Steven Max Patterson
Author Archives: Steven Max Patterson
- Home → Author's archive:
Steven Max Patterson
0
How SAP is making the shift to industrial IoT
The view of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) as billions of sensors connected into intelligent systems distracts from its true role: digital transformation. The gargantuan task and investment of making all these connections, reliably and securely, is pointless unless there is a solid business reason — and there are two very good ones.2 reasons manufacturers invest in IoT The first reason big companies invest in IoT is they are worried about being digitally disrupted by a Tesla, Uber, or the next AirBnb in their industries — disrupt or be disrupted.The second reason: a company’s slowing growth and the need for increased productivity. BCG’s Olivier Scalabre explained that driver during a 2016 Ted talk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How Cisco drives its industrial IoT business forward
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) does not have the explosive growth of the consumer internet. It’s a nitty-gritty, complicated, and sometimes downright boring business. It is too complex and diverse for explosive growth like the narrowly defined, one-size-fits-all iPhone. That said, the promise of rich returns on investment from new business models that are possible with IoT is very compelling.The only way to cut through the venture-driven IoT hype cycle is with conversations with builders and implementers at companies investing in IoT, such as Cisco’s co-innovation center chief, Maciej Kranz.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Rebuttal to Daring Fireball: FreeBSD, Intel and Microsoft did save the Mac
The point of my blog post, "What the IoT industry can learn from Apple’s revival of the Mac," was to use Apple’s pivot to the Intel platform and compliance with the Open Group’s Unix standards as an example of the importance of a large vibrant ecosystem (created by Intel and Microsoft) is for the IoT industry to follow.Without the PC ecosystem, the Mac would be an obsolete machine exhibited in the Computer History Museum. The PC ecosystem eliminated much redundant development, letting component and product companies focus on their products’ differentiation. The IoT industry would benefit if it had a robust ecosystem the eliminated redundant development. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How the internet of sound eliminates billions of IoT sensors
The Internet of Thing’s dirty little secret is the cost of deployment. For example, adding a low-cost motion sensor and radio to a traffic light to count passing vehicles before it leaves the factory is easy and inexpensive. The incremental cost of deployment is near zero, especially if low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) coverage or other low-cost communications coverage is available. But retrofitting the traffic light with sensors and radios will cost the municipality a public works truck roll, a crew, an electrician and a police traffic detail. Retrofits are expensive.Also on Network World: IoT standards battles could get messy Retrofitting the world for IoT is a data science and a sensor engineering task to study the IoT problem and find the simplest way to acquire the data. The question for the data scientist is what minimum data resolution will provide the desired result: How many sensors per unit of area and how many readings per time interval are necessary to solve the problem? The engineer must trade off sensor costs, radio costs and network availability, and power consumption versus available power sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How to build low-cost IoT sensor networks
Sensor Fusion for Public Space Utilization Monitoring in a Smart City (pdf) is simply the best read for IoT product designers, developers and implementers. It steps through designing a system to measure space utilization in a city — the trade-offs made in sensor selection and calibration, power source selection, network design, data cleaning and normalization, and data processing. The methodology can be generalized for designing any IoT network. The paper is nothing less than a perfect case study about how to build an IoT network.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network The most interesting aspects of the paper by Billy Pik Lik Lau, Nipun Wijerathne, and Chau Yuen of the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Benny Kai Kiat Ng of Curtin University is how they matched the sensors to acquire the data at the right resolution to estimate space utilization and built a test bed, minimizing a wide range of implementation issues. To measure space utilization, meaning how populated a space is over multiple time intervals, they chose sound and motion sensors and the fusion of the two. The methodology applied in this paper could be adapted to other sensor types.To read this Continue reading
0
What the IoT industry can learn from Apple’s revival of the Mac
This post is an excerpt from a talk I gave at the Reality Virtually Hackathon that makes a similar comparison between virtual reality and augmented reality and the Mac. It holds true for the Internet of Things (IoT) and every emerging technology.Many IoT devices makers build on proprietary platforms. Proprietary hardware is an advantage during the emergence of a new platform — until it is not. A proprietary platform protects intellectual property from reverse engineering because the software is tied to the hardware and it can be tuned for performance.Custom-designed hardware performs better — until it doesn’t. For example, when supercomputers, video bridges and CAD simulators were first introduced, all took advantage of custom, proprietary hardware to gain time to market. Now mature products, almost all the supercomputer, video bridge and CAD simulator suppliers use x86 and Nvidia platforms because these they have open ecosystems that add capabilities and value while reducing cost. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Will machine learning save the enterprise server business?
