A Cognitive approach to Internet of Things.SUSHANTH PATWARI -SXP0063

“LETS CONNECT EVERYTHING”

“WHEN WIRELESS IS PERFECTLY APPL IED THE WHOLE EARTH WILL BE CONVERTED INTO A HUGE BRAIN , WHICH IN FACT IT I S , ALL TH INGS BE ING PART ICLES OF A REAL AND RHYTHMIC WHOLE . . .AND THE INSTRUMENTS THROUGH WHICH WE SHALL BE ABLE TO DO TH IS WILL BE AMAZINGLY S IMPLE COMPARED WITH OUR PRESENT TELEPHONE. A MAN WILL BE ABLE TO CARRY ONE IN H IS VEST POCKET. “ – N IKOL A TESL A

Before we begin……During one of the classes professor mentioned how when he was a visiting computer scientist at the computer laboratory in Cambridge, England, he would go visit King’s College Chapel almost every afternoon to view Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi on display at the altar. And each time he never failed to experience a strong emotion of some kind.

I felt the same kind of strong emotion when I first heard what IoT was all about. This emotion influenced me to take it up as a prospective career choice ( sure have a long way to go though).

Professor also shared his experience of how Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial offered his first glimpse of a possible resolution to his long-standing conundrum of difference between sciences and engineering. The exact lines are “creation of artifacts entails a kind of reasoning and thinking that goes well beyond the thinking in the natural sciences that the artificial world contains its own distinctive logic was a revelation”. These lines perfectly describe what engineering is, we engineers touch life and I will say that as our creative super need. “To touch life”.

Producer-artifact-consumerApplying this triad to internet of things can be quite complex as IoT can be considered as a hybrid artifact.

Kevin Ashton is credited for inventing the term “the internet of things” to describe a system where the internet is connected to the physical world via sensors.

Ashton was born in Birmingham, UK. He was working as an assistant brand manager at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1997 when he became interested in using RFID to help manage P&G's supply chain. This work led him to MIT, where he helped start an RFID research consortium called the Auto-ID Center with professors Sanjay Sarma and Sunny Siu and researcher David Brock. The center opened in 1999 as an industry sponsored research project with the goal of creating a global open standard system to put RFID everywhere.

This is what I like to call the cognitive domino effect and this can be seen most prominently in consumer driven industry.

Producer-artifact-consumerThe artifact here is the Idea. The Idea that everything can be connected. The areas of life IoT is touching is just growing day by day.

I mentioned IoT as a hybrid artifact in the previous slide what I meant was when you look at IoT you can see that there are so many technologies involved, so many protocols and on top of that there are so many manufacturers constantly trying to get the consumers attention.

Cognitive identityAny idea comes down to one thing, its acceptance by the end user. The consumer decides if the idea was really worth.

This thing is what made IoT so popular and widely accepted. The consumers were able to identify the idea as something which would make their lives more easier and highly efficient. Many consumers don’t even care the effort taken up to develop the idea all they look for is if it is doing something which has never been done before, a uniqueness.

The consumers were introduced to a combination of products and technologies which they never thought could exist together and this fascinated them. We can say that the there was a strong emotional and aesthetic response as IoT touched every part of their life.

Creative encounter “If the response effects a significant change to the consumers cognitive identity then we will say that a creative encounter has occurred between the producer and consumer”- lines from the text.

As early as in 1982 a coke machine at Carnegie Mellon university became the first internet-connected appliance. It was able to report its inventory and whether newly loaded drinks were cool or not. There were several papers and discussions after that mainly on using wireless internet for connecting devices. The significant development happened when Kevin Ashton established his Auto-ID lab at MIT and started working on RFID.

This is where the consumers and producers had a creative encounter. If all equipment in daily life would be equipped with identifiers, computers could manage and inventory them. There was a change in consumers creative identity, earlier they would see inventory as a time taking painful job but now it was cool, just stick a RFID and just scan it voila you have the a entry into the inventory.

Cognitive styleAs IoT was developed by using a bunch of existing technologies we cannot attach a particular unique style to it. The idea is being utilized by a number of companies trying to fascinate a consumer with their own unique style. This may be considered as that companies cognitive style.

Let us compare two existing home automation systems.

1) Belkin WeMo – Protocols supported – Wifi, zigbee, no web based control console, no voicecontrol, no touch screen, in app push notification for alerts, price- $40- $130

2) Honeywell Total connect remote services- Z wave, Honeywell 5800, web based control console available, optional voice control, Email and sms alert system, touch screen available, price- $300 - $550.

Each product is appealing to same set of consumers but they have different cognitive styles. By cognitive style here I mean the balance they had to achieve between different technologies to implement the product. This also explains originality.

AestheticsAesthetics play a major role in acceptance of a product by consumers. Most of the consumers responsive sensibility is limited to appearance.

Design and appearance has become a major part of manufacturing these days and this is no different IoT products.

Paradigm shiftA creative process is a historical phenomenon.

It is always a work in progress, there is always room for something more.

IoT was built on existing technologies. The existing technologies made it possible for the producers to use that knowledge space and build something original, something unique out of them. It just proves that you always need that one creative spark to look at a different way of utilizing the existing thing and you will have a new idea which was possible only because those things had a historical existence.

IoT established a new paradigm, the area of connected devices was like a empty canvas and the idea was like a art masterpiece appreciated and accepted by the masses.

While researching about this topic I stumbled upon a new concept which I would like can act as a paradigm shift in IoT

Continued…..The new paradigm I am talking is cognitive internet of things* .

Current research on IoT mainly focuses on how to enable objects to sense the environment around them for themselves and make them connected to share the observations.

How about general objects have the capability of learn, think, and understand physical and social worlds by themselves? How about each appliance has its own brain?

This would a new paradigm in the world of IoT

Application scenario: This is really cool.

*Cognitive Internet of Things: A New Paradigm beyond Connection Qihui Wu, Senior Member, IEEE, Guoru Ding, Student Member, IEEE, Yuhua Xu, Student Member, IEEE, Shuo Feng, Zhiyong Du, Jinlong Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Keping Long, Senior Member, IEEE

Questions, queries, suggestions, critical comments, expert judgment.

All the above mentioned things are welcome.