"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth."

Just recently I had the opportunity to attend the event Iot:: Empowering the Enterprise. The event was opened by a welcome note by Padmasree Warrior, CTO of CISCO, who predicted IoT as the next revolution of technology wave.
Then Wim Elfrink stepped onto the stage and started off that his kids would only have two statuses in life, asleep or alive. He questioned IoT being a hype and emphasized the fact that IoT could only be built in a joined effort. Furthermore he presented evidence that the selling of sensors would be exploding and sensors are being deployed everywhere. Only 1% is of our world today would be connected so far. He mentioned it would be less about the data more about how to transfer data to knowledge and wisdom. (Which reminded me after the famous Frank Zappa quote;) Surprising to me, Wim mentioned the public sector as the largest opportunity for sensors, he was calling for new governmental regulations to drive new opportunities. Finally, opened the stage for startup called relayr.io that provides connectivity to sensors bundled with an analytics platform.
Next on the agenda was panel discussion on the IoT eco-system. Debjit Mukerji from Siemens presented the notion of Web of Systems as an approach for moving from sensor-cloud analytics systems to decentralized, local information processing systems. Thus, IoT systems would not solely depend on connectivity to a cloud but could operate and reason locally in real time closer to the phenomenon. Debjit mentioned the importance of enterprises for startups to learn about industrial business cases, receive real-world feedback, access to testing resources and customers.
Amit Chaturvedy from Cisco Investments said the IoT would a global phenomenon wherof silicon valley startups would be mostly focusing on consumer applications, Germany would be leading in industrial developments, Asia about smart cities...different geographies would have different drivers.

From the startup pitches I recall pubnub allowing to connect devices in a secure manner, helium building networks on top of commercial wireless networks, edyn for monitoring plants (I can't help but hasn't Koubachi done than some time ago?), skyspecs making drones saving for industrial use, Ayla offering a network layer for remote monitoring, and placemeter quantifying the real world in real time using computer vision and video sensors.

VR Ferose from SAP sent out the message that connecting would be only the first step, the real value would be to learn from the data and most importantly provide enhanced customer experience. As an example he joked about settling down in the Bay area could be based on three apps google express, amazon prime and uber. IoT instead could go far beyond this experience provide new insights into predicitive maintenance and connected insurance. VR underlined his arguments by a remote control car demo where the premium rate has been adjusted to the driver's driving behavior. Personally, I was happy to see how earlier research [1] finally found its way into practice.

The last keynote on the program was delivered by Helmuth Ludwig who described integration of data during industrial manufacturing could be used the optimize performance and time to market. He mentioned the example of Omneo allowing to analyze events at real time. As you can't do physical prototypes for testing mars rover, simulation software can be used to eliminate prototypes, save resources, and increase efficiency. The future would rely on tools helping companies to produce in new ways, more efficiently and faster. For that reason, Siemens has opened its research lab in Berkeley to build bridges from the knowledge pool of universities and startups to the corporate world. As an example of this bridge he presented the video The Missing Link.

Overall, I enjoyed very much being at this event feeling the great passion for Internet of Things both in the corporate and the startup world. While I found a lot of belief that IoT will happen (e.g. presented by cisco), I still see more thoughts to be spend on innovative ideas about how IoT can really provide value across domains. Connecting millions, billions, trillions - whatever the large number should be - is just the first step. Just having access to more data does not really provide value in itself. 

How can we leverage these investments across completely different domains? How can a temperature sensors describe itself as a temperature sensor and team up with an air pressure close by to provide a more comprehensive picture and simultaneously calibrate itself using the data of another temperature sensor close by? Why would the owner of the temperature sensor allow access to his sensor, what could be an appropriate business model look like? How can we keep track of this connected layer, upgrade it and maintain it over time? How much can we achieve in the cloud, what do have to do locally, how can we transition effectively between cloud and edge?

To make IoT a reality in the enterprise there has to be more than collecting data, as Frank Zappa already recognized: "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth..." ;)

[1] Johannes Paefgen, Flavius Kehr, Yudan Zhai, Florian Michahelles: Driving Behavior Analysis with Smartphones: Insights from a Controlled Field Study, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGMOBILE Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'12), Ulm, Germany, December 2012 [PDF].

