Richard Soley on Industrial Internet, AI, and the Future of Distributed Computing

From flying vehicles to smart buildings, this year’s IoTSWC will bring the best industrial internet solutions to Barcelona.

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is the leading organization promoting Industry 4.0 in the US. During the last five years, together with Fira Barcelona, it has been organizing the IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC), the leading conference of industrial IoT.

Dr. Richard Soley is the Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium and is responsible for the vision and direction of the organization. In addition to this role, Dr. Soley is Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG) – an international, nonprofit computer industry standards consortium — and Executive Director of the Cloud Standards Customer Council – an end-user advocacy group. Dr. Soley holds bachelor’s, masters, and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

We had the opportunity to interview Dr. Soley to learn about the impact of artificial intelligence on the industrial internet, what new exciting technologies we’ll see on this year’s IoTSWC, and the new alliance with the Fog Computing Consortium to promote distributed computing.

 

IoT Times: One of the highlights of the IoT Solutions World Congress is the testbeds. What new and exciting technologies are you expecting to have this year for the show?

 

Soley: The testbeds are selected through a competitive process, and the jury is literally now going through the proposals for testbeds, and I don’t know what testbeds are going to win. But I know which ones that I like. I expect that we’re going to see some flying vehicles. We’re going to see quite a few interesting agricultural projects. Agricultural projects are taking off like crazy. And we’re going to see some pharmaceutical testbeds as well, I hope, cause they’re interesting testbeds. But again, I can’t tell you which ones are going to win, because I don’t know yet. We should know by the end of May. I think the announcements are in the middle of June sometime. We expect testbeds that are a combination of interesting and innovative, and engaging and exciting demonstrations.

 

IoT Times: That’s great. Flying cars? That would be something interesting.

 

Soley: I don’t think we’re going to see flying cars, but I do think we’re going to see some flying things. If you have a 100,000-hectare farm, traveling around that farm by foot takes a while. But a flying vehicle can cover a lot of space in a very short time and tell you where you need to apply more fertilizer, more water, more seeds, and so forth. There are some interesting things in that space. We’re getting a lot of agricultural testbeds at the IIC as well, so I expect we’re going to see at least one new interesting agricultural test bed at IoT Solutions.

 

IoT Times: This year, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) was joined the OpenFog Consortium and formed a new organization. How are you working to promote edge and fog computing in this new role for the IIC?

 

Soley: First of all, the IIC had only one competitor, and that competitor was the OpenFog Consortium, and they’re now working together. The new Industrial Internet Consortium will emerge through that project. And one of the very first things that we determined is that when we talk about edge computing and when they talk about fog computing, we’re talking about the same thing. So we’re now calling both of them distributed computing, because they really are distributed computing, and we’re making it much simpler to use the architectures that came from both organizations, and updating the Industrial Internet Consortium’s technical architecture to include some of the work that has been developed by the OpenFog Consortium over the last three years.

 

The important thing is the realization that edge computing and fog computing are the same thing, and there’s no way to avoid that. That allows you to realize that all of the work that went into fog computing over the last three years, even though fog computing is not getting as much visibility as it used to, is not wasted because it’s the same thing as edge computing.

 

IoT Times: What about internet companies jumping into the industrial internet ecosystem? I remember six, seven years ago when everybody started to talk about IoT, everything was about hardware, hardware companies and trying to set up standards for communications. But now all these big guys like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon, they are jumping in with different products and services, including hardware. What do you think has changed in the market for all these people to jump into the ecosystem?

 

Soley: First of all, both IBM and Microsoft are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium, and participating quite heavily in all of the working groups at the IIC. But yes, we are seeing a lot more interest from Google and Amazon as well. They have traditionally been B2C companies, collecting information about consumers, whereas what we’re doing is much more focused on industrial systems. In the last few months, we’ve seen some of these companies realize that if they’re going to catalog all of the world’s information, they have to catalog industrial information too. I think it’s a classic disconnect between information technology, IT, and operational technology, OT. So we’re seeing, especially Google, but to some extent, Amazon as well, collect operational information, and I think we’re going to see them at the IIC. But we already had IBM and Microsoft participating very heavily in the IIC.

 

IoT Times: Artificial intelligence and machine learning are now one of the most important things that companies are looking at, and especially for IoT and edge computing. How do you see the current penetration of those technologies, and what do think machine learning and AI are going to be in the industrial IoT in the next five years?

 

Soley: I’ll come back to other technologies, but I’ll answer first around machine learning. It’s very simple, and I use the deep learning test bed at IIC as an example. The deep learning testbed is a Toshiba building outside Tokyo. This is a testbed that’s run by Dell and Toshiba. They have sensorized the building. The building has 35,000 sensors, and it collects 300 terabytes of data per day, two and a half petabytes a week of temperature, humidity, light, telephone usage, occupancy information, and so forth. No human being can possibly look at two petabytes a week, 300 terabytes a day. That just can’t happen. Instead, they’re feeding that information to a machine learning algorithm to try to learn how the building is used so they can optimize the building for maintenance and they can optimize the building for efficiency.

 

That’s a really good example of where machine learning is closely connected to IoT, industrial IoT. I think what’s going to be really exciting about IoT Solutions World Congress this year is we will also see augmented reality. Especially in the maintenance area, but I think in other areas as well. If you’re trying to take an enormous amount of information and make some use of it intelligently, you’re going to use machine learning to make use of that information. You’re going to use blockchain to trust that information, and you’re going to use augmented reality to display that information. I think we’re going to see some really exciting demonstrations of all three technologies as part of industrial IoT at IoT Solutions World Congress.

 

IoT Times: So what do you expect for this year’s congress? What are your goals for that?

 

Soley: I think we’re going to see modest growth, again. It can’t possibly be as fast as it’s been the last few years, but that would be amazing if it was. And I think we’re going to see new technologies join the industrial internet, such as AI/machine learning, blockchain technologies for trustworthiness, and augmented reality.

 

We’re going to see interesting testbeds, as we always see, and those are important because they allow us to understand how IoT is going to be used in real industries, whether that’s financial industry, agriculture, healthcare, smart buildings, smart cities, or manufacturing and production.

 

I think we’re going to see a big crowd again, because people want to know, how do I start? How do I benchmark myself against other companies in a similar area? And what’s the roadmap for applying industrial internet technology to my real company? So we’re going to see a lot of end users. We’re going to see a lot of vendors showing their wares. It should be exciting. I’m looking forward to it.

 

IoT Times: Thank you very much, Richard, looking forward to see you in Barcelona for IoTSWC.