IBM Watson – Tech Raman

A Developer’s Guide to Internet of Things (IoT)

Lakshmi Rajan — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 05:58:54 +0000

Internet of Things is interestingly poised with an explosive numbers of connected devices, proliferation of sensors and new smart solutions it brings in. For a developer who loves innovative challenges it is an area to be right now but for an aspiring developer or a developer who is eyeing at IoT here are the top skills that a professional needs to be equipped with.

Embedded Things

IoT is conversations between various electronic or electromechanical devices that are able to size up, look at, interact with the environment around them and collate data. This is where knowledge of embedded systems is vital. Within the IoT ecosystem, embedded system refers to the platforms where we have devices or objects with sensors embedded in them, these sensors can ‘talk’ between them via internet and also to ‘us’ depending on the objective they are supposed to engage. This is where a working knowledge on embedded system electronic design, fabrication technologies, measurement systems, and hardware knowledge of the machines, Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering, AutoCAD drafting skillsets can give you a boost to the IoT career.

Networking

Network engineers are most sought people due to convergence and connected world not just in IoT but in general. Talking about IoT, networking plays an all-important role as we talk about connected devices here and hence skills related to hardware in communication devices is very much needed. If you tick the following knowledge points, you got your resume right to be part of the fledging IoT career.

Knowledge of current networking standards and technologies
Deploying and troubleshooting modern networks
Knowledge of wireless (WPA/WEP or 3G/4G) connections,
Applying and managing RFID (radio frequency identification)
Wireless protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy.

Computer programming

This is for given and a no-brainer, a computer programming skill is a basic skill to have. Amongst the various programming languages, Java, C, JavaScript, and Python were the top four choices for developers who are “building IoT solutions.” That’s not much different from the top languages used for writing old desktop apps and servers. There are also atleast 14 other languages used for niche solutions. Increasingly handheld devices and mobility is the direction the world is moving to. In the Internet of Things concept, mobile applications are a key area since many IoT solutions for end-consumers in lifestyle segment are controlled by mobile devices like smartphone, wearables, tablets etc, there by making professionals with the knowledge of making mobile apps for iOS and Android phone a lucrative career in IoT.

Big Data – Security and Data Analytics

With so many connected devices, there comes the challenge of information overload that needs to be analysed, make sense of and also protected. Skilled engineers, architects and analysts will be needed to gather and process the information with knowledge in the following areas.

Vulnerability assessment
Public key infrastructure (PKI) security
Ethical hacking
Wireless network security
Knowledge of data ethics and privacy policy
Securely managing data
Cybersecurity analysis

Bid data knowledge and machine learning will help a professional get a foothold in the IoT industry.

UI / UX Design

IoT objects will come in all shapes and sizes and User Interface and User Experience professionals will be needed to create interfaces that are effective and user-friendly. So if you enjoy this skill, you could be welcomed by the IoT industry.

Cloud computing

With the amount of data Internet of Things will generate, data storage will be an issue and companies will have to take help of cloud services to manage excessive data. Hence the industry will look forward to professionals with knowledge of cloud computing technologies who can store and manage the data efficiently and make it available for analysis. Giants like IBM has made headway with their cognitive computing and dedicated IBM Watson IoT platform. You can learn more about IBM Watson IoT platform HERE. Within the IoT landscape, IBM Watson evolved into the technological poster child for analytics, machine learning, and cognitive computing that every developer being wooed into the IoT should take note of. IBM also runs an IoT online academy which can help a professional developer horn his skillsets and an aspiring developer get armed with the skillsets. For more on the IBM Watson IoT Online Academy HERE.]]>

