The Internet of Things

Ambient intelligence: empowering the new Web

This blog concerns advanced Web technologies that can be roughly described as being part of the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web efforts. Most recently, we’ve looked at technology that will either buttress new Web development technology or take advantage of it. In particular, in the last posting of this blog, we looked at the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing, and how they might interface with advanced Web applications to produce a combined, more powerful computing environment. We’ve also looked at New Songdo City - the u-city - and how it will at least indirectly serve as a testing ground for new Web technology.

Ambient Intelligence: A Powerful Enhancer of Advanced Web Technology.

In this blog entry, we’ll look at another new technology and how it might dovetail with the new Web. It’s called “ambient intelligence”. Like other software advances, although it is not directly related to the Web, it will dovetail beautifully with new Web technology.

We consider how ambient intelligence will make the Web radically better at serving individuals.

Ambient Intelligence: Just What Is It?

The term refers to computerized devices that tailor their behavior according to the nature of each user. First of all, though, we should make it clear that this is not a particularly new term, that it does not have a highly specific definition, and there are lots of other terms that have been used to describe similar concepts. But there is something focused that is emerging under the banner of this name.

Ambient intelligence is commonly discussed in the context of embedded devices, machines that have processors in them and that perform specific information-based tasks, as opposed to being general purpose programmable computers. Embedded computers are in cell phones, our automobiles, and “smart cards”. Sometimes, they can indeed be programmed to do almost anything, like the ones inside cell phones. But even then, it’s assumed that very few people will do so. The point is that they generally do not have displays, keyboards, or mice dedicated to their use. They are found inside small and large devices, as well as in the smarts of complex systems, like assembly lines. Mass produced, but sophisticated items like insulin meters have computers in them.

As an example, you could imagine that the vending machine you put money into tomorrow might already know that you drink nothing but 20 ounce Pepsis. Maybe every vending machine in your complex at work knows your habits. Maybe if you switch to Sprite on one machine, it will tell the rest. Maybe the machines will offer you one or the other until a new pattern seems to emerge and it appears that you will never again drink Pepsi. Or you might be able to enter your “favorites” on the corporate website, and declare what you prefer to drink. The machines will know - and so will the company that services those machines. All of this could happen without human intervention.

Ambient devices don’t have to specifically target individuals. You could imagine a computing system in an airport that can smoothly transition between human languages, customs, and regulations, to better serve a global audience. We’re very close to this sort of thing right now, actually.

Ambient Intelligence at the Fingertips of the Web.

But wait. Let’s get back to that vending machine. How do they communicate with each other to pass on the critical news that you’re a Sprite person now? How do you enter your favorites? How does the vending machine company get the news so they know what to order?

The Web. Those ambient vending machines use the Web.

On the Web, embedded devices can be engaged by web applications and
web services. (Remember that web services are programmatic interfaces to services;
i.e., they don’t have to be activated by a human using a browser.)
Embedded machines can also initiate web services, as well as trigger “push” tasks,
whereby a user on a client machine somewhere is told that something is happening and itʼs time to get to work. The embedded device and the user could be on opposite sides of the world, thanks to the Web.

RFID Technology: Tracking Things.

We’ve already looked at RFID technology.

As a reminder, the goal of RFID-based systems is help us coordinate and carefully control the use of various objects. Of particular interest are mobile objects. One of the key components behind this idea are RFID tags. RFID stands for “radio frequency identification”. A tag can be attached to almost anything. After they are deployed, an RFID reader can send out a signal, which is picked up by the RFID tags, and then respond. As things move around, as things are used in concert to perform tasks, they can be carefully tracked and managed.

An Example:

There’s another aspect of ambient intelligence. When people talk about a device that has ambient intelligence, often they are referring to a dedicated devices with a simple display, not a general purpose computer. By this quality, the soda machine example is a bit rudimentary, in that it probably doesn’t have any true native display at all, and the indirect way of accessing it, at least according to our example, is too general purpose - a website that is accessed with a full blown computer.

Consider something that is a major topic of discussion now, and a subject we will return to in this blog in the near future: electronic health records. The idea is that we would have life-long electronic medical information bases that would be accessible to medical providers (with our approval). This way, the fact that I had some disease as a child that makes us vulnerable for some other disease
later in life would become apparent to my family doctor, and the necessary screening exam would be scheduled periodically. Otherwise, how am I supposed to know about the consequences of something that happened when I was a toddler? My “EHR” would also hold prescription records, imaging data, and anything else related to my health. It would, of course, be a web-based app.