Summaries and Impressions: Internet of Things 2014 Conference, MIT, Oct 6-8, 2014

IoT2014 is the continuation of IoT2008 (Zurich), IoT2010 (Tokyo), IoT2012 (Wuxi). This conference focuses on both academia and industry, it applies a rigorous review process to research papers (according to IEEE guidelines), features focused workshops on IoT subtopics as well as demo and poster session presenting early ideas.

The audience comprises a rather unique set of researchers, consultants, end-users, funding agency representatives and entrepreneurs.

Siemens’ Web of things research team has been the this year’s gold sponsor. This yielded an honorary mention of Siemens in the opening of the conference, a keynote speech (presented by K. Bettenhausen), sponsor booth and appearance on print material. Additionally, team members of WoT were visible beyond by organizing the web of things workshop and various talks.

The keynote of Kurt Bettenhausen (Siemens) highlighted the economic importance of manufacturing industry across the world. He expressed the need for innovation in order to keep up with the pace of innovation coming from China. Thus, in Germany the vision of Industrie 4.0 has been created which suggests products carrying all the data throughout the production process describing the steps for the product necessary to get produced. The driver for this vision are individual customer needs, dynamic design of engineer, new services, increased efficiency, and the importance of work-life balance of workers. After the lost battle in internet technologies, software and mobile services, it's the European industries' chance to make Industrie 4.0 a reality. This should allow companies to gain more flexibility in manufacturing control, reduction of energy and shorter time to market. In addition to the efforts and opportunities of big data analytics, there is much more knowledge available locally during the production process already which should be leveraged: why re-learning constraints from data analytics as they were already know during the design process. Questions from the audience focused on the performance of the Industrie 4.0 project progress in Germany and explicit examples of I4.0. The keynote speaker mentioned successful collaboration between research, industry and government but was not willing to disclose specific examples of I4.0.

David Clark (MIT) explained why the Internet has been so successful despite and because of the many design flaws and compromises. He started out with reflecting on the initial goals of the Internet back in 1975: development of a generic, global reaching, layered approach following network. In retrospect he admitted various flaws. Configuring wifi routers in today's home can be challenging as the design of the IP protocol would not care about configuration. Also the systems would neither know nor care what the user was doing and could not never tell if there was going something wrong. Furthermore, the Internet was never designed for mobility. Instead, the IP protocol was designed as a stupid network. As key learnings David derived,

If you build an ugly system, everybody says how ugly it is, if you build a well-defined system, nobody will ever look at it.

Thus, the consequences for today are that connectivity is not a cost issue anymore but configuration is. Initially the Internet has been designed to route packets, the rest was left up to the application, today the Internet is more about routing money, package routing is just a side-effect;)

An IoT panel discussion has been lead by Alex Ilic from the Auto-ID Labs. The keypoints raised by the panelists Sanjay Sarma (MIT), Elgar Fleisch (ETH Zurich/HSG) and Scott Jenson (Google) were interesting and diverse. The Internet of Things should develop successfully in specific verticals first and then only derive generic principles for cross domain platforms. This would counter the "European" approach of EU-funded projects which have spend time and money on developing bullet proof and shiny solutions which have a hard time of adoption in any domain. There was, however, no consensus which approach would succeed, at least the Internet has followed build-it/fix-it approach;). History of industry has shown that whenever a dominant design [1] has evolved, the industry became successful. For the IoT we are still missing this dominant design, who could lead this effort, IT players, or verticals? Finally, healthcare was mentioned to bear the greatest potential for IoT, as here it is not just about money but about a huge societal problem. Healthcare is so expensive today and differences between developed and developing world are tremendous. IoT would have the potential to link information and devices, provide access, empower people, drive costs, and challenge expensive equipment, e.g. MRI's, with simpler sensors embedded in connected billions of phones.