How Developers can tap into IoT powered Drones

Lakshmi Rajan — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:28:51 +0000

Since 2015 Drones sales have sky-rocketed, according to research firm Gartner the total drone unit sales climbed to 2.2 million worldwide in 2016, and revenue surged 36% to $4.5 billion. BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service expects sales of drones to surpass $12 billion in 2021. Why is the sudden rush in the drone interest? Discounting the drone flying as a hobby, the renewed interest is due to the commercial applications for drones with several use cases in multiple sectors such as insurance, construction, and agriculture powered by IoT. Drone has opened new avenues for IoT developers, let’s see how. Typical IoT applications necessitate a “sitting” sensor that gathers data, an Internet highway to transmit the accumulated data and a back end platform like Bluemix to sort and make sense of the data. What Drone has done to the sedentary IoT practice? Drones have added mobility to the sensors and can now be deployed to different locations, thus bringing in new dynamism to the IoT developers to reinvent new practices and new solutions. Developers could harness the data sourced via various sensors perched on top of the drones and connect to Watson IoT Platform and IBM Bluemix services. This real time data which utilizes visual inspection capabilities can be integrated with more traditional solutions – such as IBM TRIRIGA . Let’s take a use case scenario which a developer can tap on increasingly congested cities and challenges it poses. Drones can be used to identify traffic congestions, bottle necks and can take pictures and collect related data real time, at the backend the inputs can help identify effective traffic movement solutions and also custom-tailor made solutions for individuals who are on the move. The opportunities are plenty. Combining IoT with cognitive services and integrating them into facilities management solutions like TRIRIGA can also help in real-time solutions to handle the parking problems in cities. This is something what Persistent systems has done with their Quadcopter Smart Parking using IBM Watson IoT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H67qV6OF9c For a developer with big ideas and a limited resources Watson IoT platform gives the flexibility to scale up and tools to implement the ideas. It offers secure, globally distributed data, analytics and cloud facilities and a rich ecosystem of developer community to bank on for any course correction.

For simple developer recipe on how IBM Watson can help control the Drone – Check the tutorial HERE

Companies like Aerialtronics, Sensurion Aerospace, H3 dynamics to name a few have already been working on these space leveraged by IBM Watson IoT program. IBM has been on forefront and to quote inventor Cliff Pickover in one of the IBM article “And with cognitive capabilities, our drone system could learn what surfaces and surface varieties are more prone to build up of particular microbes, so as to suggest and carry out sterilization procedures and to make predictions.” IBM also has secured 8,088 patents in 2016 on “Drone-based microbial analysis system” alone covering a diverse range of inventions in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, cognitive health, cloud, cyber security and other strategic growth areas. In short, the unmanned aerial vehicles are here to stay and with cloud computing and platforms like Bluemix there is lot to be unwrapped in days to come and I would be covering the developments here. Stay tuned. Source link: here]]>

IBM Watson, IoT and Retail – The Emerging Confluence of Cutting edge technologies

Lakshmi Rajan — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 11:59:02 +0000

The global retail sector is estimated to achieve revenues of more than US$ 28 trillion by 2019, with average annual growth rate of 3.8% since 2008. The sector represents 31% of the world’s GDP and employs billions of people throughout the globe. Hyper and supermarket, e-commerce and local kirana stores connect the various dots of the retail industry. The industry also faces pressing challenges in inventory management, logistics, consumer retention, warehouse problems and many others that need more innovative smart solutions. It’s were IoT opens up new solutions to micromanage and offer effective insights and scope not just to increase the profitability of the business but also offer better consumer experience, after all customer is still the king when it comes to the retail Industry. When looked from far, the Internet of Things is a network of connected physical objects embedded with sensors. IoT allows these devices to communicate, analyze and share data about the physical world around us via networks and cloud-based software platforms. Retail has more aces up its sleeves to harness more data and that includes RFID inventory tracking chips, traditional in-store infrared implants to monitor data like foot-falls, cellular and wi-fi tracking systems, digital signage, in-store beacons and many more. With data from all these, it opens up an exciting world of opportunities for IoT developers. Take a simple case of soda bottle crates. We have seen them stacked up in most of local stores and bakeries, and marketing vans doing rounds in the neighborhood to take stock of the crates to be replenished. What if each crate could be attached with a chip that automatically triggers alert to the marketing guy whenever the total crate volume goes below a specified quantity, he does not have to physically do rounds and take audit and smartly prioritize his schedules based on the inputs. It would save time, fuel costs and man power. So let’s see how IoT in retail looks like.

