Users’ devices (e.g. smart phones, with ever growing storage and processing capabilities, acting as hot-spots), and a multitudes of smart objects and things (e.g. from Consumers’ Electronics) with embedded communications, will create new challenges and opportunities at the edge of the network. It is estimated that, in less than ten years, there will be a few hundreds of billions of electronic devices (including machines, sensors, actuators, etc) connected with each other and to the Internet. A wave, innovating networks, starting at the edge.

At the edge (in the last few meters) there will (soon) be a growing number of such communicating entities, with powerful storage and processing capabilities, interacting one each other locally. Imagine cars or Users having a sort of communication halo around them (i.e. a range of connection, interaction). Imagine also kiosks and lamp streets having their own halos. Overlapping halos will allow networks to emerge spontaneously (as flocks of birds flying around). Short-middle range connectivity will be covered by local device-to-device communications, whilst long range interactions will be enabled by hopping into the big Net. Services and data will be virally delivered through multiple devices, machines, objects mostly by using local resources.

Is this scenario so far away in the future ? Not really: some military solutions (almost ready for civilian needs) are already available.

Today, creating – your own “halo” – by yourself would cost you less than one or two hundred euros (obviously depending on what and how many devices you wish to have). You may like to include, for example, an Android smart phone (which can act also as Wi-Fi Hot Spot), one (or more) cheap, tiny PC (e.g. a Raspberry Pi for $ 25) and one (or more) microcontroller (e.g. based on Arduino) for controlling any sensor, actuator or electronic gadget.

Raspberry Pi: a cheap, tiny PC for $ 25

It will be like a fully fledged wireless personal area network (with thousands of free applications available on the web). Once equipped with autonomic features it will be ready to interact spontaneously with other people’s halos to create dynamic local networks. Welcome to Edge Networks.

This scenario raises important issues for Stakeholders to consider. Are we ready?

Few months ago we talked about a company called Pachube that was investing on the next big thing, the Internet of Thing, also known like Web 3.0.

The news of 10 days ago is that Pachube has just been acquired by an other company, Logmein, leading provider of cloud based solutions. Logmein, born in 2003 in Boston, in a few years has reached 20 millions of users and 125 millions of connected devices. I used Logmein to manage my PCs in home LAN using their tunneling service through my ADSL modem that has only one public IP address.

What is happening in the IoT market and how can we comment this acquisition?

I’m enough sure that the pie of IoT will be huge and attractive (soon everything will be connected in internet) and there will be, like already happened in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, new small, innovative and disruptive players and big players with expertise and capitals. I think that there will be different markets with different customers and different rules. Probably huge players like HP, IBM, SUN/Oracle, SAP,…will continue to work for big customers (public and private) and small and disruptive will open the 3.0 to everyone and to everything.

I’m sure that there will not be a unique strategy, but different markets, different players, different game rules and different strategies also for same companies that will make decisions to get in different markets.

So what a Telco could do?

Maybe for markets with big customers it could make sense to have joint ventures or strong partnerships with big players guaranteeing quality of connectivity and cloud computing capabilities. In this markets will continue to be valid 1.0 rules.

Instead for 3.0 markets (2.0 users, 2.0 developers and 3.0 things) a telco or other players should have a 3.0 approach if they to want to compete with players like Logmein (Pachube), Google (Android@Home) or BTicino (MyHome).

In my opinion the 1.0 approach for a 3.0 market will be absolutely a crash because the users will choose the openest and the most user friendly solutions. Google will continue to grow in the 3.0 market.

Although the numbers forecasted by different sources can vary significantly there seems to be a consensus on the ubiquitous presence of sensors in our future (that is the one we are going to be in).

Cisco and Ericsson are expecting 50 billion of them by 2015, HP foresees 1 trillion by the end of this decade. To reach those figures sensors will need to be everywhere. Let’s dismiss immediately the concern that we cannot provide an identity to each of them: Ipv6 addressing scheme supports 1,500 identities per sq meter of the Earth surface, and 1,000 trillion sensors would require just ONE identity every 150 square meter!

However, placing sensors everywhere requires in many cases to have them fitting a variety of environment. One point in case is the embedding of sensors on deformable surfaces, like fabric (our dresses to name but one). Sensors technology is based on silicon that is a hard material impossible to stretch.

