It’s hard to imagine that in a world where we’ve produced more data in the past few years than in the entirety of human history, there’s room for much more.
Yet, there is. When pioneering MIT researcher Kevin Ashton took the stage at the BT Tower Talk on 11 February, he left the crowd open-mouthed with an infographic demonstrating the scale of the data explosion: if a kilobyte (the measurement previously used to gauge volumes of data) is the size of a person, then the zettabyte now used to measure data is equivalent to the size of Europe.
Ashton is best known as the man who coined “The internet of things” - that phrase you’ve often heard but may struggle to wrap your head around. When we talk about “things”, do we mean websites, tweets and cat photos?
Actually, no: the internet of things (IoT) is distinct from the world behind our web browsers, explains Ashton. It is the network of physical objects - such as phones, cars, food and clothing - that make up the real world. Ashton (now based in Austin, Texas) has spent more than a decade perfecting data-capturing sensors that can make these objects smarter, capable of storing and sharing valuable information.
“The digital age is all very nice,” says Ashton, “but you can’t eat a tweet. We are physical beings that depend on physical things for survival. The IoT gives these physical things the ability to capture information by themselves.”
Smart solutions
The idea came to Ashton while working for Proctor & Gamble in the late 1990s. As a brand manager, Ashton was tasked with monitoring the sales of a new lipstick line. He noticed a problem when visiting vendors such as Tesco: the most popular shade was regularly sold out, and wasn’t being re-stocked fast enough.
“In those days, the only way people found out what was happening in the real world was to go around with clipboards,” he recalls. “So I told P&G to put a microchip in the lipstick and a radio receiver in the shelf, so the lipstick could tell us when the shelf needed re-stocking.”
The past fifteen years have seen the IoT become a hotly-tipped tool for fixing complex challenges, from GPS maps in smartphones to sensors that monitor traffic congestion, pollution, and energy use in homes and businesses.
“The real world is where our problems are, and it’s time that our IT helped with that,” says Ashton. “Not being able to buy your favourite shade of lipstick isn’t the end of the world. But when you’re talking about tracking supplies of medicine, or levels of water, oil and electricity - then things become very important.”
A major application for the future will be in so-called “smart cities”. With more than half the world’s population in urban spaces, technology that can make cities more efficient, and ultimately more sustainable, is of major interest to governments and businesses.
Presenting alongside Ashton, BT’s MD of research Tim Whitley highlighted how the company’s role in initiatives such as the Milton Keynes Smart City project, a partnership between BT, Milton Keynes Council and the Open University that will see real-time data gathered from the city’s infrastructure, is part of the march forward.
Suzi Williams, group marketing and brand director at BT says the opportunity for developing the IoT is “huge, and the appetite is coming from outside the UK too. Last June over 200 mayors and city leaders attended the BT Global City Leaders’ summit in Liverpool, part of the International Festival of Business, of which BT was a lead partner. The group discussed how cities can be at the forefront of utilising technology to improve the quality of life for their citizens.”
“Mayors see the potential of the Internet of Things to make their cities better places to live and work in, from Istanbul to Tokyo, Santander to Quito,” she adds “As Tim highlighted, the IoT can help on both an environmental and a financial level. For example, not wasting petrol picking up rubbish bins that aren’t full, intelligent street lighting and smart car parking.”
Risk and reward
When asked about the risk appetite for investing in this kind of technology, Williams adds: “innovation always involves risk. That’s one of the reasons we started the BT Ingenious programme – it’s about culture change, organisations have to be bold enough to say ‘we are investing in the future and if something goes wrong, we are smart enough to work it out’.”
The question of risk is one that gets put to Ashton a lot. For instance, are there troubling artificial-intelligence implications of “empowering computers to observe, identify and understand the world”, as he has advocated in the past?
“People are primed by Hollywood and science-fiction writers to believe that technology can all go wrong overnight, and then only Will Smith can save us,” laughs Ashton. “The reality is that technology saves us every day, and will continue to do so.”
So what’s the next big challenge for the IoT? Turning our ever-expanding data soup into something intelligible, and without needing people to do it, says Ashton. “Data science is the next hurdle. Information is trivial unless you can make sense of it, and we’re working on machines that can do this for us.”
Williams agrees: “The next frontier is capturing a galaxy of information in a meaningful way, without human intervention – and BT is absolutely at the heart of enabling this.”
And can we really create a machine that’s capable of this? “Of course we can,” says Ashton, a self-confessed optimist. “Go talk to Siri.”
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