Key Retail Opportunities for IoT:

Smart Logistics: Retail industry involves movement of inventories and making an efficient movement of merchandise is one of the key areas of IoT where it can help save time and costs involved. Many retailers and logistic companies have already been using IoT but still lot can be done when it comes to the basic routines like the maintenance of transport, tracking and route optimization. In-store movement of goods can also be efficiently done with some smart IoT solutions. Smart Store: When we talk about smart in-store movement, it is one part of the larger area of interests that can be tapped by IoT to make a smart store. A smart store solution can help enhance better consumer experience which is more valuable for any business. IoT can help retailers predict consumer patterns and preferences thereby helping them in store management and adjusting the layout, inventory management and placements, staff training and more. With an array of beacons in-store micro patterns can be gathered. Real time warehouse connect: How many times have we seen our favorite items missing in the store shelves? Warehouse automation, RFID and and IoT aided real time monitoring of stocks can help a store never have a disappointed customer looking for a particular product. IoT helps to real-time track sales opportunities and avoid missed in-store sales. Retail being a mammoth industry it also has mammoth challenges that IoT can solve. From predictive equipment maintenance, monitoring employee fatigue and efficiency, predicting emergency alerts and much more. It would be interesting to see how a smart developer can visualize a smart IoT solution for different opportunities the segment offers. Also read: IoT in Agriculture Sector If you are a passionate developer, IoT unravels goldmine of opportunities in wider areas and IBM Watson a perfect platform to jumpstart. To know more about IBM Watson IoT program click HERE. ]]>

IBM Watson, IoT and how it can help Agriculture in India

Lakshmi Rajan — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 12:24:51 +0000

Convergence of several technologies has made the Internet of Things a reality now in various fields including agriculture. India is predominantly an agrarian society with around 60% of population involved in farming. Of late, agriculture has also been widely reported and is a topic of concern for the hardship the farming community faces due to various reasons. In our continuing article on IBM Watson and IoT, let’s see how IBM Watson can help the agriculture in India. IBM’s India research lab has realized that by combining IoT data with cognitive computing, businesses can extract valuable insights to improve the farming scenario and aid the farmers. The lab is looking at ways of using its Watson cognitive technology to help farmers determine potential crop yields and protect against pests, an effort that could increase the use of such data in farmer loans and insurance. Smart farming is a concept widely gaining momentum in global agricultural business making use of wide amounted of data right from weather, water and soil at the disposal. For the Indian lab of IBM Watson, agri-business is one of the three industries it focuses on in India. The technology — part of a solution called Precision Agriculture — involves the use of a few strategically placed sensors and remote sensing data from satellites to answer questions about the state of the soil, moisture content, weather data and susceptibility to pests. “Blanketing a farm with sensors is extremely expensive and hard to manage. But data from a small amount of local sensors and data from satellites can be married using cognitive technologies — a process called cognitive fusion. We can answer those questions in a cost-effective way,” Sriram Raghavan, director of India Research Labs was quoted by ET. “Agri-businesses have the ability to invest in technology and have an interest in increasing productivity even if the farms are run by individual farmers. The other model is to look at financial institutions,” Raghavan said. “We have seen a lot of issues with agri insurance and credit. And while there are definitely non-technology issues to be solved, but there is an opportunity for technology to help provide better visibility to financial institutions.” “With the technology, the financial products they issue in the agri space do not have to be driven just by the credit history of a farmer, which may not be a viable model, but can be driven by knowledge of the farm and focus on health on the farm. This will increase risk awareness.” ]]>

IBM Watson: Internet Of Things – The Holy Grail of Connectivity?

Lakshmi Rajan — Wed, 24 May 2017 17:44:38 +0000

If there is a crystal ball to foresee the future of technology, it would point to an exciting world converging at ‘Internet of Things’ – almost every device to be made in future would be build with a capability to communicate with another device – collect, collate and send information for a better world. Internet of Things is poised to make every interactions of our devices smart – from personal devices to smart homes to smart cities, the highway of connected devices and information runway is expected to get bigger and phenomenal. IoT is revolutionizing manufacturing, supply chains, hospitality to medical technologies and eventually making personal life smarter at individual levels. While the devices gets smarter and there are information overload, we arrive at a time where there is too much of information to process and a need for smarter platform to navigate and work through the data for better identification, analysis and processing them. IoT software platforms help simplify deploying, managing, operating, and capturing insights from IoT- enabled connected devices. That is where IBM Watson comes in. In our earlier article we briefed about ‘IBM Watson Conversation – Unlocking gold mine of unstructured Information” and let’s see specifically how IBM Watson can enable Internet of Things. The recently published Forrester Wave: IoT Software Platforms assess how IBM Watson is poised to be a leader of the new age platform. According the report, the advantage IBM Watson IoT platform has is its ability and flexibility to serve a broad range of advance use case. IBM has been doubling down on IoT with billion dollars of investment to create a new IoT business unit from 2015. With a setup that includes more than 1000 researchers, developers, and designers dedicated specifically to developing Watson IoT platform. The Watson program has spanned and embraced new capabilities including the Augumented Reality, an area which is seeing tremendous traction in recent days, cognitive capabilities, blockchain, edge analytics, analytics tooling and natural language processing, to name a few. In our series of articles in the coming days on Watson IoT we will dig into some of the practical aspects of the platform and how it can reshape healthcare business trends, ease the state of agriculture especially in agrarian society like India, predictive maintenance and analytic models and algorithms via connectivity of critical equipments reducing maintenance time and cost saving in manufucaturing units and many more areas. In a nutshell, Watson Platform can help developers avoid data fatigue and work on the enormous data that various sensors throw in and harness the sea of data to come up with innovative ideas and smart solutions.]]>