Stretchable sensors

But now, researchers at the Fraunhofer institute for Silicate Research ISC in Wurzburg have managed to develop sensors using elastomers. They can measure tension and pressure and can be stretched up to a point where they double their surface.

According to the researchers these sensors are just a few years away from the marketplace.

In a few years’ time, this is my bet. we will have sensors in any objects, including food packaging, and we will take for granted the interaction with objects.

This is a whole new area for telecommunications and there is a significant business involved. It is not about transporting bits (although this will remain a business), rather it is about delivery of services through the object and its interaction with us. The US is the key point from a biz point of view. We will be wiling to pay for customized interactions and that requires an intermediator to bring in the knowledge about us.
Welcome Web 3.0.

According to IBM, by 2013, there will be  1.2 billion connected electronic devices (sensor, appliances, meters, transformers, wind turbines, rooftop solar panels and so on), in more than 800 million homes with broadband Internet access. This network is called Internet of Things, IoT. With that, we have an opportunity to make our homes smarter.

Taking into account energy consumption the IoT could unleash several new services to save energy. Imagine our refrigerator being automatically adjusted based on the weather, the lights turning off if we have enough light coming from outside, our washer and dryer determining water temperature and wash/rinse/dry time based on load volume, dirt level and time-of-day energy rates, etc.

Your smart home may looks like this, normal.

In order to have smart services like these and achieve optimum efficiency, which is after all the idea behind a smart grid, it is necessary to link many millions of devices across our entire electrical, and communication infrastructure.  With all devices communicating one another there will be a lot of data traveling back and forth in many directions. It is hard to estimate how much data, but I truly believe that it will be a “huuuuge” amount.  Being able to deal with a massive volume of data that need to be processed cheaply in order to monetize value is a key element for this area, but of course there are other challenges like the design of algorithms to offer smart services, and so on.

Cloud computing has been one of the biggest trends for computing and the web of the past decade. Bringing the management of that massive volume of data to cloud computing style services could be an interesting opportunity for the main players in the game of smarter services for energy consumption, as utility industry, and Telecom Operators. Sure new applications and services (previously unthinkable) will come to light, in all shapes and sizes. But I tend to believe that the Internet of thing and cloud computing are meant to each other.

In his book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age”, C. Shirky argues that “the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource”.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

Indeed the diffusion of wireless communications and the ubiquitous availability of miniaturized devices (with growing processing and storage capabilities) is likely to change social paradigms through an highly connected world.  A limitless variety of (real/virtual) objects with embedded wireless communication capabilities will be able to receive, process and transmit information to and from other devices (of humans and machines) and (real/virtual) objects through omni-pervasive autonomic networks.

So in the future we’ll live in a highly interconnected environment which is between real and virtual worlds: our lives activities will be carried out by exploiting the potentiality of an omni-pervasive network interconnecting not only people, but also virtual objects (clones of your mobile phone or PC on the cloud, any pieces of s/w as a service, applications, etc.) and real objects real mobile phone or PC, any kind of electronics devices, sensor/actuator, any physical object, etc).

This evolution will also integrate Social Networks and Internet of Objects realms enabling the development of new ecosystems around real/virtual objects, maybe even moving towards decentralised micro-manufacturing models.

Suppose you invent a concept of a real object and you wish to build it: you start sketching it and then you can forward the preliminary electronic sketch to an expert designer (that you have discovered with your social network tools). He produces a detailed electronic design. Then you have discovered (still on the network) that a SME (or more than one, or some friend of yours) can build that object, so you forward them the detailed design for the manufacturing phase. At the end, the produced real object can be augmented with the information about its features and the development process (maybe creating also a virtual clone of it that can live and be updated on the Cloud), for example: the specifications, who had the concept idea, who produced the (detailed) designed, who produced and assembled it.  Then, you may wish to sell it over the cyber-market (the design or the real object or both): your social networking tool may help you also in doing that.

This paper provides further examples about combining Social Networks and the Internet of Things:

http://www.im.ethz.ch/publications/thingstwitter_ciot2010/

In general, I think that (to put forward this vision) one of the most promising area we need to investigate is how Social Networking tools can take advantage of key functionalities/services of underneath (autonomic) pervasive networks (and viceversa), for example certified discovery (of people and machine/objects) and message routing (virally, towards humans and machines/objects).

