directions that I and my team are working on. For example, as part of our FAR-EDGE project we research the applicability of blockchain technology in industrial automation and more specifically in a manufacturing context. Moreover, we are working on the application of IoT technologies for predictive maintenance based on advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques, as part of our H2020 PROPHESY project. As of 01/01/2018, we have also started a novel research initiative on IoT security, which emphasizes the application of AI methods as a means of enabling a predictive approach to IoT security.
I am really keen on receiving your feedback and opinion on “Internet of Things: The Top 5 IoT Trends for 2018”. Please feel free to connect at LinkedIN or follow me at Twitter (@jsoldatos).
