Excellent article from applemagazine.com gathered from an interview with Bret Greenstein, VP of IBM’s Watson IoT Consumer Business. Here are a few thoughts from this interview.
The article mentions, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) being one of today’s biggest buzzwords but that doesn’t mean that everyone using it knows exactly what it is.”
Exactly!! And do businesses or consumers even care what it is?
No!
In a consumer context, I know little about how a car engine works but I love to drive. I believe the same is true for AI. I know how to talk, I ask a question or state a command, and I get a response from my gadget. The only limitation, whether for business or consumer, is knowing enough to connect all of the devices and apps to harness the full potential of the IoT. Even with my Alexa, it takes time researching and some creativity to work through use-cases and determine how to connect all of your apps, devices and content sources.
Mr. Greenstein states that pushing processing power to “the edge” will continue to gain steam. As I have commented before, edge computing is a specific “use-case” enabler. If your use-case does not require immediate computing, analysis and greater privacy, sending data to the cloud may work just fine. If your use-cases do need these things, edge computing may make more sense. When architecting your IoT solution it is clearly important to determine upfront your use-cases and how to design the best end-user experience. For example, the article provides an edge use-case as “a system within a home care setting that is able to detect signs which imply that the resident is in danger, without compromising their privacy.” Edge computing is more effective than cloud for delivering this use-case to the end-user.
Blockchain is referenced and continues to gain support as an effective way to secure M2M connectivity. We’ve covered this before here and here and here.
And lastly, the IoT will continue to transform the industrial manufacturing landscape. Absolutely right on!
Also published on Medium.
