The Crash

The Crash   by Roberto Verdone   It was in the early afternoon of an otherwise unremarkable Monday that Apophis 99942 hit the Moon. The asteroid, whose diameter was nearly 320 meters, crashed on the ground close to the South Pole on August 6, 2035, releasing an energy of 2,500 megatons; that was sufficient to destroy in few seconds any human infrastructures built there in the range of 5 Km. Apophis was known since 2004, when it was observed and classified for the first time in Arizona, and the chances of a collision with the Earth were estimated. After few years, models predicted a passage close to our planet for the year 2029, without any precise formulation of the consequences of such event on the asteroid’s future trajectory. It was only after 2029 that new computations allowed to predict that a Big Crash would have happened in 2035, near the South Pole, on the Moon.   In the meanwhile, we had started populating the Moon in 2027....
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Industry 4.0: IoT or NoT?

It is now very clear that one of the pillars of the 4th industrial evolution lies in wireless technologies to augment sensing and monitoring capabilities of IT systems that control machines in industry plants. Sensors and RFid tags distributed over machines can improve maintenance processes and make the production flow more efficient. Many associate this revolution to 5G, since 5G will include IoT capabilities of unprecedented performance, in terms of latency and reliability. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, 5G requires connection to the Internet. The IoT requires connection to the Internet. The recent war launched by the US Government towards Chinese network equipment manufacturers, emphasises privacy and cybersecurity threats and feed FEAR. Companies are worried by privacy and cybersecurity threats much more than individuals. For this reason, many companies are wandering whether to rely on IoT technologies to improve their industrial plants. However, IoT in many cases is not really needed. Equipping plants with sensors and tags, reading thei information and using it for maintenance and monitoring...
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Divide et Impera.

In IoT Large Environment Scenarios, complexity of networks can be too difficult to handle. When communication nodes (sensors, actuators) are too many, overhead caused by network protocols can saturate any short-range wireless technology that needs multi-hopping (e.g. Zigbee, 6lowPAN, 6TISCH, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc). A (sub-optimal) solution taken in the past ten years is to split (divide) networks in sub-networks, moving the burden of their coordination (impera) to an upper level (e.g. in the cloud) where processing power, and storage capabilities are not a hard limited resource. A more recent solution is to rely on Low Power Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN, Sigfox, LTE-M, NB-IOT, etc) that allow to achieve long range communication (no need for multi-hopping topologies) at the cost of reduced data rates. However, owing to limitations in terms of available bands, and the long ranges covered by such technologies, the density of IoT nodes that will be served might turn out to be unsatisfactory. So, scalability (in terms of node density) of IoT...
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IoT: Does Technology Matter?

Yes it does. Technology is at the core of any IoT solution. Whatever the domain of application (agriculture, smart health, smart cars, etc), the IoT relies on the ability to communicate efficiently, securely and reliably data to/from the Internet, and the power to elaborate it. Radio network technologies, big data and cloud are essential to it. No, it does not. There are hundreds new IoT startup every year in Italy. The fundamental building blocks of a startup to make it successful are the team, an innovative idea, and a good business model. Startuppers are trained to hide technology and talk about service. None cares about the technology behind your idea. A recent survey at European level published by EiT Digital has reported that during 2018 the number of startups that passed the chasm phase and succedded in scaling up (investments above 1 ME) has decreased with respect to the past. Interestingly, those who succeed in the growth towards a sustainable future are the companies...
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Change is the most difficult thing, Richard Soley says.

I had the chance few days ago to meet Richard Soley. He is the Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, an US-based institution that groups ALL global stakeholders of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): technology providers and end-users. We met after his talk at the BBS - the Bologna Business School - where he gave a speech about the disruption that the IIoT will bring. We had a sort of discussion about the reason why, though technologies are available and the world needs them, still the IIoT has not come: it is still largely in front of us. Interestingly, we expressed completely different views. Most probably, we were both right. At some point in time he said: "Technologies for the IIoT are already available, and are low cost". So I jumped in. No, IoT technologies are not low-cost. This is the worst message you can give. Sensors, HW platforms are low-cost. Few dollars per node. But the cost of customisation...
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IoT Strategist, or Maker?

You can teach about 2G, 3G, 4G radio networks without the need to explain the business that it's behind it. Technology experts are far from being involved in the strategies of network operators. For the IoT, it's different. The IoT is in the hands of small companies, with disruptive ideas. The IoT is a playground where those who conceive the idea, the business opportunity, can also be or are closely related to the makers, those who make it become reality. You can't be an expert of the IoT without knowing how to make business out of it. You can't have a disruptive and successful idea, without knowing how to build your solution. True IoT experts are both strategists, and makers....
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The IoT is not Plug-And-Play

If you were to ask me what is the most stressful talks I have had recently in my professional life, that's when I meet companies willing to implement IoT solutions. The message that the IoT community has provided after a decade of research and technological developments, is that the IoT is based on low-cost technologies, low-cost platforms. The result is that end user expect the inclusion of IoT solutions to be super-cheap and simple. That's not the case. IoT solutions in 99% of cases require a level of customisation, personalisation with respect to user needs, whose impact on the overall complexity of the project and the development is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of technology and platforms. The IoT is not plug-and-play. To plug it, human expert effort is needed. This requires time, and resources....
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The Liquid Network.

The recent releases of 3GPP for LTE have introduced the notion of D2D (Device to Device), a revolutionary step from the viewpoint of network topology and operation: direct communication between devices is allowed, exploiting the same radio resources used in the links with the base station. Though it is initially assumed that resources will be assigned by the network schedulers, a more distributed approach is also possible where mobile nodes will identify what radio resource to use for D2D links. Meanwhile, the concept of Moving Networks for Beyond 5G systems has been introduced in the Strategic Research Agenda of EC, with nodes responsible for radio resource assignment that might move and roam around (cars, drones), serving users through a flexible demand-attentive networking approach. The concept of femto-caching is also advancing, with a distributed and dynamic management of storage resources that might take advantage of the memory of infrastructure, UEs and moving base stations. The mobile network of the future will rely more...
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(My) Ten Pillars to Success

After years listening to professionals about the skills needed to succeed in professional life. After years reading articles and books related to the skills needed to succeed in professional life. After years listening to TED Talks, pitches and other contribution on the topic. There are ingredients to success that are clearly common to most viewpoints, situations, professional roles. That's (my) list of pillars to success. Motivation - the fuel Knowledge - the engine Skills - the driver Effort - hard, hard, hard work Communication - ability to pursuade, to feel, to express yourself Team Spirit and Leadership - be a team leader when needed, be a team member when required Confidence and Trust - people should trust you and be confident you are committed to goals Continuous Learning - learn from failures, learn from the world Task/Time Management - time is THE limited resource Resilience - never ever give up!  ...
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Startups and the IoT

The Observatory on the IoT of the Polythecnic of Milano has recently released a survey including the analysis of 500+ startups in the world. Some interesting insights. The average financing collected by a startup per year in the US is ten times larger than in Europe. Not surprising. The amount of startups that offer integrated solutions (hardware + software + service) is significantly increasing. Interesting. Looking at application domains, the smart home is the one that attracts more attention worldwide. In Italy smart buildings and smart agriculture follow closely. Intriguing. IDESIO was chosen by the Observatory as one of the ten startups deserving particular attention, and we gave a presentation in front of 50 companies. Amazing!...
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