Shouman Datta (MIT) built upon the argument of the previous panel discussion that IoT should not be just about money but even more about societal challenges. The grand challenge would be to build a platform that creates an ecosystem for other to follow. The vision of the IoT would be rather old anyway. Shouman mentioned projects like 'pay per pee', monitoring at the toilet, odd projects like 'print your face' and others. The ultimate potential for IoT in healthcare will be to connect a plethora of dumb disconnected device of today, increase patient safety and increase building a more comprehensive understanding what's going in the human body for longer periods of time.

Overall, the IoT conference has been a very exciting event. It has provided the unique mixing researchers and practitioners which is hard to find. I'm very much looking forward to the 2015 edition in Korea: www.iot2015.org

[1] Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, Utterback (1994) Harvard Business School Press ISBN 0-87584-342-5 Library call numbers HD58.8.U87 1994 658.4'06—dc20, p 24.

A short report about NFC 2013

As program chairs Josef Langer and Tuomo Tuika opened the Fifth International Workshop on Near-field Communication (NFC2013) in Zurich on February 5, 2013. I as the general chair introduced briefly about the previous hype on NFC and it's current loss against national football conference on google trends.

The goal of the workshop was to bring together experts on RF and smartcards technology, security, NFC-related applications,

services and business processes. We received 22 research paper submissions around these topics. A rigorous review

process was followed with each paper receiving three reviews from international experts of the program committee. Based

upon this process, thirteen full papers were selected to appear in these proceedings and to be presented at the workshop. This

resulted in an acceptance rate of 59% for 2013.

The papers covered a range of topics related to NFC payment and ticketing, security, retail applications, and NFC communication. 

Marcello Morean started off with a secure solution for mobile ticketing.
Christian Saminger presented a solution of ticketing using the inverse reader mode where the  phone acts as reader/write device whereas terminal emulates the nfc ticketing card. This approach works on any nfc without requiring a secure element.
Next, Gerald Madlmayr talked about the nfc payment ecosystem.

Michael Roland presented on hacking and fixing relay attacks against the google wallet. Ali Alshehri explained how to analyse coupon protocols using the CASPER/FDR framework.

Marcello Morena stepped in for his colleagues and reported about user-centered design process of developing an NFC museum app.
Mark Lochrie showed how to use NFC/checkins to curate music preferences. By reusing library cards the music could be controlled.


Gregor Broll reported about on-going work of displaying sugar saturation in products using multimodal feedback. Maali Alabdulhafith reported about how to use NFC to check for drug allergies and notify doctors and pharmacists accordingly. The system relies on the hospital's database entries but may trigger some false alarms if the DB is not properly curated.

All papers are available in the online proceedings as part of the IEEE Xplore libary.

Overall, it was an exciting workshop. It remains to be seen whether 2013 will be the year of NFC, after all the previous years have been suspects of this event already;)

Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia Conference 2012 in Ulm

Enrico Rukzio did a fabulous job in organizing MUM2012  in Ulm this year. Together with the PC-Co chairs Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila and Mark Billinghurst I could coordinate the collection of 389 reviews from 69 PC members for the 126 paper submissions we received from 359 authors out of 32 countries.
Dieter Schmalstieg opened the conference with his keynote Augmented Reality Technology for Smartphones. He nicely showed how this technology has evolved from expensive, bulky and immature platforms towards everyday AR in today's mobile phones. Ironically, though, all the AR systems of today (LayAR, Wikitude, Swisspeaks etc.) are simply based on compass and acceleration without taking any developments about visual and natural markers into account. Dieter showed some very impressive videos how AR experience can be improved significantly by stabilizing the digital overlays using markers extracted by image processing. Futhermore, he showed systems which could also recognize 'free space', e.g. blue sky, for placing digital overlays there instead of occluding important information from the real-world. Indeed fascinating was the presentation of the recording of a skate-board stunt which was recorded life, separated from the background and replayed and introduced as an AR layer in another setting over and over again.
While I was absolutely amazed about the technical achievements of AR research I'm still struggling with recognizing meaningful applications of this technologies. In the subsequent session Dieter mentioned replacing today's habit googeling for keywords on the mobile by instant web searches based on context and situations the users is in and pointing to: AR could replace the text-field of Google search...

