Mainstream futurologists spend a lot of time talking abut the future of work and the future of the internet -- for good reason, since they are major parts of regular life. But how much do they really know about what the IoT actually is, and is becoming?
At NSF, some folks recently asked me to write a little piece on the IoT, where it is going and what we could do to affect where it is going. This is just my personal reaction to that question, not anything at all official... yes, I see major threats, opportunities and needs for action in new directions. I wrote it for NSF, but it certainly goes well beyond NSF.
So first I copy over the draft, and then add some comments about tricky aspects beyond the draft.
At the end, I later add a follow-on paper, formally on "smart cities", which gets a bit deeper into some of these issues -- such as health care, privacy, sequestration...
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New Directions at
NSF for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Paul J. Werbos, Oct. 30, 2014
1. Summary
NSF
already funds substantial research related to most of the many, complex
requirements of the IoT. For example, many of the potential important benefits to
the nation lie in three key application domains: (1) energy; (2) healthcare;
and (3) education and human potential. Conscious attention to long-term
transformative national needs and opportunities possible through the IOT could
be enhanced in all three areas, but important efforts are already being made.
Likewise, the enabling technologies of data analytics, prediction, control, low
power radio communication, machine
intelligence, human-computer interface and associated large-scale internet technology
are all receiving attention. There is growing attention to cloud computing,
with large centrally maintained server farms,
as one approach to implement new algorithms and cope with the growing
deluge of data from IOT and other sources.
The
opportunities for doing even better in this area come in three main possible
areas: (1) technical improvements and better, more forward looking integration
of the existing efforts; (2) improved
translational work connecting these to downstream users; and (3) new directions
to address the growing concerns about security and privacy, and strengthening
the free market of ideas which underlies the unique productivity of America’s
university system and economy in general.
Because so
much attention has already been given to (1) and (2), the many unmet
possibilities for positive benefit in IOT as such are relatively technical, and
hard to summarize at the “300,000 foot” level. Most striking perhaps are: (1)
developing ways for teams of humans and robots to work together in coordinated
tasks, which have often been discussed, but which could become more concrete by
addressing testbeds of an X prize flavor in remote mining, in assembly of a
well-defined family of large space structures [1], or in assembly of large CPS solar
farms (for which construction labor is the main cost, unlike PV farms); (2)
expansion of immersive experience, including remote laboratory experience and
student health monitoring, connected to a cross-cutting new effort in improving
education of the Other 3 Billion (O3B, in Google’s terms) connected to other
expansions in the internet as such both on earth and in space. Both of these
would require NSF to work in greater partnership with others. NSF efforts on
(3) are relatively new [3], and offer more opportunities for new directions, as
well as new basic intellectual challenges and dilemmas of great importance to
national needs. Unresolved issues about
privacy and security are perhaps the major barrier today facing vendors of IoT
and cloud services [2].
2. Basic Background on IoT—What It is and How it
is Seen
Wikipedia
[4] defines the IoT as “the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded
computing devices within the existing internet infrastructure.” In practice, it
also entails the development of new technology for the devices themselves, and
expansion of the existing Internet to make better use of them.
In May 2013, McKinsey Institute published a
widely cited evaluation of 12 new disruptive technologies, including IoT, and
predicted that the global economic impact of IoT could reach $2.7 trillion to $6.2
trillion per year by 2025 [5,6]. An IBM viewpoint [7] states: “The industry
predicts that by 2010 possibly 50 billion devices will be connected, which is
10 times the number of all current Internet hosts, including connected mobile
phones.”
McKinsey [8] envisions two types
of market or application. First, there are three markets for new information
and analysis opened up by IoT: (1) the tracking of behavior; (2) enhanced
situational awareness; and (3) sensor-driven decision analytics. There are
three markets for automation and control: (1) process optimization; (2)
optimized resource consumption; and (3) complex autonomous systems. Goldman
Sachs [9] partitions the same markets in a more concrete way, as five segments:
(1) wearable electronics; (2) connected cars; (3) connected homes; (4)
connected cities; and (5) industries, such as intelligent power grid and
healthcare.
A thorough review by Wikipedia
[4] discusses many such applications, but focuses on the key enabling
technologies such as the required new protocols, architectures, security and
privacy, without which it could all tank.
All three levels of analysis
(McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Wikipedia) give important insights and are relevant
to assessing the portfolio and potential of NSF work.