Nvidia and server makers Dell EMC, HPE, IBM and Supermicro announced enterprise servers featuring Nvidia’s Tesla V100 GPU. The question is, can servers designed for machine learning stem the erosion of enterprise server purchases as companies shift to PaaS, IaaS, and cloud services? The recent introduction of hardened industrial servers for IoT may indicate that server makers are looking for growth in vertical markets.There are very compelling reasons for moving enterprise workloads to Amazon, Google, IBM and other hosted infrastructures. The scalability of on-demand resources, operating efficiency at cloud-scale and security are just three of many reasons. For instance, Google has 90 engineers working on just security where most enterprises are understaffed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Will machine learning save the enterprise server business?
Nvidia and server makers Dell EMC, HPE, IBM and Supermicro announced enterprise servers featuring Nvidia’s Tesla V100 GPU. The question is, can servers designed for machine learning stem the erosion of enterprise server purchases as companies shift to PaaS, IaaS, and cloud services? The recent introduction of hardened industrial servers for IoT may indicate that server makers are looking for growth in vertical markets.There are very compelling reasons for moving enterprise workloads to Amazon, Google, IBM and other hosted infrastructures. The scalability of on-demand resources, operating efficiency at cloud-scale and security are just three of many reasons. For instance, Google has 90 engineers working on just security where most enterprises are understaffed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Pub/Sub model could connect IoT devices without carrier networks
Three characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT) differentiate it from industrial automation. IoT devices are inexpensive. IoT devices can be ubiquitously connected everyplace and anyplace. IoT devices have inexpensive or zero-cost deployment. It explains why we see so few IoT networks and why most of the industrial IoT forecasts are measurements of industrial automation that we have had for decades.The first one, with the exception of the issue of strong security, is easy. The second two, though, in New Jersey parlance — says easy does hard.Ubiquitous connectivity is talked about, and there is a glimmer of hope presented by Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Senet that focus on both low-cost technology and a business model for entrepreneurial partners to deploy networks. But waiting for carriers to perfect and deploy 5G networks to build IoT solutions will delay innovators and prevent early adopters from building proof-of-concept and prototype networks essential for the iterative learning of technical methods, business cases and making financial projections of the benefits of IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Pub/Sub model could connect IoT devices without carrier networks
Three characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT) differentiate it from industrial automation. IoT devices are inexpensive. IoT devices can be ubiquitously connected everyplace and anyplace. IoT devices have inexpensive or zero-cost deployment. It explains why we see so few IoT networks and why most of the industrial IoT forecasts are measurements of industrial automation that we have had for decades.The first one, with the exception of the issue of strong security, is easy. The second two, though, in New Jersey parlance — says easy does hard.Ubiquitous connectivity is talked about, and there is a glimmer of hope presented by Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Senet that focus on both low-cost technology and a business model for entrepreneurial partners to deploy networks. But waiting for carriers to perfect and deploy 5G networks to build IoT solutions will delay innovators and prevent early adopters from building proof-of-concept and prototype networks essential for the iterative learning of technical methods, business cases and making financial projections of the benefits of IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How Microsoft’s self-soaring sailplane improves IoT, digital assistants
A machine learning project to build an autonomous sailplane that remains aloft on thermal currents is impressive enough. But the work conducted by Microsoft researchers Andrey Kolobov and Iain Guilliard will also improve the decision making and trustworthiness of IoT devices, personal assistants and autonomous cars.The constraints limiting the computational resource of weight and space imposed by the airframe of the sailplane adds relevance to the many new developments in ubiquitous computing. The autonomous sailplane is controlled by a 160MHz Arm Cortex M4 with 256KB of RAM and 60KB of flash running on batteries that monitor the sensors, run the autopilot and control the servo motors, to which the researchers have added a machine learning model that continuously learns how to autonomously ride the thermal currents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
5 reasons why device makers cannot secure the IoT platform