As we all know, Internet of Things is a brand new future in world, the low cost and the convenience in every corner of daily life absolutely may change our future life style. It is a very powerful weapon not only to control the masses but also to control every object they use.

China will start exploring the ‘Internet of Things’ very soon also. Within a government context, the areas of application would be public assets/facilities management, environmental surveillance, disaster management, and remote monitoring of health. Pervasive adoption of Internet of Things will not only help government solve many practical issues, meanwhile it will generate a big industry ecosystem which is beneficial for the society as a whole

There are few hurdles preventing adoption currently, such as lack of standards and a scarcity of proven successes. In order to leverage Internet of Things successfully, governments would have to clearly identify their needs and work out a clear structure for different stakeholders to work together. Here below, there are some specific points that china has to fix on the way, and also i think it is a positive approach to have a pre-view of our Marco Polo2.0 entering China——the very special emerging market in the world.

1．Policies and regulations.

Internet of Things is not a small product, nor a small business can do that. it requires not only technology, but also a variety of forces of integration which is involved in every industry. Therefore, the country’s industrial policy and legislation should be in the front to ensure the normal development of the industry by formulating suitable policies and regulations for the development of this industry.

We all know that the automotive industry is a major industry in economic development. for a very long time, China’s auto industry policy-making dominated by the hands of a number of interest groups, such as FAW, SAIC these cars factories, affect the country’s policy formulation and dominate this industry to a large extent through state-owned enterprises, an important industry on behalf of, which makes the new force can not enter the Chinese automobile industry. These groups simply do not work hard or make any progress to conduct research and development after they benefit, but think the only one way of development is the joint venture. The result is Chinese car industry was not well developed, but the one making money is foreign business, while consumers in China has been paid far higher than the international market to buy a car more than 10 years. However, the industrial policy is changed and Chery, Geely, BYD these enterprises entered the automotive industry, China’s automotive industry developed at high speed, and continuous showing new models with the prices greatly reducing.

After World War II, the U.S. economy once is not particularly strong, but by the 90s of last century, the U.S. information superhighway program is not only government investment, but also give a lot of support in industrial policy, which lead to high-speed development of the U.S. information industry, and now the world’s PC and Internet-based information industries are complete controlled by the hands of the Americans, which not only benefit a lot, but also received great political interests and culture & communication values.
So for the complex Internet of Things there must be government policy supported. In order to have true meaning of development, the Government should form dedicated and specialized agencies to study and coordinate, otherwise, it can only modicum of success, rather than perfect.

2.The unification and harmony of technology standard.

With the development of the internet, the problem of unifying the standard of the internet is solved wonderfully. There are unified TCP/IP protocol and router protocol which are worldwide used. There is also perfect solution to unify the operation system. Therefore, we can surfer online no matter whichever computer we are using and wherever we are. During the development of Internet of Things, new technology will be invented in sensor layer, transfer layer and application layer. Different precept will be also used. If there is not a unified standard, serious problems will come out. Quite a lot of intranets which are in very small scale would not make up of an internet and also can not form an integrated business model or economies of scale. Thus the research budget would not decrease. As a result, how to unify the technology standard and form a management mechanism will become a urgent problem. If we solve the problems successfully at first, the rest problem will become easy. Otherwise, things will become more and more difficult.

This issue is also relating to the first one. How can the unify standard be built without government management and relevant policy?

3.Management platform.

What is Internet of Things? We usually mention RFID which is known as sensor. Actually, sensor has been already invented. Although the technology of sensor is still developing, it is not difficult to do the research in a high level. Where is the key value of the Internet of Things? It is in the internet but not the things. Sensor is easy technology and the information of things which is detecting by the sensor is meaningless if there is no network to manage them. Therefore, building a nationwide, integrated management platform, which is used to collect and manage the information by different subject, becomes very important. A small business department may use the sensor technology. However, it cannot build an efficiency nationwide network. Without the management platform, the single network must be low efficiency and high budget. Therefore, it will not be continue developing and will not benefit anyone.

The carrier of telecommunication is the most powerful one to join the construction of this platform. It is also possible that there would be other department comes out to construct it. It is believable that the builders of this platform will get better position and benefit most.

4.Composing of the security system.