3. Issues of Security and Privacy
Since the
9/11 event, the world has been facing a growing difficulty in trying to do
justice to three major values:
(1)
Security vis-à-vis growing
risks from terrorism, particularly considering the possibility of escalation of
terrorism to weapons of mass destruction (WMD);
(2)
Cybersecurity, in the face
of rising threats, including a greater ability by hackers to locate and exploit
all kinds of back doors, and to use control of physical devices to cause
physical destruction;
(3)
Protection of privacy and
intellectual property, which is essential to systems of trust and
confidentiality like the NSF review process, and to intellectual creativity and
productivity in general.
The
tension between these three values is
analogous in a way to the tension between creating jobs and reducing national
debt (while accounting for economic growth and sustainability). It will play out on a global stage much
larger than anything NSF can decide.
However, in both cases, technical creativity could be useful in offering
better choices or tradeoffs, to require less damage to one value while pursuing
another.
This
section will discuss each of these three values in more detail.
3.1.
Terrorism and Monitoring
With regards to (1), NSF
partnership with DHS [10] brought us some awareness of just how severe and how
real some of the challenges are, looking forward. At one meeting, it was said
that the United States is like a house with 20 doors, 10 locked tight with lots
of opportunities to strengthen the locks, and 10 open and swinging wide for all
the world to see with no realistic ideas in sight for how to close them. For the case of “dirty bombs” (radioactivity
but not fission), the main reason we have not seen major scares yet is that the
supply of such materials is very limited at the source. However, as the world
energy economy goes through major transformations, the availability of nuclear
material and technology now seems likely to grow substantially, in all parts of
the world, stable and unstable. (Breakthroughs
in renewable energy technology could possibly help reduce that factor, but on
the present path they are not moving fast enough.)
In recent discussions with DNDO/DHS, they were shifting
towards more reliance on human intelligence and deterrence (as can be seen by
inspecting the last funding announcement, in comparison with earlier ones) to
cope with this threat. However, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and the
global response to them, many have said that the old methods of human
intelligence are no longer working so well. This poses one dilemma, and one
value which needs to be considered.
3.2.
Cybersecurity and IoT
On the other hand, many
view the emerging cybersecurity threats as even more serious than WMD
terrorism. In IEEE-USA meetings and
other venues, leaders from the electric utility industry have told us again and
again that they view cybersecurity and electromagnetic pulses (EMP) as the two
biggest threats to the working of the power grid. Congressional legislation has
reflected those concerns. The number of cyberattacks has been rising at a very
rapid rate, and has also grown more sophisticated. At a meeting at the National
Defense University in 2009, Sandia researchers showed how big generators can be
taken out by a cyberattack – enough perhaps to send the entire US back to the dark
ages, due to system of system effects. Of course, the Internet of Things
includes embedded control systems, which are the front lines of any attack
intended to cause physical damage. Putting those things on the Internet does
create serious new risks.
Cybersecurity has also become a
large and profitable industry for many consulting firms. This has mixed benefits
and costs. On the one hand, a growing
workforce has emerged of real-time operations people, monitoring threats, and
expanding capabilities for intrusion detection and isolation. However, as the
tide of attacks grows larger and larger, beyond the ability of this workforce
to cope with well enough, many financial institutions hope to be saved by a
combination of better intrusion detection and “sandboxing” to test suspicious
software. Alongside these capabilities have evolved additional protections
involving identity authentication, procedures and so on. Recent NSF research
[3] has shown ways to improve password protection systems. Research in China
has been especially active in biometric methods, and may possibly be ahead of
the US in that area. Consulting firms do tend to have a vested interest in
maintaining the sales and credibility of the limited capabilities they now have
to offer.
However, many involved in really
critical physical infrastructure argue that all of these methods combined still
are not enough. After all, just one explosion of a major generator would be a
huge problem, even if the responsible attack was only one success out of a million
attempts (not an unrealistic number for what is coming). Thus, when the
“things” are critical generators or other critical embedded systems, much of
the front line power industry uses a different type of operating system,
Security Enhanced (SE) Linux , developed in part with help from the NSA.
SE Linux is grounded in
important capabilities initially developed in university research [11,12] but
hardly ever discussed by the consulting industry or its representatives. In
essence, it relies on research in the 1970’s which fed into the development of
the Multics operating system (which I once worked with, albeit for data
analytic apps, but with direct contact with the Pl/1 core programming four
floors away in the same building at MIT). It involves a very strict adherence
to formal rules about the use of privileged access and ring brackets. Theorems
were proven offering absolute unbreakability of the operating system, if the
rules were adhered to.