I believe AR is a fascinating research area and also a great tool. Combining the advancements of visual markers/sensors/localization should help to make AR a useful and intuitive experience for accessing digital services in mobile user contexts.
Throughout the three days there was interesting work presented on novel design, mobile interaction, social interaction, security, mobile augmented reality, tools, audio, field studies, and public displays (see program). As part of these sessions I was presenting our work object circles which proposes to use the Google+ Circle concept for visualizing and managing data streams of smart items as an intuitive metaphor for everyday users. The underlying principle is to use the established interface of social media to also manage and interact with items and devices [1]. In addition to that, as part of the industry track, I presented our evaluation of the Dacuda scanmouse where could prove the more effective use of this device for everyday scanning tasks compared to multi-function printers, personal scanners, and mobile phone image taking [2]. Instead of a prototype I could actually show the working product which clearly showed to me the power of demonstrations. Let's see how many visitors will buy such a mouse;)
Finally, Flavius Kehr presented our field study on evaluating capturing of driving behavior via smart-phone vs. built-in fixed unit [3]. His statistical analysis showed that the fixed unit has more accuracy, however, the measurements of the phone are still significant to provide feedback to driver about his driving behaviour. Thus, Flavius could conclude with the clear finding that mobile devices are well suited to elicit driving behavior. This opens the space for many other players, e.g. insurance companies, to provide driving feedback in addition to the built-in systems of car manufacturers.

Nigel Davies provided the second keynote of the conference, he showed his passion about public displays as part of his involved into the PD-net project. He started off with the general benefits of giving a keynote: it allows you to present results without being bound to a strict scientific methodology. Despite the ubiquitous emergence of displays in public areas all these devices still suffer major short-comings: people feel disturbed by aggressive ads, the systems are passive and don't allow for interaction. There are much smarter ways of using these expensive installations: build toolkits to allow interactivity, implement context sensitive information, support audit-trails and hand-over for strolling users across several displays. Nigel also showed how ideas and concepts may quickly become obsolete: the idea of setting bluetooth-friendly usernames appears to be ridiculous today but seemed to be completely reasonable a few years ago [4].
As scenarios for more interactive displays he proposed emergency search for missing children, emergency announcements, behavior changes (e.g. collect vouchers by by-passing) and local marketing. Public displays should be open for users he concluded. Challenged by the question of why display providers would open up their systems Nigel responded with the proposal of radically re-thinking the concept of how displays are being used today: instead of catching eyballs based on impressions they would be more integrated into users needs. Nigel drew the analogy of Google embedding ads into search results rather than catching eyeballs on the front page. Whether the ad companies are already ready for this now is hard to say, Nigel admitted, but it would be worth trying.Public displays (sometimes also referred to as digital signage) is a growing field, a research community with its own conference has already been formed: The International Symposium on Pervasive Displays, 4-5 June, 2013 - Mountain View, California.

[1] Florian Michahelles, Philip Probst: Object Circles: Modeling physical objects as social relationships, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGMOBILE Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'12), Ulm, Germany, December 2012 [PDF].
[2] Matthias Wyss, Alexander Ilic, Florian Michahelles: The scanner at your finger tips - analysis of the effectiveness of the scan mouse device, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGMOBILE Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'12), Ulm, Germany, December 2012 [PDF].
[3] Driving Behavior Analysis with Smartphones: Insights from a Controlled Field Study, Johannes Paefgen, Flavius Kehr, Yudan Zhai, Florian Michahelles, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGMOBILE Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'12), Ulm, Germany, December 2012 [PDF].
[4] Nigel Davies, Adrian Friday, Peter Newman, Sarah Rutlidge, and Oliver Storz. 2009. Using bluetooth device names to support interaction in smart environments. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services (MobiSys '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 151-164.

Panel Discussion: "How do users find my app?"

Thanks to Lars Erik Holmquist from Yahoo Labs I had the opportunity to host a panel on “The curse of choice – how do users find your apps” at Siggraph Asia 2012. Together with my follow colleagues from previous Research in the Large workshop Henriette Cramer, FrankBentley and Niels Henze, and with Jaden Choi from TGrape we had an interesting discussion on apps. 