The sensor technology of the Internet of Things bases on using RFID. Products which embed this kind of chip can be identified and managed by humans. However, troubles are coming while the host is managing and identifying the products. Products information can be known by others while being identified and managed by hosts. How to protect privacy of the product during managing and identifying, especially prevent competitor from getting these important information becomes a serious problem. It makes people focus on designing the security system. There will be a couple of secure problems such as which kind of secure problem will come and how to fix them. These problems are complex and unclear. And they must be treated carefully by the management platform supplier. If these problems are not solved well enough, the Internet of Things will become a platform of sharing privacy for competitors. Thus the importance of Internet of Things will declined and there will nobody wants to try it.

5.Development of application

The Internet of Things is not only a sensor network, but also everyone to take part in. Different industries will apply it in different ways and have different requests. The constructive development depends on the request of the industries. It cannot rely on the carrier and the department of Internet of Things. Both of them would not understand the major points of the network. It is hard and it takes time. It needs to wait for the network accomplished and benefit the traditional industry. Thus more and more companies could find out the advantage of Internet of Things and they would find out why it is worth to use. Then they will connect their business and the Internet of Things.

It is just the beginning of Internet of Things. The benefits will not appear unless each member of our society works hard. Although there are quite a lot of problems need to be fixed, these five problems major problems. Once we can offer a good solution of these five problems, we will build a fabulous Internet of Things.

There is a nice book, by the British scientist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976), where it is claimed that we are “built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines”.  In particular, the book elaborates on how biological evolution mainly depends on self-replicating units of transmission, i.e., the gene. Also, in the following book, The Extended Phenotype (1982), Dawkins argues that individual organisms are replicators that have extended phenotypic effects on society and the world at large.

 “By dictating the way survival machines and their nervous systems are built, genes exert ultimate power over behavior. But the moment-to-moment decisions about what to do next are taken by the nervous system. Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives. But as brains became more highly developed, they took over more and more of the actual policy decisions, using tricks like learning and simulation in doing so.”

Also, The Selfish Gene argues that information influencing evolution is not only bio-molecular: for elaborating that, R. Dawkins introduced, in the book, the word meme. Meme is a cultural unit of transmission, capable of influencing cultural evolution (examples included songs, catch-phrases, beliefs, fashions, etc). By the way, cultural evolutionary models make use of the term “cultural trait” or “cultural phenotype” with a similar meaning of meme. So, one may wonder if/how genes and memes influence each other or even if they can coevolve.

Well, it seems so, at least according to [1], [2] with the so-called memetic driving process. It works like this: memes competition results in some memes becoming more successful and widely imitated (while others fail). People who are best at imitating or copying (propagating) the most successful memes acquire advantages in terms of status and survival, e.g. also being preferentially selected mates. It seems so simple, but implications look like complex.

Then if the degree of interdependence of gene and meme seems impacting social behavior and evolution, what’s the role of social networking in this process?  Consider, for example, the epidemic spread of a piece of information through a social network or the word of mouth in a blogspace for diffusing a fashion, or adopting a service. Maybe tomorrow, structure and dynamics of the future Internet of Things will play a new significant role also in this (for example, small-world networks show much faster propagation capabilities than a simple diffusion models on regular, or random networks). Some interesting simulations, in this direction, are reported in [4] and [5].

Will future Internet (connecting billions of devices) enable new forms of “replicators” (based on digital information) ? [6]

HP Labs has announced (New York Times Nov. 18, 2009) a project called “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE): it is a R&D program to build a planet-wide sensing network, using millions and millions of tiny, cheap and sensitive detectors (e.g. accelerometers that detect motion and vibrations, ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity) [1]. CeNSE is another effort in building a pervasive infrastructure gathering and processing huge amounts of data.

We see a general consensus that data around the world will continue growing and everything will become more instrumented and interconnected (Internet of Things). Most probably, this trend will bring also the need of innovative computational and networking paradigms – i.e. enhanced with cognitive capabilities capable of spotting patterns in huge amount of data, to analyze, route and integrate information real-time and to deal with stochastic behaviors typical of complex, real environments. A question arises: are current computing paradigms ready to face these challenges?

In the direction of inventing brain-inspired computational paradigms (facing challenges of a pervasive Internet of Things), a recent press released [2] announced that scientists, at IBM Research, in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed for the first time a near real-time cortical simulation of the brain (with a scale of 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses).  Specifically, in collaboration with Stanford University, IBM has developed an algorithm (Blue Matter) [3] exploiting the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain. Final goal is building brain-like computing systems based on a compact, low-power chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions.