Recent versions of Microsoft
operating systems included some effort to apply the same principles, but adherence
to rules was not quite so strict and backdoors compromise the theorems to some
degree. Apple and Linux operating systems have been much more strict in
following what is now called “the Unix model,” but relatively recently it
turned out that back doors were found and exploited by malicious hackers for
Apple as well. Most shocking of all was the very recent discovery of ShellShock vulnerability in most Linux and
Apple systems – which includes the embedded systems at the forefront of the
IoT.
Industry sources are
understandably reluctant to go too public about their concerns for the
vulnerability of embedded systems. The most advanced industry researcher I have
contact with there says that the plan now is to move to a kind of “patch” model
for embedded systems, very different from the frozen mode used in the past for
the sake of verification and validation (V&V), more similar to Microsoft
mass products, but how to do that for billions of small embedded systems mainly
communicating by wireless is something of a challenge – to some extent a
research challenge, but to some extent just a problem.
An additional problem comes from
the update cycle for electric utility software. The operations manager of one
of the major power systems has told me that yes, like his counterparts
elsewhere, he relies on SE Linux, but he actually gets his software from one of
the three or four big vendors (like AB&B). They promise full compliance
with SE standards of unbreakability, but with some delay. Since it takes some
time to ensure compliance, but new software capabilities are needed all the
time, they are always behind and never fully compliant in practice.
In summary, detecting and
getting rid of backdoors (and insecurities from outright bugs noncompliant with
SE rules) for all embedded systems and
critical infrastructure would be a huge step forward. Important work has been done recently on automated
systems to detect dangerous bugs [3,13], but university researchers could go
further. It should be possible to develop open, transparent compliance checking
codes, which could be trusted by a wide range of users, grounded in the
original theorems [11,12]. Of course, to
protect wireless embedded systems, this would also require that hard encryption
be part of enhanced standards.
3.3.
Privacy Versus Transparency
The
protection of intellectual property and private information is another value of
the highest importance. For example, at a recent conference organized by
Federal Computer Week, Keith Alexander (recent Director of NSA) stated that
theft of intellectual property by China and others is very much at the top of
his list of global concerns. He agreed that monitoring to detect terrorism is
unavoidable by all major powers, but intellectual theft and sabotage rise to an
extremely high level of concern.
This concern is very relevant to
NSF, since we receive some of the most advanced ideas in technology considered
anywhere, well before they reach the slow deployment process in US industry.
Certainly there are cases where Japan and China have deployed technologies
developed in the US before the US did, because of the general speed of some of
their systems. Some of that was based on ideas in the open literature, but one
could argue that NSF (and other government agencies and technology firms and
universities) should have much more
solid protection, as great as what could be had for embedded systems. Security
and confidentiality are essential concern of NSF PIs. I have even encountered
cases where PIs were wiling to submit ideas to NSF, but not to DOE, because
with NSF they felt more secure that systems managed by people with university
values would protect them from premature leaks to big stakeholder
corporations.
Should NSF and a wide variety of
other organizations have access to SE compliant operating systems, backed up by
open transparent compliance checking software? Should this be managed at the
level of local area networks, or applied individually to servers, PCs, and
mobile devices, with secure communication between them? There is room for considerable research on
the relevant tradeoffs.
Perhaps the most sticky tradeoff
is the tradeoff between unbreakability and security at the PC level, versus monitoring
for terrorism and such (section 3.1). In the past, limited backdoors may have
seemed to offer the best of both worlds (as with Apple operating systems),
where “Unix standards” offered unbreakability to normal hackers but
transparency to those with the information. But the events of the past year or
two show that this does not work so well as some may have hoped, and other
factors have made monitoring more difficult in any case.
Likewise, communication
technology plays a central role here. NSF and the US have in the past been
leaders in the quantum technologies most relevant here, but it is not clear how
long they can retain that leadership, which requires strengthening the culture
of discovery, and not only innovation as such. In general, distributed systems
under central management have less security than systems where the nodes
themselves are secure, especially when there is heavy reliance on wireless
communication; however, for many small embedded systems, one has little choice.
The implications for economic interactions and corporate culture are also
important.
There is room for considerable
research on all these tradeoffs and options.
4. Selected Examples of Possible Areas for IoT
Application and Research
NSF
probably has awarded something like 10,000 or more grants related to core issues
of the IoT. That very crude estimate comes from considering the ten or so areas
of NSF research mentioned in sections 1 and 2, and the many years over which
NSF has funded work in those areas. Of
course, it is impossible for a brief review written over two weeks to do full
justice to that very wide range of work. Therefore, for this draft, I will
mention just four of the areas I have looked into, starting with what look like
the most interesting unmet open opportunities:
(1)
More focus on human-robotic
teams for selected assembly tasks (space solar power SSP, mining, solar farm
construction);
(2)
Enlargement of
cross-disciplinary global education efforts aimed at the Other 3 Billion (O3B);
(3)
Intelligent Power Grid;
(4)
Connected Cars.
