Tens for the Tens: Web of Everything
Jan. 2nd, 2010 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pmcrayI remember when I used to work near Farringdon/Chancery Lane and I used to get the 341 back to Waterloo (in the end, it turned out to be easier to get the Hammersmith and City Line from Farriingdon to Goldhawk Road and then the 237, but that is besides the point). Sometimes, I would see some random hole in the ground and I would think to myself "I wonder what that is going to be?" as well as the inevitable corollary "What used to be there?" Clearly what was needed was some kind of smartdust. Each mote after it has been scattered would think to itself "Where am I?" This it would determine by triangulation from other motes (so you would need a reasonable number of them as the range of their radios in transmit mode presumably would not be very far) and location reference nodes that incorporate (satellite) positioning system functionality, perhaps incorporated into mobile phone basestations. Once the mote knows where it is, it then has to find what is there. This might require some kind of smart search functionality. "I am at Latitude 51.5162 degrees North, 0.1092 degrees West. That means I am on somewhere along Fetter Lane, close to 110 Fetter Lane. And, yes, I can see from the satellite data that I am in fact near an eleven story office block with 29 courtrooms and judicial accommodation that has been built on the site of what was called Rolls House from 1961 to 2007 and before that Geraldine House, where from 1920 to 1961, the Daily Mirror lived through its glory years." So when I was passing on the bus I could issue a query and find out just what it was I was going past.
You don't need NMT for smartdust. We already have nanoradios. The motes don't have to particularly small and in fact might benefit from not being (to contain an energy source - battery, capacitor or fuel cell) and will be manufactured using more or less off-the-shelf electronic component fabrication techniques at a cost of, perhaps, a few dollars per mote and sold to organisations like utility companies that might want a few thousands or tens of thousands for their needs.
I know what you are thinking. "You don't need smartdust for that, just a location-based lookup table on a server." Indeed. Of course, it is a good thing to migrate the intelligence to the edge of the network. But the motes do lots of other things beside serving up gobbets of psychogeographical trivia. Which is why IBM and HP and Cisco are interested in this kind of technology and Cisco signed an agreement with Imperial College to work together on Planetary Skin, regardless of whether the consortium that Imperial was part of was awarded the EIT Climate KIC. Now, Cisco want to sell switches and HP and IBM servers (and consultancy). The kinds of sensors will be installed in the first wave of the Web of Everything will mostly be quite different to my motes. And what they will doing is generating massive amounts of data - temperature, humidity, pressure, rainfall, water depth, water velocity, water quality, strain, anything and everything you can think for the different kinds of sensors in pavements, roads, railways, rivers, storm drains, sanitary sewers, etc, etc.
Thanks to Moore's Law, we are likely to have the raw computing power to handle all that data. And maybe we need AGI-like tools to mine the unexpected out of it. Of course, it won't just be the big IT companies and the world's leading science universities who will benefit from the Web of Everything. Never again will we have to worry about having left the gas on and attach an RFID to your glasses (in 2019? Won't be all be on smart contacts by then?) and never again will you mislay them under the sofa.
But, of course, if people are going to be randomly scattering smart dust around our cities and countryside, it is going to be the security and intelligence apparatus that is the major stakeholders. There are obvious privacy concerns from having universally accessible smart motes - with audiovisual functionality that some of them would certainly offer - just lying around everywhere. So they will be strongly regulated. And if smartdust is outlawed, only outlaws - and the security and intelligence apparatus - will have smart dust. The Tens could see the end of privacy, destroyed the mote in the spy's eye (public or strictly private).
You don't need NMT for smartdust. We already have nanoradios. The motes don't have to particularly small and in fact might benefit from not being (to contain an energy source - battery, capacitor or fuel cell) and will be manufactured using more or less off-the-shelf electronic component fabrication techniques at a cost of, perhaps, a few dollars per mote and sold to organisations like utility companies that might want a few thousands or tens of thousands for their needs.
I know what you are thinking. "You don't need smartdust for that, just a location-based lookup table on a server." Indeed. Of course, it is a good thing to migrate the intelligence to the edge of the network. But the motes do lots of other things beside serving up gobbets of psychogeographical trivia. Which is why IBM and HP and Cisco are interested in this kind of technology and Cisco signed an agreement with Imperial College to work together on Planetary Skin, regardless of whether the consortium that Imperial was part of was awarded the EIT Climate KIC. Now, Cisco want to sell switches and HP and IBM servers (and consultancy). The kinds of sensors will be installed in the first wave of the Web of Everything will mostly be quite different to my motes. And what they will doing is generating massive amounts of data - temperature, humidity, pressure, rainfall, water depth, water velocity, water quality, strain, anything and everything you can think for the different kinds of sensors in pavements, roads, railways, rivers, storm drains, sanitary sewers, etc, etc.
Thanks to Moore's Law, we are likely to have the raw computing power to handle all that data. And maybe we need AGI-like tools to mine the unexpected out of it. Of course, it won't just be the big IT companies and the world's leading science universities who will benefit from the Web of Everything. Never again will we have to worry about having left the gas on and attach an RFID to your glasses (in 2019? Won't be all be on smart contacts by then?) and never again will you mislay them under the sofa.
But, of course, if people are going to be randomly scattering smart dust around our cities and countryside, it is going to be the security and intelligence apparatus that is the major stakeholders. There are obvious privacy concerns from having universally accessible smart motes - with audiovisual functionality that some of them would certainly offer - just lying around everywhere. So they will be strongly regulated. And if smartdust is outlawed, only outlaws - and the security and intelligence apparatus - will have smart dust. The Tens could see the end of privacy, destroyed the mote in the spy's eye (public or strictly private).
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