If Akamai, Cisco and Google’s post-platform security and privacy machine learning security systems protecting the web and mobile platforms are indicative of the future, IoT device makers will only be part of a larger security ecosystem. That’s because they will not have the data to train the AI machine learning models. As a result, IoT post-platform security and privacy will become a layer on top of IoT device security. These five factors are why that will happen.1. Product developers underestimated IoT security In their race to market, product developers building for new platforms will underestimate the security and privacy features that should be built into their products. In some cases, this will be an act of commission, but most will be an act of omission because it is difficult to anticipate the vulnerabilities until the products reach the market at scale. Windows and mobile devices experienced something similar. They have been hardened, but earlier in their evolution they were an easy target for cyber criminals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
5 reasons why device makers cannot secure the IoT platform
If Akamai, Cisco and Google’s post-platform security and privacy machine learning security systems protecting the web and mobile platforms are indicative of the future, IoT device makers will only be part of a larger security ecosystem. That’s because they will not have the data to train the AI machine learning models. As a result, IoT post-platform security and privacy will become a layer on top of IoT device security. These five factors are why that will happen.1. Product developers underestimated IoT security In their race to market, product developers building for new platforms will underestimate the security and privacy features that should be built into their products. In some cases, this will be an act of commission, but most will be an act of omission because it is difficult to anticipate the vulnerabilities until the products reach the market at scale. Windows and mobile devices experienced something similar. They have been hardened, but earlier in their evolution they were an easy target for cyber criminals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
30 ways to improve IoT privacy
Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
30 ways to improve IoT privacy
Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
IoT privacy: 30 ways to build a security culture
Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full, please click here
0
IoT privacy: 30 ways to build a security culture
Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full, please click here
0
Using IoT to keep Mt. Washington hikers safe, predict weather
Weather on Mount Washington in New Hampshire can be biblical. On one occasion, I started an early-morning April ascent with fresh snow at the base. Mid-day we stripped to our base layer of clothing when the bright sun warmed the temperature to 60°F. At the peak elevation of 6,288 feet, dark clouds closed in, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. We ran for cover from lightning that had a very short distance to travel between the low clouds and the high peak to travel.After hiking the mountain a half-dozen times, in all seasons and all conditions, it’s interesting to learn how the Mount Washington Weather Observatory on the peak uses IoT to update weather conditions on this frequent hiker destination.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
This Mirai malware vaccine could protect insecure IoT devices
The hazard of unsophisticated and poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices came to the front last year with the Mirai DDoS attack that involved nearly a million bots. Many of these devices remain a threat.Researchers have posed an original solution to the problem: Use the vulnerability of these devices to inject a white worm that secures the devices. It is an epidemiological approach that creates immunity with a vaccine by exposing the immune system to a weakened form of the disease.+ Also on Network World: How to improve IoT security + These devices are still a threat because some cannot be fixed because they have hard-coded back doors. Other insecure devices have software or firmware vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed because product designers did not include a software updates mechanism.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
This Mirai malware vaccine could protect insecure IoT devices
The hazard of unsophisticated and poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices came to the front last year with the Mirai DDoS attack that involved nearly a million bots. Many of these devices remain a threat.Researchers have posed an original solution to the problem: Use the vulnerability of these devices to inject a white worm that secures the devices. It is an epidemiological approach that creates immunity with a vaccine by exposing the immune system to a weakened form of the disease.+ Also on Network World: How to improve IoT security + These devices are still a threat because some cannot be fixed because they have hard-coded back doors. Other insecure devices have software or firmware vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed because product designers did not include a software updates mechanism.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here