Nan Zhong, master student at ETH Zurich, opened the panel with a general introduction to the head and longtail nature of markets (slides). Head markets follow the so-called Pareto-principle which builds upon the fact that shelf space is usually limited, such that the merchant has to choose wisely which products to put on displays. The general rule is that only 20% out of all products generated a 80% of total revenue, thus niche products have a hard chance to appear on the shelf. Opposite to that are longtail markets which generated most of the revenue out of a huge variety of less popular niche products. However, this is only possible in digital markets were shelf-space is virtually unlimited and transaction costs of managing all these products can be kept low. Nan investigated [1] the nature of the Google Play market based on data-set of Appaware and – surprisingly – found: in contrast to most other digital markets (Netflix, amazon…), Google play is a clear Head market with even stronger characteristics than traditional retail. Thus, Nan’s conclusion was that developers should clearly focus on developing blockbuster. Furthermore, he found that the average capacity of users to install apps is limited by average to 40 apps. This means an app has to be really good in order to make it most user’s phone. What’s more, only 28% of all users would download not more than one paid app. Thus, free apps are much more likely to be successful. Furthermore, successful apps are rated better in general, whereas niche apps are used by expert users who are more critical give lower scores. Nan closed his talk with the suggestion to develop mechanisms that allow niche to be found more easily, as current collaborative filtering techniques would rather push successful apps even further.

Inspired by these insights we discussed various strategies of how developers could foster that their apps get found. Niels proposed to focus on search engine optimization by trying to understand how Google would rank apps. Thus, building up a history of a developer account releasing several successful apps overtime might help as well as tweaking the description of apps. Frank reported about his experience [2] of professionally marketing apps as any other product by approaching influential blogs launch posts that could trigger the demand for the app. Henriette proposed [4] to build upon the sharing friends by making apps social and allowing to be propagated by digital word of mouth.

We continued with the question of the price and Jaden Choi disclosed that he sees price rather following quality of the app. Price wouldn’t really matter so much, is rather a decision between paid and free app. Nan confirmed this finding saying that the 99cent price would be rather a relict of itunes than based on rational thinking. Also his research didn’t really reveal much experimentation of developers with adapting the price of apps. Jaden added that especially in Korea in-app payment for virtual gadgets would be strong opportunity and even more successful than having a paid app.

Niels disclosed his experience of releasing apps on Sunday [3] evening as the most effective measure getting users’ attention. Based on our experience with AppAware I mentioned that creating localized clones yourself from or own could be another approach to be found more easily in various languages and to get better positions in local app markets.

The fundamental question of developing interesting and new apps in the plethora of existing apps Frank answered by reverting on established methods of ethnography and experimentation. One approach would be to go out and observe users in order to get a glance what they might need. The next step then would be to “fail early”, meaning to release in short cycles and to learn from user comments to improve quickly.

Another interesting insight to me was that more expensive devices might also allow for more expensive apps. Finally, we had some controversy discussion about whether apps would prevail or rather be replaced by HTML5 web apps. The arguments by Frank (pro apps) and Niels (pro web-apps) where along the lines of barrier to install apps and technical flexibility of accessing hardware functions on the phone.

Overall, the panel together with about 50 visitors seemed to have been a good add-on at the Siggraph Asia conference. The App Symposium will be continued as a SiggraphMobile in 2013.

Additionally, Siggraph Asia was featuring an Emerging Technologies section. Different demos could be tried out proving new developments or also art and entertainment projects. My takes were controlling and seeing through a drone by a head-mounted display, “tasting” a website's ingredients (links, pics, bandwidth) as mixed liquor, an interface for controlling dancing robots, a force-sensitive display, an actuator game, and breath-awareness through a baloon.

Additionally, the Siggraph exhibition

featured a humanoid robot demo where a user's face gets project onto a mannequin representing a proxy of the user in meeting. <

Apart from that, Singapore is a fascinating place, an island of wealth, luxury, and strange rules in the heart of Asia. I really enjoyed the visit of the conference in Singapore. 