But various sorts of doctors - not to mention non-medical types like me - need information displayed and abstracted in special ways. My family doc might want to see everything is its raw form, if for no other reason than my doctor would be expected to know my medical history, if it were readily available. (And yes, if I had a chronic disease or were the caregiver for someone with a chronic disease, the immense size of the EHR would be truly overwhelming. I imagine that doctors might be afraid of being expected to process huge EHRs belonging to new patients.)

Now, consider an emergency room doctor. If I was lying on a bed in an emergency room, not conscious, having just collapsed and complaining of a terrible pain from a horrendous headache, and from nauseous, and unable to answer questions, the doctor needs data fast. The display that the ER doc uses would not be on a general purpose desktop computer, would not provide that massive raw data view, and would present information in a highly readable form.

Most importantly, that computer would have to be instantly adaptable to suit the needs of an emergency, and then later, go back to a non-emergency mode, to be of help in further treatment.

Or, it might be that the web server and not the machine in the ER, contains the ambient software. The machine in the ER might be a very simple client. But either way, the combined web application and local client would have to be capable of searching my online EHR, to look for possible problems, and to display them. It might deliver up the fact that just this morning, I had minor surgery on the baby finger on my left hand - and since I was so squeamish, I was given general anesthesia.

Boom. The ER doc figures out that my headache is from high blood pressure, which, along with nausea, is a common side effect of anesthesia, and it can hit hours later. The doc now knows that if I’m given a blood pressure reducing drug, I’ll be fine. But I might have to first be given an anti-nausea drug, and obviously, I wouldn’t be able to swallow that and keep it down, and so it would be administered at the other end of my food processing subsystem.

Wait, one more thing. What about RFID tags? Maybe I have one around my neck, and that’s how the doc figured out who I was in the first place, since I was stumbling around with no driver’s license. The machine in the ER scanned the tag - and voila.

The Reach of the Web.

If you think about it, by leveraging the Web, ambient devices can be empower in incredible ways - and in the years to come, we’ll see a new generation of such web applications emerge.

(Finally, if my medical scenario is ridiculous, and you are a medical professional, then I’m sorry.)

The New Web and the U-City.

The Internet of Things, ubiquitous computing, and something amazing.

The goal is for every posting of this blog to be understandable as a standalone posting, and so let’s review a few things quickly.

In previous blog entries, we have looked at the definition of an an advanced web app. And we’ve looked at some specific advanced apps.

And in the last posting of this blob, we looked at the Internet of Things, and how it might interface with advanced Web applications.

As a reminder, the Internet of Things refers to the use of tracking technology such as RFID tags and other wave-based devices. Computers can easily be programmed to coordinate the use of everyday objects and track their movements. RIFID tags, which are cheap and can be mass produced, have been used all over the world to track products and components in factories and warehouses. They are used to catch shoplifters, as well.

In the previous blog posting, we also took a quick look at “ubiquitous computing”, which refers to the spread of computing technology into every aspect of our lives.

Multilevel integration of computerized tasks.

What’s the lesson?

The world of advanced web apps is merging with the worlds of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. We see a future emerging where computing is deeply integrated into every facet of life. This includes such things as law enforcement, supply chains, manufacturing processes, retail shopping, and education.

Importantly, with multiple levels of computing working in unison, complex tasks will be performed online, and humans will not have to intercede to keep things going. As an example, from the initiation of a shopping session by a web user, to management of the tiny parts that make up a complex product that has just been ordered, the process of shopping will be automated.

All of this will deliver great power to the lone web user.

But is this future a faraway dream, one that depends on technology that has not yet been developed, or is it being built right now?

New Songdo City: the U-City.

The answer is yes, it’s here.

There’s a new, model city being built in South Korea. Much of it is already in existence. It is called New Songdo City, and it is touted as the “u-city” of the future. The u stands for ubiquitous. There are other ongoing developments and many other planned developments throughout the Middle East and Asia.

The concept of a u-city is disturbing to some people in the west, because of privacy concerns, but it’s probably unavoidable.

Importantly, New Songdo City isn’t an existing, older urban area that is being “computerized”. Lots of existing cities around the world (including the United States) are introducing city-wide wifi, adding dynamically-changeable subway and bus routing, and providing information kiosks for visitors and businesspeople.

But New Songdo City will be a mid-sized city, built from the ground up according to a design paradigm that has as one of its primary goals the smooth introduction of computing wherever it seems useful. This city will be the home of several tens of thousands of people, will employ a few hundred thousand, will have a high tech centralized business district, and will have several cultural facilities. There will be a high tech hospital and a golf course.

And computing technology will be everywhere, visibly and invisibly.

