The next generation of connected devices and big data has the potential to revolutionise the modern world, driving profound changes in lifestyle, medicine, industry and commerce.
Howard Charney, senior VP at Cisco, opened the Cisco Expo South Africa conference today with a keynote focused on the evolutionary path to the 50 billion connected devices projected by 2020. "The Internet of everything" is the expo's core theme, with the vendor painting a technology roadmap around the core networking required to enable next-generation services.
"While we may feel as if we're wired up every minute of the day, connectivity only covers 1% of what could be connected," Charney said. "Ninety-nine percent of the world is still not connected. The question is how much value is expected to be created by the Internet of everything."
Some advantages are obvious, he said. Agricultural output could be boosted by 10%, a key concern with global population closing in on seven billion. Industrial sectors could gain trillions of dollars in improved efficiency through greater connectivity, Charney said.
But improving existing business is not the only goal. Some early developments are already showing the potential of a more connected approach, Charney said, particularly in healthcare and scientific research, where breakthroughs can follow new strategies in collecting and managing data.
The modern world is highly wasteful with its data, Charney said. "We throw away valuable data all the time. IDC says only 0.05% of world's available data is being mined for value." More efficient use of data we already have can lead to breakthroughs, especially in healthcare. "Big data and the internet of everything are going to have a huge impact on public health."
The Artemis project in Canada aims to greatly reduce infant mortality in ICUs by mining health data more efficiently. Although medical equipment captures thousands of data items every second, nurses often only record hourly milestones, Charney said. Artemis researcher Dr Carolyn McGregor found that patterns within the data could identify infections in infant ICU patients a full day before visible symptoms were observed, with the potential to save many lives.
Other breakthroughs are coming from opening data to collaboration with third parties. Crowd sourcing disease reports in Africa is leading to programmes to more quickly identify and treat outbreaks, Charney said. "Researchers typically guard their data, and companies protect it, but those barriers are breaking down. You don't win by locking up your data, you win by putting your data out there and collaborating with others."
Real-time collaboration will empower car-to-car infrastructure, avoid collisions, reducing emissions and saving money through greatly improved traffic efficiency, Charney said. Cisco has invested in R&D in the motoring space, joining companies like Google with active projects in the self-driving space. "Thanks to the Internet of everything, we may not even need traffic lights one day."
In some areas, we're already at capacity, Charney said. In science, the prodigious data requirements of projects like the Large Hadron Collider and Square Kilometre Array are pushing the technology providers to step up with new solutions. "The SKA project will require long haul links with capacity greater than current global Internet traffic. That's one project requiring more bandwidth than the entire Internet today.
"Tremendous breakthroughs are already happening," Charney said. "It's just a matter of how we use all of that to benefit all of us: that's a matter of culture and public policy. The Internet of everything is the culmination of a dream; a dream of better decision-making, efficiency, standards of living, and quality of life."
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