Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Things. Everything that I have talked to you about today, there is always, in one way,
form or shape, a human interaction. Our sensors are becoming more and more
intelligent. We are getting more and more of them. Here are some of the statistics of
what exactly is happening every minute in the world. Frankly, the one statistic that I
love most is that apparently every minute in the world we shoot 208,333 Angry Birds!
Now, that is not really something that adds a lot of value but we are seeing a
tremendous amount of devices that will be able to provide feedback from the
information they process. I started by talking about the importance of using that
information to be able to make decisions. The Internet of Things is all about that. It is
about pervasive connectivity. It is about the use of smart devices and it is about the
better usage of the explosion of information that is actually becoming available to us.
So, where can that help? Where do we use these devices? I have put a number of
examples together. We track wildlife, we try to really understand what is happening
with our global warming, we use it for access controls, etc.
I will give you an example in the area of geophysical mapping, infrastructures,
traffic control. Do you realize that when a plane flies for a couple of hours, it
generates something like 500 gigabytes worth of information that is actually being
processed to understand when the plane needs to be maintained, if something could
go wrong, and so on? That is just the start, they are examples of where the use of
sensors, the acquisition of that real time information really gives us the capability to
take decisions, to understand in detail what is actually happening. So let me give you
an example, about a year and a half ago I started talking to a company that is doing
surveillance cameras, you know them, they are all over the place. What I did not
realize is that in this world that is ever more becoming digital, 90% of the surveillance
cameras are still analog. Believe me or not, they are analog and they feed into those
tapes that are actually keeping the last two, three, four hours' worth of information.
And then the information is wiped out, replaced by the new one, not very efficient.
So the idea we came up with was to digitize that information. Then at least we can
store it in digital format. And if we digitized that information, would there be a way
that we could start analyzing it? It just happens to be that there are a couple of
companies around the world that are able to analyze video information for strange
things, but it needs to be digital. These companies started doing that for military
purposes and now this is becoming more available. I can analyze the information, I
can detect something strange is happening and then I have a decision to make, what
do I do with it? Do I warn the owner where he is and feed him back what is actually
happening so that he can decide whether he wants to intervene, call the police or do
nothing?
This is a completely different experience because in a traditional world when
something happens, there is a robbery, for example, the only thing you can do is you
bring the tape to the police and hope that they can see something, probably eight
hours later or whatever. You hope the information has not been wiped out yet. Here
you are getting into real time, you are getting close to what is actually happening. You
can take the appropriate decisions because you have started combining the different
technologies that I have talked about.
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