This
discussion will build heavily on my previous report on renewable energy [14].
In essence, for each of the possible markets for IoT, it is important to
consider where the real large opportunities are to better meet the ultimate
national needs.
4.1.
Human-Robotic Teams
In 2002,
the Engineering Directorate of NSF the senior managing partner of the last open
call from the US government for research related to space solar power (SSP)
[1,14]. NASA and the Electric Power
Research Institute (EPRI) also participated. At the time, many of the earlier
problems had been solved, but it was still considered an area for high risk
research, mainly because of cost issues with the current designs. Even at the
time, it was recognized that the sheer assembly of large structures in space would
be one of the three toughest challenges – one of the three areas where new
research was most essential to reduce risks and be more certain about likely
costs.
Because of the importance of
robotic assembly to that task, robotic assembly was a major topic in the
program announcement. It also received the largest number of proposals from the
community. As we held a joint workshop, and surveyed the community, we found
that “teleautonomy” was the most promising way to solve the real world
challenges here.
“Teleautonomy” is an outgrowth
of the earlier important concept of telerobotics. In telerobotics (as in UAV
control), a human still makes real-time decisions, but manages some kind of
robotics body, typically far away, in a hazardous location. Teleautonomy is
essentially the same, except that the robots have just enough intelligence or
skill to perform a number of recurrent basic tasks, such that one human can
control, say, ten robots. Rhett Whittaker of Carnegie-Mellon (CMU) was the best
know spokesman for this, but a Canadian, Baiden, of Laurentian University, had
developed the most impressive working systems, used in underground mining.
The challenge then is to expand
the fundamental tools for teleautonomy, by developing repertoires of skills
(and bodies) for robots used in tasks like large-scale assembly in space or
construction or solar farms, and, even trickier, developing ways to coordinate
whole teams of humans coordinating larger teams or robots, aimed at
well-defined construction goals. In
principle, this is already within the scope of the National Robotics
Initiative, but focus on specific testbed challenge with large potential
benefits would stimulate more thinking and proposals, and make comparison
easier, in the spirit of X prize.
I suggest two testbeds, one
related to recent designs for SSP and one to solar farms, because they bring
out different aspects of the new technology possible, and because they happen
to address critical bottlenecks or uncertainties in the two technologies which
seem most important to me for affordable, global renewable energy [14]. In both
cases, coordinating teams of humans in charge of many robots is the core issue.
For the case of solar farms, I
am excited by the realistic possibilities for using dish style solar energy to
get down to 5-10 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). New research into Stirling
engines might itself be enough to get us there, when combined with things going
on in the firms which best understand this technology. However, use of automated construction of
solar farms could reduce the cost and the risk. In [14], I estimated that every
ten cents per kwh equates to about $2 trillion per year in the global
electricity market. A deep reduction in cost and risk would be worth it.
The chief scientist of STM (the
firm which produced the six demo dishes operating still at Sandia) estimates
that 90% of the cost of building that type of solar farm is the cost of labor
in construction. Unlike PVs, there is no need to import solar cells from China,
or pay for expensive DC-to-AC converters; power comes out as AC directly. Thus reduction in construction cost could be
very important. Also, this kind of “solar farm” is actually more like an
“orchard,” where each tree is about as high as a two-story building but far
less heavy and complicated. Construction
robotics has addressed much larger structures already in Japan, but the US has
yet to catch up with Japan in this area; open research, starting with a
reasonable sized testbed, could be very useful. A team at MIT already studied
solar farm construction, under EFRI, but much more is needed, including use of
intelligent control at the level of the individual robot (which is much safer
and easier than totally automated, truly intelligent network-wide control). One
tricky aspect, however, is that partnership might be needed with a US
manufacturer like Caterpillar well equipped to produce this type of mobile
robotic assembly platform. On the plus side, one might hope this would fit with
the OSTP interest in getting DOE more involved with NRI.
For the case of SSP, much
smaller robots, in free space, are called for. The latest new work on SSP
[1,14] shows real promise now in getting down to 9 cents per kwh anywhere on
earth, 24 hours per day, switchable from hour to hour to places of greatest
need (price). The new designs call for a
highly modular, “lego kit,” style of system, such that assembly of the many
pieces in space is essential. Sketch designs exist for the robot bodies, and eight
other small elements, but the coordination of hundreds or robots to build one
large structure out of little pieces is the essential intellectual challenge.