IBM Watson Conversation: Unlocking goldmine of unstructured information

Lakshmi Rajan — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 15:03:01 +0000

Back in 2011, IBM created a flutter by debuting IBM Watson on the TV show Jeopardy and enthralled the public where the artificial intelligence defeated Jeopardy’s all time champions, not one but two. Since then much water has flown in the AI space and the technology has got into the mainstream consumer technology with companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft focusing on the AI to ease the consumer interactions on mobile devices to execute simple daily tasks. But unfettered, IBM is focusing on IBM Watson for larger picture that would ease, benefit and enrich the development of the society, simplify complicated challenges and find solutions for complex real world problems. IBM Watson is active now in areas like cancer diagnosis/treatment, traffic accident prevention, and tax reporting. I came across an article in Forbes which mentions “Manipal Hospitals in India adopted Watson for Oncology as a tool to support oncologists in making high-quality, evidence-based decisions for their patients. This study is helping reinforce the value of Watson to support clinical practice.” Not, just diagnosing ailments, IBM Watson might be your personal Chartered accountant when you next walk into a accountancy firm. H&R Block an American tax preparation company whose operations spread in various countries including Brazil and India have roped in IBM Watson, the idea is to apply the power of cognitive computing in the tax prep process.

Why IBM Watson ?

In case you are yet to figure out what is IBM Watson, take few minutes to go through the video below. The new service is available on IBM Bluemix where developers can build and train a basic system at no cost. https://youtu.be/_Xcmh1LQB9I

What is IBM Watson Conversation?

The Watson program began with Watson Dialog which enables a developer to automate branching conversations between a user and your application. While this was a good starting point, IBM soon realized there are immense possibilities by tapping into various chatters that happens in the world. The IBM Natural Language Classifier was the next progression which understood the language of short texts and made predictions about how to handle them. Then came the IBM Watson Conversation, which was able to absorb, sieve, identify and collate information from the numerous chatters happening around. IBM Watson can dig into terabytes of information and does not need to be spoon fed with tabulated fields of contents. The natural language learning intelligence can talk like a human mind and sieve the relevant data from a natural conversation type of information. This opens up an immense potential for developers in creating friendlier and ‘intelligent’ chatbots.

IBM Watson Conversation Chatbots

Chatbots are in rage now and they have much practical implications. What makes a good chatbots though is the range of questions it can tackle effectively in a less automated ‘feel’ to it. Effectively the virtual agents or chatbots are ‘fed’ data and trained to answer questions frequently asked by end users and thus automating a variety of customer interactions of an organization. With the Bluemix services based on IBM Watson, it is now possible to automate domains that were not possible to automate before. In particular, the Conversation service allows you to create natural dialogs using virtual agents and bots, reducing the pressure on customer service teams. This is made possible by combining a series of cognitive techniques: defining intents and entities and crafting dialog to simulate conversation, all in one integrated service.

What can you do with Conversation?

Watson Conversation offers a clean and simple user interface that does not require any coding or a deep understanding of machine language providing developers a way to easily build and train a bot – from simple, narrowly focused tools to sophisticated, full-blown virtual agents.

Build Facebook, Twitter, Slack and other messaging and social network platform bots that let users interact instantly
Add a chatbot to your website that can respond to frequently asked questions from customers
Allow customers to control your mobile app using natural language virtual agents

IBM has been actively reaching out to the developers to help them with working on the Conversation. From the Indian perspective with the on-going Digital India push by the government and the new positive outlook amidst public over various digital solutions post-demonetization, the time might be ripe for more companies to look forward to automate many levels of their user engagements and interactions, IBM Watson Conversation could be the right tool the developers could be looking at.]]>