For example, a single, integrated smart card, armed with an embedded microprocessor, will get residents, visitors, and workers rides on the subway, time on parking meters, and access to movie theatres. A smart card will even get the free loan of a city bicycle.

In New Songdo City, there will be an Internet of Things that serves every citizen. It’s not clear exactly what will exist when the city is complete (perhaps in a few years), but one often-repeated promise from the New Songdo developers is the use of RFID technology that will credit people every time they toss a bottle into a public recycling bin.

The U-City as a laboratory.

The potential uses of RFID technology are almost endless, and in fact, New Songdo, with its ubiquitous computing infrastructure, will actually serve as a giant Internet of Things experimental platform. People, city services, and countless RFID tagged objects will be part of the real world laboratory.

The Internet of Things Meets the Internet of Web Apps.

Injecting Smarts into the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0.

In our continuing series on advanced web technology, we’ve looked at the difference between the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0. We’ve also looked closely at the Semantic Web, and in particular, we’ve discussed what we mean by that word “semantic“. And with respect to Web 2.0/3.0, we’ve considered just what constitutes an advanced web app. And we’ve looked at some specific advanced apps.

But one thing has stood out above all else: the new world of web applications depends on our ability to make web apps smarter. At the core of this are a handful of key technological advances: namespaces, XML languages, full text searching, and web services. Still, as we have seen, we can only crudely mimic intelligence, which we do largely by using a complex mixture of standards, heuristics, and pre-made components.

Importantly, this issue of being smart is very old, and has been a far off goal of the folks who build software development tools since the very early days of computing. In truth, some of the things that seem new and exciting to us have actually been around for a long time, and have existed under multiple names.

But this base of intelligence-injecting technology, could it be used to give the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0 a shot in the arm? Can we leverage the greater world of smart technology to make the new web even more powerful?

Let’s focus on just one technology that has been around a while, but is still vibrant and rapidly growing.

The Internet of Things.

This idea is centered around the idea that the objects in our world would serve us a lot better if computers could coordinate their use. Of particular interest are mobile objects. One of the key components behind this idea are RFID tags. RFID stands for “radio frequency identification”. A tag can be attached to almost anything. After they are deployed, an RFID reader can send out a signal, which is picked up by the RFID tags, when then respond. As things move around, as things are used in concert to perform tasks, they can be carefully tracked and managed.

Other technologies for tracking objects can be employed, too, and RFID is just one example of something that is fairly cheap and very dependable.

It’s also true that objects can respond with more than a “Yo, I’m here.” In particular, they are likely to tell us exactly where they are, and whether they are in use. But for the most part, these things tend to be fairly inert when it comes to intelligence. They might be warehouse items or objects in retail stores. Volume is a key factor. RFID tags are cheap enough that an organization can tag tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of items.

Immobile Things, but Mobile Users.

We can use the Internet of things concept in another mode. The objects might be immobile, but the users might be highly mobile, and they might be carrying the tags. The objects might have computing capabilities in them, as well. If I work in a secure facility, and if I use a variety of computing devices in the course of the workday, I can be carefully tracked. And every machine could be engineered to allow me to perform only those functions for which I have been authorized. The computers could also track suspicious trends that involve multiple machines and multiple users over a period of time.

The Internet of Things and the Internet of Web Apps.

What does this all have to do with the Internet we are concerned with in this blog, the one that hosts next generation web apps? The two worlds could be blended together.

Consider this. When we buy things on the web, we normally use one of two retail models. If the object is software or data or in any downloadable electronic form, the website can ensure that by the end of the shopping session, our credit card has been paid and we have received the goods. This makes both the seller and the user happy.

Or, if the object is physical, like a printed book, the website will ensure that by the end of the session, our credit card has been charged, and we have been given a shipping number, a shipping date, or some other piece of information that gives us some assurance that we will get what we paid for. In this mode, the seller is likely to be quite happy, and the buyer might not be quite so happy.

But there’s another way. At the end of retail session, the buyer of a physical product could be given the ID of the particular object being purchased, and then, via the retail website, track that object nonstop from the moment the session ends until the moment it arrives. The buyer could even track the construction of a purchased object out of many subcomponents.

The Bigger Picture.

Here’s something to think about, something else that can be used in concert with the advanced web technology and the Internet of things concept. It’s called “ubiquitous computing”, and it is a concept that has been around for many years. It refers to the expansion of computing technology into every aspect of our lives.

Putting all of this technology together means that the new web is working its way into law enforcement, supply chains, manufacturing processes, retail shopping, education, etc., etc., etc.

This will have a huge impact over the next decade.