Fabrication and testing of the “lego pieces’ themselves is also a valid area
for university research; it is hope that design of a good enough simulator
could be a key step in enabling lots of competition here on earth, between
multiple teams, addressing teleautonomous assembly in simulation.
For SSP the SSP topic,
partnership would be needed (or a large scale integrator grant) to develop the
key testbed for competitive smaller scale teams.
As I type this, I have received
information that Abdul Kalam (former President of India, with links to the new
Prime Minister) , is excited by a new international meeting on global
collaboration on SSP, which Japan and China are already funding. The potential
benefits to economic development (and reducing the need for nuclear
proliferation) could be enormous.
However, though I was invited to come and represent the US, I have
responded that I personally probably do not have the kind of mandate they would
need. Still, if NSF becomes active, many partners could become available.
4.2
Expanded Education for the Other 3 Billion
Education
for the poorest three billion people of earth is a huge potential new market,
but is also an area of enormous strategic importance for the entire world. China,
for example, has shown how high levels of effort in education can have huge
benefits to economic growth and stability in the present world economy. The
hope is that new technology might reduce the cost and delay in getting higher
levels of education and empowerment out to all the rest of the poorest three
billion people of earth.
One of the
key requirements here is for expanded internet access as such. Wireless
technology has played a central role in this, and ECCS research has been at the
cutting edge of developing new wireless technology. However, ECCS and US
university research has tended to reflect the existing markets in the US, which
gives huge weight to the richer 3 billion. There have been a few discussions in
past years of an NSF push into O3B, but
they never got very far – though the EARS people and Jerry Tian did seem to
want to move us that way, before their departures.
But in the
meantime, the private sector has started to respond to the huge market
potential here. Personally, I have heard more about the Facebook and google
efforts, which are extremely high priorities for those companies, but major
competitors are also putting money into the area.
What could
NSF do above and beyond what they are already doing? The NSF has certain
special areas of leverage which could help here: (1) ability to look even
further into the future, towards higher-risk higher benefit technology; (2) a
strong connection to educational technology, which is by far the most important
internet service that could be provided here; and (3) advanced physical device technology, which
could be important to the quality (and cost) of experience of the end user, in
the “last mile.” All three link nicely
with areas of NSF research, which could play a key role in any new
cross-cutting partnership.
Educational
technology has been discussed at such great length already at NSF that I would
hesitate to get deeper into it in this
review. However, it is interesting that the choice of end user devices to
develop should reflect what is being learned about what benefits education. Education
research needs to be an integral part of this. But technologies like wearable
devices for health monitoring bring device technology to education as well. For
example, I was very impressed by research for the Science of Learning Centers
which showed that some elementary school
teachers, when shifting to teaching arithmetic, would suddenly experience
spurts of adrenalin worse than what they would get being attacked by a dog.
Monitoring of such reactions could be useful in presentation of curricular
material. And of course, immersive experience is relevant.
Several
major private sector players have told me that costs of the nodes in poor
countries could be reduced enormously, and quality improved, if we could study
the option of designing and orbiting really large new communication satellites,
perhaps even as a testbed for solar power collection in space. In an ideal
world, we should include such possibilities in any new O3B partnership.
4.3.
The Intelligent Grid
The
intelligent grid is often cited as the lead example of IoT benefits to the
industry sector, because the use of internet and system-wide intelligent
systems has been explored in greater depth for the power grid than for other
sectors.
As with
all experience confronting the real world and the real needs, there has been a
mix of lessons, some more encouraging, some less encouraging. All were
discussed to some degree in this year’s ISGT smart grid conference in
Washington DC, and also in the Clemson power conference which got quite a bit
deeper into the use of new intelligent systems technology (led by
Venayagamoorthy, one of the ECCS PIs).
On the
positive side, Venayagamoorthy’s group has demonstrated new world class
breakthroughs in situational awareness using IoT technologies, with
considerable industry support adding to the original NSF support. With Harley
and Liang, they have outlined a strategy by which intelligent technologies
could reduce the effective cost of renewable electricity to the end user by a
factor of 50% or more [14]. This
certainly counts as a major national need. Deepak Divan, a collaborator of
Harley (also ECCS-funded) developed new actuators (a key type of embedded
device) with enormous implications for our ability to absorb plug-in hybrid
cars in power distribution systems without going unstable, another major
national need; he has incorporated his inventions, and received important
follow-on funding form ARPA-E and form industry.
