IBM CEO on Lessons & Opportunities in Internet of Things

Earlier this month IBM CEO Sam Palmisano gave a speech in London, in which he discussed IBM's products and services in the Internet of Things. He also outlined what IBM sees as emerging opportunities for "smart systems" over the coming decade. It was a significant speech, given that IBM has been probably the leading large tech company promoting the Internet of Things up till now.

When you consider that trillions of sensors will be deployed worldwide in the coming decade and the interest in Internet of Things from such high-ranking officials as China's Premier, IBM's use cases so far and its evolving strategy is definitely worth taking note of.

IBM's 'Smarter Planet' campaign and accompanying Tumblr blog have been in operation since November 2008. This strategy is about connecting objects to the Internet and applying intelligence and services on top of that.

Palmisano noted one of the key points about Internet of Things early in his speech - it puts computational power into "things no one would recognize as computers." Things like "cars, appliances, roadways and rail lines, power grids, clothes." He also mentioned processes and global supply chains, non-sexy markets that have proven to be early commercial successes for the company in Internet of Things. Finally, Palmisano pointed to implementation in "natural systems, such as agriculture and waterways."

He explained that "intelligence" can be gleaned off all of this data, "because we now have the processing power and advanced analytics to make sense of it all."

IBM claims to have developed 1,200 "smarter solutions" so far. Palmisano said that "in four cities where IBM has helped deploy congestion management solutions, traffic volume during peak periods has been reduced by up to 18 percent, CO2 emissions from motor vehicles were reduced by up to 14 percent, and public transit use increased by up to 7 percent." He listed other examples from healthcare, banking, power metering and retailing.

However, Palmisano cautioned that while the "technology may be ready, [...] your culture may not be." He talked about one of IBM's customers, Rosenau Transport in Canada. That company took over two years to implement a new 'smart' trucking system.

Another key thing to note about Internet of Things is the sheer volume of data that will flow through the Internet in the coming years. Palmisano remarked that "we are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world." He claimed that in three years time, IP traffic "is expected to total more than half a zettabyte" (which equals a trillion gigabytes).

He also said that "all this data is far more real-time than ever before" - which of course is another trend that ReadWriteWeb has been tracking closely.

Palmisano didn't neglect to mention the "disquieting implications" of the Internet of Things. In particular, privacy and security. However, he didn't give any reassurances on this front - other than to say that IBM is part of several coalitions, such as the Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition and the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative. He rather blandly added, "they [privacy and security] will require serious consideration and collaborative decision making across all the stakeholders of civil society."

Overall, we continue to be impressed by IBM's commitment to Internet of Things. It is leading the way in technology and implementation. The privacy implications (in particular) will potentially be a roadblock in some areas, together with the continuing difficulties of implementing technology such as RFID. So it will be interesting to see how IBM deals with those two issues over 2010.

NRL artificial intelligence team win 2 video awards (w/ Video)

Robot "Octavia," featured in "Robotic Secrets Revealed," demonstrates cognitive robotics being developed at NRL. Credit: NRL Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence. Researchers at NRL's Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, within the laboratory's Information Technology Division (ITD), received two top awards at the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) held in California. Selecting from a cadre of 39 competitor videos, IJCAI awarded the NRL films with top honors in the categories of "Best Overall" and "Most Informative."Since 2006, the Artificial Intelligence research community has held this prestigiously honored competition for videos documenting exciting artificial intelligence advances in research, education and application and that are accessible to a broad on-line audience.

"We are very excited to have won not just one, but two awards in our first year entering this competition," said Dr. Greg Trafton, section head, NRL Intelligent Systems Section. "Both videos are extremely entertaining and display the top-notch research currently occurring in artificial intelligence and robotics at NRL"

Researchers using parallel processing computing could save thousands by using an Xbox

Dr Simon Scarle

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study by a University of Warwick researcher has demonstrated that researchers trying to model a range of processes could use the power and capabilities of a particular XBox chip as a much cheaper alternative to other forms of parallel processing hardware.Dr Simon Scarle, a researcher in the University of Warwick’s WMG Digital Laboratory, wished to model how electrical excitations in the heart moved around damaged cardiac cells in order to investigate or even predict cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal electrical activity in the heart which can lead to a heart attack). To conduct these simulations using traditional CPU based processing one would normally need to book time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or spend thousands on a parallel network of PCs.

