What is IoT – At-least, as I understand the end goal of IoT is to represent real world entities as data. IoT is more emerging across industries. Every industry is trying to gather as much data as possible for variety of purposes.
IoT can help in achieving –
- Increased efficiency and productivity through automation
- Better decision making using the gathered data by applying AI/ML
- Good quality of life by taking advantage of connected devices
As data is prime in IoT, let’s see the role of data –
1) True data – Truthiness about collected data has become significantly important to arrive at the models for analysis. With IoT, there are always 2 ways a data is collected. Either the device represents itself (basic) or tries to collect information about other devices near it even-though the other device is not connected to internet (advanced). Since every device connected to internet reports the data – the truthiness of data can be more accurate.
2) Modes of data – There are always restriction on what data to be collected. Publicly available data – Sensitive Private data – Or both. This depends on the use case we try to resolve. Also depends on the customer willingness to share data.
3) Source of data – A home or institution or an enterprise in today’s world has variety of devices. Many of the devices/things are already connected to the internet. All the devices which are connected to internet can act as source of IoT data.
4) Privacy concerns over data – Privacy is a biggest challenging factor in achieving higher degree of success in IoT. In order to build customer trust there is always an option to opt in or opt out of IoT. The customer can either stop reporting data on a selected device or group of devices. This also includes option to enable/disable a device from being a proxy for other devices.
5) Storage medium – Collected data should be stored in a medium for further processing. NoSQL is the way forward for storing huge volumes of data. Based on the customer interest and privacy options the data can be stored in a private or public cloud.
6) Computation – AI/ML – All the collected data has to be processed to make the connected world even better. The analysis can be on n number of functionalities. AI/ML opens up capabilities to enrich the customer experience. Increased safety, comfort and efficiency of the customer. With Tensor Flow and Tensor Flow lite even ML is made simple. Google has come out with cloud TPU which can handle data processing at an higher speed over the cloud. All these computational engine capabilities can help in achieving higher accuracy of the model prediction in a faster way.
The success and emergence of IoT can be more helpful in areas like – Healthcare, Insurance, Banking, Automobile, law enforcement and most importantly Agriculture.
Below picture summarizes on what we discussed so far –
As technology evolves and computational capacity of machines increase it will be exciting to see the maturity of Internet of Things!
Shankar's Blog 