On the
negative side, critics have gone carefully over the twenty or so benefits which
were promised as part of the billions of dollars spent on smart grid under the
stimulus act. Much of that money enabled the industry to catch up on woefully
overdue needs of system maintenance and modernization, of great value with or
without the IoT part. However, the primary “showcase” arguing for the IoT smart
grid work at ISGT (not counting ARPAE) was an effort to lower voltage in
distribution systems, “saving energy” by getting people to operate at lower
power. The community spoke out rather clearly about that; their feedback is a
strong warning to any investment in these areas, not to lose side of the areas of larger need, even when they are
more futuristic and impose greater requirements for high risk R&D and for
IT, including deployed intelligence. The opportunities are real in this market,
but we could easily lose them if we are not clear and imaginative enough.
4.4.
Smart Cars
Intelligent
transportation and smart cars have been a major theme of research for many
decades now.
For many
years, auto industry leaders were quietly very skeptical of that research. They
saw little chance that individual car drivers would want to give up so much
autonomy, or that cities would spend so much money as required for most of the
schemes for smart controlled roadways. Marketing studies showed that
reliability was number on, two and three in what consumers wanted, not
automation.
Before the
economic collapse of 2008, this had
changed to some degree. More and more, car companies saw on-board electronics
(especially GPS and diagnostics) as vital ways to differentiate their products,
and onboard electronics for individual cars became a great priority. It is
amusing that China’s most potent new competitor, BYD Qin (guided by Buffet’s
suggestions), actually has a small robot dancing on the dashboard to humanize
some of those services.
However,
after the economic collapse, and the rise in oil prices up to that collapse,
issues of fuel security and basic have risen in priority. Oil prices are
currently low, perhaps due to a special effort by the Saudis more than the
promising decade of oil fracking ahead of us; however, long-term markets will
still be heavily influenced by the new conditions. From the viewpoint of national need, one
might argue that toys like dancing robots on the dashboard are matters for the
private sector, whereas management of new propulsion plants (as funded on-again
off-again at ECCS) is more crucial. Domain expertise and vehicle-level intelligent
control and embodied chips play a crucial role, but the need for internet
connectivity is not as clear. Changes in the power grid are needed, to
accommodate new cars (section 4.3), but the car itself need not be complicated.
IoT has
two other important new aspects in the smart car area.
One is the
greater development of “On Star” kinds of systems. Industry is already working
hard to deploy such systems, to exploit the internet for what consumers care
about most – reliability. Ford Motor formerly had a major intelligent systems
group focused on new technology to support such systems, but its director,
Kenneth Marko, migrated first to Bosch and then to retirement, and I do not
have as much access now to what is under the hood. There are many unmet opportunities
in that sector. On the other hand, IEEE Spectrum has run a story on just how
serious the vulnerability of all modern cars is to really strong, central
cyberattacks.
Self-driving
cars are also now very popular as an idea in much of the “new adopter” and
curious public. This area has a long history, but, as with the dancing robot,
it is not clear how vital these cars would be to national security; again, some
things are best left to the private sector, except for the military
applications, which are being actively pursued at DOD.
References
1. P. Werbos,
Reviewing space solar power policy, Ad
Astra, Vol. 26, No. 2, summer 2014
2. Mike
Kavis, The internet of things will radically change your big data strategy, Forbes magazine, June 26, 2014.
3. NSF,
Leading researchers to discuss privacy and
security in a connected age
//www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=133147&org=ENG&from=home
4. Wikipedia, Internet of things, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
5. James
Manyika, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Peter Misson and Alex
Marrs, Disruptive technologies: advances that will transform life, business,
and the global economy. www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/disruptive_technologies
6. M2M,
Internet of things (IoT) companies gear up for $6 trillion market demand, http://mesh-systems.com/news/iot-companies
7. Brad
Bech, James Jamison, Ling Shao and Glenn Wightwick, The interconnecting of
everything, IBM Academy of Technology, RedBooks, 2013
8. Michael
Chui, Markus Loffler and Roger Roberts, The Internet of Things, McKinsey, March
2010,
www.mckinset.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_internet_of_things
9. Simona
Jankowski, James Covello, Heather Bellini, Joe Ritchie and Daniela Cost,IoT
primer: the
Internet of things: making sense of the next mega-trend,
Global Investment Research, Goldman Sachs
http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/outlook/internet-of-things/iot-report.pdf
10.
NSF, Joint Domestic Nuclear Detection Office-National Science Foundation:
Academic Research
Initiative (ARI),
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503223
111.
David D. Clark and David R. Wilson, A Comparison of Commercial and Military Computer
112. Chen, Yanpei, Vern Paxson, and
Randy H. Katz. "What’s new about cloud computing security."
University of Calif., Berkeley Report No. UCB/EECS-2010-5 January 20.2010 (2010): 2010-5.