Dr Scarle however also had a background in the computer games industry as he had been a Software Engineer at the Warwickshire firm Rare Ltd, part of Microsoft Games Studios. His time there made him very aware of the parallel processing power of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of the XBox 360, the popular computer games console played in many homes. He was convinced that this chip could, for a few hundred pounds, be employed to conduct much the same scientific modelling as several thousand pounds of parallel network PCs.

The results of his work have just been published in the journal Computational Biology and Chemistry under the title of “Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem”. The good news is that his hunch was right and the XBox 360 GPU can indeed be used by researchers in exactly the money saving way he envisaged. Simon Scarle said:

“This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on “domestic” hardware for cardiac simulations. Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.” However his research does have some bad news for a particular set of cardiac researchers in that his study demonstrates that it is impossible to predict the rise of certain dangerous arrhythmias, as he has shown that cardiac cell models are affected by a specific limitation of computational systems known as the Halting problem.

Provided by University of Warwick link..

Surveillance software solves security snag

Sophisticated network surveillance technology developed at the University of Adelaide will help solve a security dilemma currently facing airports, casinos, CBDs, shopping malls and large sporting and entertainment venues around the world.New software will automatically integrate data from thousands of securitycameras in a video surveillance network into a single sensor, eliminating existing problems with huge information overloads.

Developed at the University's Australian Centre for Visual Technologies (ACVT), the software is being commercialised by Snap Network Video Surveillance Pty Ltd., a University spin-out company funded with a major investment from the Trans Tasman Commercialisation Fund (TTCF).

Dr Henry Detmold, Snap's Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, says this patented technology will provide significant benefits to large-scale surveillance applications in Australia and internationally.

"Security personnel at these sites are struggling against a huge information overload, trying to spot events in video walls displaying hundreds or thousands of cameras and trying to follow the action as it moves from camera to camera.

"The new technology acts as a force multiplier, saving security companies time, resources and money as well as boosting the chances of security staff spotting potentially harmful events. Having found events of interest, staff can then perform virtual walkthroughs to investigate without risking their personal safety," Dr Detmold says.

"Network security monitoring is currently limited by the inability of operators to recall the relationships between more than about 40 cameras in a network.

"Snap automatically finds the relationships between all the cameras in a network. This allows a single operator to follow people throughout the whole network, in real time, and is scalable to many thousands of cameras."

ACVT Director and Snap co-founder Professor Anton van den Hengel says the technology has applications across the full spectrum of large-scale video surveillance, including airports and the 2012 London Olympics.

Snap will receive equity funding of $500,000 from the Trans Tasman Commercialisation Fund (TTCF), a $30 million venture collaboration of South Australia's three public universities, Monash University in Victoria and the University of Auckland in New Zealand, with capital funding from the WA-based industry superannuation fund Westscheme.

"Snap is the first South Australian spinout company to receive equity funding from TTCF," says Roger Coats, the South Australian based investment manager for the TTCF, which is headquartered in Melbourne.

The South Australian universities' participation in the TTCF is facilitated by the South Australian Government, which contributes support for the fund's operating costs. The Governments of Victoria and New Zealand likewise provide financial support for operating costs.

Adelaide Research & Innovation Managing Director Robert Chalmers says thevideo surveillance software is an "exciting development for the University of Adelaide, reinforcing its reputation as a hub of world-class research and innovation".

Provided by University of Adelaide link..

On the road to secure car-to-car communications

PhysOrg.com) -- A European research project works out how to keep car-to-car data transmissions private and secure from malicious hackers.You pull out to overtake a slow lorry. Suddenly the lorry swerves into your path. You hit the brakes hard and avert a full-on collision by a whisker.