[1] Where should You Focus: Long Tail or Superstar?, An analysis of app adoption on the Android Market, Nan Zhong, Florian Michahelles. Symposium on Apps at Siggraph Asia, Singapore, November, 2012. [pdf] [slides]

[2] Frank Bentley, Santosh Basapur:   StoryPlace.Me: the path from studying elder communication to a public location-based video service, CHI EA '12, CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2012 

[3] Niels Henze, Susanne Boll: Release Your App on Sunday Eve: Finding the Best Time to Deploy Apps (poster), Adjunct proceedings of MobileHCI, 2011

[4] Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost, Lars Erik Holmquist (2011) Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare. Proc. MobileHCI’11, Stockholm, Sweden. pdf

Internet of Things 2012 in Wuxi

As a program co-chair I had the opportunity to visit the recent IoT conference hosted by Fudan University in Wuxi.

Elgar Fleisch opened IoT2012 by reviewing the potential of IoT to add things-generated data to the gulf of human-generated data. He listed standards, biz models, ownership management, and human behavior change as future research topics within the IoT domain.

Li-rong Zheng, general chair IoT2012, thanked the various organizers and conference chairs. Then, Junyu Wang reflected on the importance of Wuxi as the center of IoT in China walked through the program. A rigor selection of papers yielded an acceptance rate of only 24.7%.
Finally, I had the pleasure to introduce Stefan Ferber from Bosch who is not only a professional but also passionate private user of IoT technology (see his smart home here). In his opening keynote of IoT2012
Stefan Ferber (see his slides) introduced to various  IoT projects going on within Bosch and reflected on the significant differences between old and new economy in terms of organization structure, decision processes and effectiveness. He showed how technology finally helped to disrupt established hierarchies allowing for more flexible and dynamic patterns of collaboration. By refering to Conway's law ("organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations") he underlined the importance of changing organizations correspondingly along the technological innovations.

 

Stefan used the very strong metaphor colliding galaxies to express the impact of IoT to organizations. He introduced the geigermaps project as an example of how a grassroot movement of people connecting their sensors to each other can provide a much faster and more fine-graine picture on radiation than the official authorities could or wanted to provide during the Fukushima accident. As a second example of grassroot movement he refered to the iot bill of rights signed during the open iot assembly by various stakeholders of IoT as a free movement of concerned individuals outside regulatory bodies.
Stefan went on reflecting on the properties of IoT-enabled products. Originally, purposeful systems were handled and controlled by their owners: the owner was responsible, the producer only provided the tool. However, once the tool becomes smart this might change: the tool's functionality grows outside its original physical purpose and follows the digital configuration the producer has set-up. Thus, the producer becomes responsible as well (see also his blog post on his talk).





Haitao Liu, Wuxi SensingNet Industrialization Research Institute talked about  IoT projects in China which focus on standardization and  applications, such as resolving traffic jams, better public transportation and parking guide systems. As part of public security initiatives he mentioned the "Golden Shield Project" which aims at improving communication of security data and management of capturing technology as cameras in public areas. He also mentioned smart homes as an emerging trend in China which would pose challenges of integration and interoperability. There would be also several activities of environment monitoring where single measurements stations are being gradually replaced by swarms of collective pollution meters. Furthermore, IoT projects in China would also focus improving efficiency of agriculture and food safety.

Overall, it became pretty obvious that IoT in China clearly relies on central power and control leveraging the the central governance system. I'm pretty sure that sooner or later this approach will collide with the rather distributed technical nature of IoT. Mr. Liu concluded his talk by referring to the current bottlenecks of limited understanding of requirements, insufficient standards and prevailing information silos. He mentioned IoT as a big market for Chinese companies for transiting from traditional manufacturing to highter value IT businesses. The Chinese government sees IoT as new enginge to accelerate the development of Smart City construction for upgrading the industrialization in China.

Then the technical program started, the proceedings can be found here. Overall, the conference had about 300 visitors. According to comments I received from visitors the mix between large variety of  scientific and industrial workshops, demos and posters was highly appreciated.
Finally, the show goes on in 2014: see you all at IoT2014 hosted by Prof. Sanjay Sarma at MIT.