13. Gary
McGraw, Technology transfer: a software security marketplace case study, IEEE
Software,
September/October 2011.
14.
Paul Werbos, Research in Renewable Energy – Emerging Opportunities for NSF, August
2014,
draft in this previous series
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There are a few tricky bits I did not choose to include, because everyone on earth has limited bandwidth and emotional constraints. Luda has said: "You somehow seem to have the ability to drive even robots crazy..." unless I take care very consciously to try to limit what I say. Then again, she is that person who was once kicked out of arxiv.org, when it said: No human could possibly read so fast; you must be a robot, so we are denying you access.
One tricky bit -- machine compliance verification for standards involves defining and agreeing to standards. Unbreakability and strong encryption should be clear enough, for PCs and servers, folks who know [11] and [12].
But should the standard also require something in the operating system which sends stuff to a backup cache, giving the user a choice of a useful local backup and a mandate that data will go to a central cloud repository with an internally agreed procedure for control, to allow some kind of monitoring for terrorism? In my view, such things need to be agreed to in the open and understood and limited and controlled -- but whether they should exist at all is a matter for debate "above my pay grade." The R&D should analyze what options exist on those lines. If nuclear terrorism can threaten our very existence, it is discussable.
Another tricky bit -- what about HARDWARE backdoors? Let me just raise that as a question. It depends a lot on who designs and makes the chips, and what they know how to do in that process, and on quality control technology.
In the paper, I skirted the issues of true machine intelligence, which I have discussed before on this blog. (Search on "terminator".) Decent control of individual vehicles and such can be done with what I call "vector intelligence," a level of intelligence far below that of a mouse and far above the old PID kind of control used in the Orbital rocket which blew up about two days ago. The paper does call for more use of vector intelligence, but skirts the kinds of things which could be more threatening on their own or in the wrong hands, which have been a growing concern for me since July 14, a major personal watershed I might write about more in the future.
One Lifeboat guy tells me this all may be necessary but not sufficient. True. Radia type software,
with no integrity in the individual PC, can still be used to make life a living hell more and more.
Conversely, for legitimate international agreed open monitoring of terrorism
(cache with agreed distribution), encryption still enters; my physics posting today (as I add this paragraph in update) suggests that requires a level of quantum technology now not in sight (i.e. more than risky, though objectively quite doable) for the US, due to recent political fluctuations.
===============
==================
Smart Cities:
A High Risk Opportunity
Paul J. Werbos, Nov. 20, 2014
1. Summary
The
term “smart cities” means very different things to different people [1]. This
paper will address smart cities defined as new approaches to applying
information and communication technology (ICT) to challenges faced by the city
governments of the world.
The IBM evaluation of smart cities [2, p.7]
argues that the important concrete opportunities in this area boil down to four
sectors:
(1)
Reducing congestion in
the transport system;
(2)
Improve emergency
response and reduce crime;
(3)
Improve education
delivery and state government services;
(4)
Improve access-to
patient-centered healthcare
Prominent
critics of centralized smart city systems [1,3] argue that more attention is
needed, instead, on core political and cultural issues of cities, and that
systems defined primarily by engineers (even systems engineers) may do more
harm than good, by neglecting larger social system issues beyond the scope of
engineering as such. Even in high technology Boston, where MIT is working on
smart cities and is well-connected to the city government, there is
considerable skepticism about large scale smart city packaged systems [3].
This being so, I would envision three major
priorities for engineering of smart cities in the US, where compelling social
needs are strong enough to outweigh public skepticism:
(1)
The health care venue,
where the national growth in costs is still a crisis, and where political
impasse at the national level creates an opening for solutions at the local
level;
(2)
Ordinary business
process re-engineering, for ordinary and emergency services, which may or may
not call for intelligent systems as such;
(3)
Systems to improve
dialogue, in the spirit of open government and university-style deep
discussion, to support more effective information economies [4,5].
Only
(1) and (3) require substantial new challenging research. Thus only (1) and (3)
offer substantial new opportunities specifically for those who are strong in
advanced research.
The remainder of this paper will discuss (1)
and (3) in order.
2. The Opportunity for Smart Healthcare
The
President has often said that the explosive growth in healthcare costs in the
US is a major crisis. Even after the passage of Obamacare, his best effort to
date to address this crisis, the Congressional Budget Office [6] projects that
federal spending on healthcare will rise from under 4% of GDP, as at present,
to about 8% by 2038 – not counting spending on healthcare at other levels of
the economy. Federal spending on healthcare is projected to be greater than all
other noninterest spending in the federal budget.