On the other hand, as Roberto pointed out in November 21st post, new results seem indicating that some elementary brain-like functions, e.g. counting, may be achieved with only a hundred neurons, that advanced thinking can be done with a greater but still limited number of neurons and that even consciousness might be generated (in principle) with smaller neuronal networks than billions spiking neurons! Nature is amazing.

Reading that I am more and more convinced that a clear understanding of how the brain works requires considering higher level models than the ones at the neuronal level. This is what Nobel Prize Prof. Brian D. Josephson argues in [4]. It looks reasonable to think that subtleties of brain such as consciousness have as basis higher level forms of description than ones at the neuronal level, whose role might be limited to justifying the higher levels. For example, Prof. J. Cowan (University of Chicago) discovered that neural activity could be effectively described as an analog of a chemical reaction-diffusion process (see my last post), and that at rest, it is statistically similar to Brownian motion; such description ignore, in turn, first-principles derivation from very basic physical laws. Nature has jumped ahead of us: once we become aware of these generic biological models we can probably make use of them to progress our understanding of the brain.

This approach leaves main questions open: What are these generic models? How do hierarchies of models emerge (and concatenate) in the brain? How are higher level models justified by the neuronal level? And beyond that, at the very basic physical laws?

References

1. http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=11423&m=54146
2. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28842.wss#release
3. http://www.modha.org/C2S2/2009/11182009/content/MICCAI_BlueMatter.pdf
4. http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/mm/articles/cognition.html

Researchers from The University of Washington have started to produce a contact lens with simple built-in electronics, with only one LED wirelessly powered by RF, “which is so far a barely hint at what will soon be possible with this technology”, they comment.

They say these lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Moreover, they affirm that even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. “With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display”, they say.

Moreover, they affirm that all the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place and they have initially tested few prototypes on animals, proving that the platform can be safe. “What must be done now is to have all the subsystems working together, shrink some of the components even more, and extend the RF power harvesting to higher efficiencies and to distances greater than the current few centimeters”, they say. Furthermore, “a companion device must be built to do all the necessary computing or image processing to truly prove that the system can form images on demand”, they complete.

They are starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and they aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user’s real field of vision. Nonetheless, they affirm that the true promise of this research is to begin a new business possibility in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions.

We must keep an eye on it!

For further information about the Project, see the original post here:

There is a general consensus that Internet will evolve to become the backbone for communications and services. Basically everything will be connected to the Internet: people, communities, machines, objects, information, services and processes.

Growth of storage capacity coupled with enhanced processing capabilities and always-on connectivity will make terminals gain a dominant role in communications. This evolution will deeply impact network architectures. Indeed one of the main challenges will be understanding the ways future Internet actors (in the sense of Social Network Analysis) will communicate and interact, and how these will impact network evolution.

Studies and simulations on Small-World (SW) networks represent an interesting attempt to model the dynamical behavior of social, economic and physical networks. For example, in literature there are several studies to understand the effect of SW networks on classical systems, such as using the Ising model. I’ve always been fascinated by the simple beauty of the Ising model, one of the pillars of Statistical Physics: it is the most famous spin system model to study phase transitions. It was introduced in 1925 by Ernst Ising in his Ph.D. thesis.

Ising model has been used to simulate systems behaviors in which individual elements (called magnetic spins) can modify their behavior so as to adapt to the behavior of other individuals in their vicinity and to an external field (for details please see the following link). Elements might be real spins, molecules in a gas, atoms in a magnet, polymers or even a node of a SW network.

Please see more details here:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/~gabor/classwork/ising.pdf

However, they say that human social networks are more likely open systems, and as such, subject to nonequilibrium-like transitions; moreover many social and biz relations are asymmetric and it is not just the number of connections a person has that should be considered but also the frequency and duration of contact for those links. We need to study some evolutions of this kind of models.

Please see some results in this direction in this paper:

http://www.citebase.org/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:cond-mat/0110500

As a matter of fact, these aspects may play an important and unforeseen role on the behavior of social models evolving on SW networks: it might turn out the emergence of unexpected relationships and not trivial phase diagrams.

By the way, concerning unexpected relations between scientific domains and emerging relationships, I would suggest taking a look at the world’s first Map of Science:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/nb.story/story_id/15965/nb_date/2009-03-11