Thanking your luck, you drive on. But little do you know that the crash was not prevented by your lightening reflexes. Instead it took clever collaboration between the lorry, your car and the cars behind.

While you were stuck behind the lorry, a communications system mounted on your car had connected with one on the lorry. When the lorry swerved, your car immediately knew that it was in your path and automatically applied the brakes.

The extra fraction of a second's braking before you took over made all the difference. And a multi-car pile up was prevented by similar messages as they were relayed from your car to the vehicles behind.

The future in the fast lane

ICT is driving forward a new era of more efficient and safer road travel for European citizens. Just as ABS brake technology dramatically cut accidents and fatalities in the 1980s, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication will make our roads safer still.

But there is a big question to answer before the technology becomes widely adopted: is the communication link secure?

Imagine the chaos that a hacker could cause by sending bogus messages to vehicles. They could tell one car of an accident ahead, make the driver brake hard and actually cause an accident behind. They could invent fake traffic jams, encourage drivers to take alternative routes, then enjoy speeding along clear roads. Insecure communication systems could also let criminals track individual cars (e.g. celebrities, politicians) or harass drivers with unwanted alerts or spam messages.

“Car-makers and equipment manufacturers have to be certain that communication channels between cars and roadside infrastructure are secure from hackers and criminals and that their privacy is maintained,” explains Trialog’s Antonio Kung, coordinator of a European research project that has proposed a blueprint for secure car-to-car (C2C) connections. link..

Rome was built in a day, with hundreds of thousands of digital photos

The Colosseum is seen here in the digital reconstruction. Each triangle is where a person was standing when he or she took a photo. The building's shape is determined by analyzing photos taken from all these different perspectives. Credit: UniveA new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word "Rome" or "Roma" that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

Computers analyzed each image and in 21 hours combined them to create a 3-D digital model. With this model a viewer can fly around Rome's landmarks, from the Trevi Fountain to the Pantheon to the inside of the Sistine Chapel.

"How to match these massive collections of images to each other was a challenge," said Sameer Agarwal, a UW acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering and lead author of a paper being presented in October at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan. Until now, he said, "even if we had all the hardware we could get our hands on and then some, a reconstruction using this many photos would take forever."

Earlier versions of the UW photo-stitching technology are known as Photo Tourism. That technology was licensed in 2006 to Microsoft, which now offers it as a free tool called Photosynth.

"With Photosynth and Photo Tourism, we basically reconstruct individual landmarks. Here we're trying to reconstruct entire cities," said co-author Noah Snavely, who developed Photo Tourism as his UW doctoral work and is now an assistant professor at Cornell University.

Other co-authors of the new paper are Rick Szeliski of Microsoft Research, UW computer science professor Steve Seitz and UW graduate student Ian Simon.

In addition to Rome, the team recreated the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, processing 60,000 images in less than 23 hours using a cluster of 350 computers, and Venice, Italy, processing 250,000 images in 65 hours using a cluster of 500 computers. Many historians see Venice as a candidate for digital preservation before water does more damage to the city, the researchers said. Transitioning from landmarks to cities - going from hundreds of photos to hundreds of thousands of photos - is not trivial. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process, Agarwal said. A million photos would take more than a decade.

The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts. The code also uses parallel processing techniques, allowing it to run simultaneously on many computers, or even on remote servers connected through the Internet.

The new, faster code makes it possible to tackle more ambitious projects.

"If a city reconstruction took several months, it would be just about building Rome," Seitz said. "But on a timeline of one day you can methodically start going through all the cities and start building models of them."

This technique could create online maps that offer viewers a virtual-reality experience. The software could build cities for video games automatically, instead of doing so by hand. It also might be used in architecture for digital preservation of cities, or integrated with online maps, Seitz said.

In the near term, the "Rome in a Day" code could be used with Photo Tourism, Photosynth or other software designed to view the model output link..