At the beginning of June (6-10) the inaugural edition of the IEEE Tech Industry Summit was held in Santa Clara, CA, USA. The program was set up to provide a focus on the various challenges in diverse areas that the Internet of Things (IoT) induces. Of course, such a new phenomenon as IoT also comes with new expectations. So be aware of the so-called Gartner hype cycle. With this article the author intends to only provide a brief overview in particular on topics that the author struck as personally interesting.
On Power & Energy Complexities
The Tech Industry Summit was opened by our president-elect Michael Condry. On the first morning, a session focused on the so-called power and energy complexities was chaired by John Hung. The very first presentation held by Andy Keates of Intel immediately clarified one of the challenges: how to sustain a steady voltage level when moving towards small form factors. Interesting to learn the approach Intel took also with start-up companies. Andy could already show results in graphs that dealing with the ever diminishing dimension showed promising progress: keeping the level steady. And Andy expresses his confidence that getting the voltage up to the level needed would just be a minor challenge :-).
Antoine Pasquin of Solantro made the case for IEEE open standards to drive the convergence of Distributed Generation (DG) and IoT.
On Security
It was clearly recognized and expressed that security has become fundamental to the success for the future. Presenters and the panel members all underwrote the importance thereof and the need to start dealing with from the chip level hardware. Hamed Soroush of RTI opened that session emphasizing the challenge to indeed protect the industrial internet.
Jeffrey Voas from the NIST clarified the need to standardize our language use also when it comes to the much-used acronym of IoT were indeed multiple connotations are in use simultaneously. Jeffrey introduced a new NIST specification and explained how they had come up with the new specification and terminology on Network of Things (NoT).
On Applications and ecoSystems
The presentations at the Summit once more clarified to the author that ecosystems are to be taken into perspective and that IoT goes along with Cloud and Big Data. And that much innovation can be achieved with applying Design Thinking.
An interesting perspective was also offered in the Applications session by Shyam Nath of GE Digital. Of course, Shyam shared with us a funny video on the old and new perspective the public has on GE :-). But much more interesting was the case presented on the Aviation Industrial Internet. Which could improve the client experience when traveling by airplane starting at his home already and saving costs nowadays incurred by the many stakeholders involved.
In Short
So this was just a very short report on a few topics presented at the IEEE Tech Industry Summit. Other sessions dealt with for example the relationship with Venture Capital, or on the IEEE Standard for an IoT Architectural Framework, on IoT Communication Challenges, Computation Challenges, and Application Areas. We can safely conclude that we are at the beginning of a new era involving Digital Transition. Albeit you could argue this has been going on for decades already but that now we have come at the stage of larger and massive adoption and use, and therefore also dependencies and thus challenges to deal with. Hence there remains a lot of work to be done.
Robert Bierwolf, VP Conferences
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