The challenges and possibilities of IoT, big data


The first
day of Future Tech Week, busy. (Images via Future Tech
Week)

The latest buzzwords in technology – big data,
Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and information security – all
found a sprawling home at the first
Future Technology
Week
(FTW) on March 29-31.

From smart homes to smart glasses for the blind,
from memory recording wearables to smart city solutions, the FTW
display at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) felt like a science
fiction movie playing into reality.

With an overwhelming and, at times, overlapping
agenda, the 10,000 attendees had to pick from a variety of sessions
that included lectures, workshops and market labs.

At the Innovation
Zone
, ‘The Hive Start Up Showdown’ for 50,000
Emirate dirhams in prize money took place on the first day followed
by ‘Capture The Flag’, a cyber security competition on the second
and a hackathon on the last.

IoT
dominated the first two days of FTW.
GE set up a booth
with its latest game changing offerings, along with a panel Marwan
Al-Roub, executive director at GE Innovation Centre later gave a
talk on “Power and Water: Smart City Solutions & [The] Return
of Experience”.
Rabi Dabbousi, managing director and
general manager at Cisco UAE, stressed that the IoT option was not
a new addition to industry conversation. Rather, it has been
ushering the “fourth industrial revolution” for
years.
 


Capture the flag competition on day 3 at the innovation
zone.

“We have barely scratched the surface of the
amount of things we have been able to do and the  limitless
possibilities ahead of us,” Dabbousi explained. “Less than half of
the world population is actually connected. We have been able to
achieve what we have achieved in a very short period of time with
limited amount of people connected to the Internet. That’s a huge
opportunity.”

Organized by DWTC, the event featured four
industry trade platforms:
Gulf Information Security Expo &
Conference
(GISEC), Gulf Enterprise Mobility Exhibition
& Conference
(GEMEC), the Internet of Things Expo
(IoTX) and The Big Data
Show

Getting smart

Tapping into the limitless possibilities were
the discussions around smart city solutions.

Jamie Cudden, Smart Cities Program director at the
Dublin City Council, gave an
overview  of Dublin’s transition to becoming a smart city. The
similarities between the Irish capital and Dubai were hard to miss.
Cudden pointed out how just like Dubai is for the MENA region,
Dublin is a hub for many social media and tech companies attempting
to reach the rest of the region, and beyond.

“These employees [of the tech companies] demand
a smart city, and really this is one of the drivers of why our city
needed to be smart,” he said. “IoT is at the peak of inflated
expectations. It’s not about the number of sensors [in the city],
it’s about what you do with them, how you drive change with that
technology…it requires a break down of silos between the different
agencies and requires new business models. IoT is a very complex
ecosystem. It’s about setting the agenda and what we want to learn
from these conversations.”

Dr.
Aravind Vijayragahavan
, lecturer in nano material at the
University of Manchester, discussed groundbreaking future tech
materials like graphene, while Shaun Moore, CEO and cofounder of
smart doorbell Chui, revealed the path to building an IoT
device.

Connecting the cities of the future
The IoTx panel on connecting the cities of the future.

The conversation trickled into the role of IoT
in education, especially for those with special needs.
Panelist

Ibrahim Elfadel
, a professor at Masdar
University hypothesized the use of IoT improving mobility and the
physical classroom experience for those with special
needs.

“If IoT should do one and one thing only, it
should make the life of people a lot easier,” added Saif Salem
Bamadhaf, CTO of Higher Colleges of Technology.  

Health tech

According to Matthew Wallhead, DWTC’s director
of business development of exhibitions and events management,
“healthcare, education, energy and utilities, transport and smart
cities are viewed as the core industries driving IoT growth”.
 A large healthcare presence was evident at multiple
sessions.

In fact, Dubai based Mosaikx won Hive’s
startup competition for its memory recording device  was
originally designed for those with memory loss issues.

Wearable tech that can detect epileptic
symptoms,
Empatica, too
made an appearance, as did
BodyO– the
brainchild of the UAE national football team’s fitness coach,
Patrice Coutard. BodyO is a platform for connected wellness
devices, using data to improve the fitness levels of
humans.

Mike Bugambe, global chief analytics officer
of
JustGiving,
however, uses data to analyze people’s giving habits. In his talk
at the Big Data Show, Bugambe discussed “the new paradigm of
data”.

What is being gathered is largely unstructured
he said. Coming in images, sentiment and sound, “big data allows us
to look at the whole world as a laboratory, so we can actually put
an equation next to your behavior,” he said.

Big means big

More data has been created in the

past two years
than in the entire history of
the human race.

Global spend on IoT is expected to $2 trillion by 2020
with the number of connected devices to hit 100 billion by 2025,
according
to Huawei Technologies.

Security, therefore, demanded its own panels and
discussions at FTW.

At the GiSEC forum, FTW hosted a live hacking
session with Tudor Enache, specialist at
aeCert.

Though it didn’t work on the day of the show,
Enache demonstrated how a smart plug could easily become an evil
plug, hacking into devices connected to the same network. Logging
into the ever convenient free wifi, could actually put individual
at risk, Enache said
.

It is Harshul Joshi’s duty to manage those
risks. As senior vice president of cyber governance of risk and
compliance at
Dark
Matter
, he knows.

“With more connections, we see more threat
vectors come into play,” Joshi explained. “ To reduce the
probability of security [breach] we work in four buckets-
prevention, how quickly can we detect and if we detect then how
quickly can we respond and if something really goes bad, how
quickly can we recover…It’s brand new field. The key is to work
together.”

Bugambe used data science to decipher the
unavoidable popularity of IoT, Big Data, Mobility and Security in
the industry.

“One
of the top reasons why people are paying attention to this is the
fear of disruption,” he said. “A lot of large organizations are
trying to avoid the Netflix effect. They don’t want a new small
start up getting better access to the information to disrupt, their
long archaic industries. Companies are putting money where their
mouth is…every single industry is jumping into this
space.”

Source : Wamda.com

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