Another way to look at this is that the
sequestration bill passed two years ago, requiring that civilian and military
agencies from NASA and NSF to DOD get their budgets cut in half over about ten
years, remains in effect. The temporary easing of sequestration passed last
year basically runs out at the end of this year, and continued rises in medical
costs cast doubt on the claims by lobbyists for all agencies that they will
somehow avoid the big crunch for their agency.
Yet another way to look at this is that the
efficiency of medical technology is not decreasing, that the present level of
medical care is not a crisis, and that many other nations seem to be able to do
more with less. In principle, a substantial improvement in cost-effectiveness
ought to be possible, and we should be able to zero out the threat of a cost
crisis without reducing the quality of medical care.
In principle, a quiet backdoor agreement
between political parties should be able to improve efficiency beyond what
Obamacare already provides for. The President has repeatedly said that he is
open to such constructive changes. However, it does not seem to be on the horizon at present. Some of
the Republicans suspicious of healthcare reform have argued that it should be
at the local level in any case, and show respect for the private sector. This
being so, there may be a huge opening at present for ICT-based solutions at the
municipal level which meet these concerns, if powerful enough new systems/solutions
can be developed.
However, the R&D challenge is quite
formidable here. There is a need for a whole-systems solution, which would be
based on a combination of social science understanding of the healthcare
system, ICT systems design, and exploitation of new devices such as low cost
diagnostic systems available directly to patients. NSF research has developed
many promising possibilities at the device level here, especially in the CBET
division (but with significant ECCS presence as well). However, the connection
both to new devices and to social reality in the ICT level could be enhanced.
The politics of empowering patients may be tractable, but needs special
attention, in the face of special interests. Places like the Harvard School of
Health and Wharton have provided a great deal of analysis relatively
independent of the vested interests which tend to limit the creativity and cost
reduction potential of new approaches.
In the end, more efficiency in this sector does
imply a loss of some jobs – or at least a loss in the rate of growth of jobs
and markets which many medical equipment makers are now counting on. It will be
essential to develop new interfaces for patients which, unlike today’s
voicemail systems and medical clerks, provide maximum real assistance to them,
respecting recent research [7].
Pathways for a smooth transition are also important.
3. Opportunities for Open Government and Dialogue
The
IBM report on smart cities stresses the importance of open systems, creativity
and the information economy in the introduction [2]. However, it does not translate that into areas for immediate
effort. That is understandable, in
a way, since it is a great challenge to try to devise ICT systems which
directly address these grand challenges. Yet in the end, the challenges in
education and law enforcement are even greater, if one fully accounts for the
full dimensions of those issues, without which public skepticism would be well justified. In some ways,
systems for more open government and deeper dialogue in general in the urban areas may even be important steppingstones to
useful progress in the two other areas, in the US. (Some cities in other parts of the world may have
emergencies in those areas, like the crime problem in Rio, calling for
different approaches and more deployment of the limited tools now available.)
One way to approach the development of such ICT
tools is to consider the tools being developed for engineering researchers, such as
tools for finding collaborators and supporting collaborations, and trying to
make them more available, not only for paid activities but for volunteer
activities and civic activities which are vital both to the happiness [8] and
to the productivity [4,5] of modern communities. Another way is to consider how
tools like the Watson debate-viewpoint search engine might also be brought in
somehow. Deep search engines and deep dialogue have some relation with each
other. It may be essential here to bite the bullet, and find ways to account
for the deepest insights from social science, from economics and even from
serious ethical philosophy when designing systems people are asked to live
with.
One important
part of this research would be to develop the types of AI system which would be
most effective in supporting (and earning) the full creativity, diversity and
trust of the human participants. Systems based on scalar measures of trust and
best guess estimates could possibly degrade dialogue, even compared with more
naive systems, because of the multidimensional nature of trust, uncertainty,
values (which are crucial if any optimization tools are used) and emotional
filters. All the considerations discussed in my recent report on the
Internet of Things, involving privacy and security, are also important here.
References
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city
2.
Susanne Dirks,
Constantin Gurdgiev and Mary Keeling, Smarter cities for smarter growth, IBM
Global Business Services. Highlighted at
www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/smarter-cities.html
3.
Courtney Humphries,
The too-smart city, Boston Globe, May 18, 2013
4.
Edward D. Hess,
Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization
5.
Neal M. Ashkanasy, Celeste P. M.
Wilderom and Mark F. Peterson , The Handbook of Organizational Culture and
Climate (Washington DC: Sage, 2011)
It was really nice blog post on IoT and cloud. I found detailed information here. Thanks for sharing
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