TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global not-for-profit organisation which aims to bring together inspiring, energetic, extremely smart or renowned individuals from different disciplines – art, business, politics, science and much more – to generate “ideas worth spreading”.

The mix of talks this year were themed around the Stuff of Life. Here are my five favourite speakers that I want to remember and recommend that you look up.

Maajid Nawaz [talk already online at TED]

Maajid Nawaz was the first speaker who got my mind racing thinking about the how the implications of what he was proposing might influence me. He spoke about the ‘Age of Behaviour’ and how transnational behaviours are influenced by ideas and narratives. Maajid grew up in Essex and as a teenager was recruited to the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir, rising into its leadership until being sentenced to 4 years in an Egyptian prison in his early 20′s. He left prison feeling that Hizb ut-Tahrir was hijacking Islam for political purposes and in 2009 founded Khudi, a counter-extremism social movement working to promote a democratic culture in Pakistan.

What struck me about his talk was the leadership role he had created at young age based upon a new technology base for sharing ideas. His talk provides some interesting insight into the potential for creating bottom up movements in an environment that thrives on cultural belief. Why do I find this interesting? I am curious to explore ways of building a new way of working within Arup focused on the organic development of the “new generation” in the firm. I suspect that a bottom up, activist based approach would work well in our culture. [quilliamfoundation.org, khudipakistan.com]

Niall Ferguson

I found Niall Ferguson’s introduction to the “great divergence” between east and west economic development fascinating. The ‘apps’ listed in the photo above were an interesting way of looking at the ‘ideas and institutions’ that provide the vehicles for our societal development. He also raised some interesting questions: are we deleting some of our apps? is the sequence in which we develop the apps important? can China do without the third app? Why do I find this interesting? I like the idea of thinking about how ideas are stored, shared and passed between generations. This is particularly relevant in a growing organisation and raises interesting questions around size, structure and leadership.

Mikko Hypponen [talk already online at TED]

Putting the excellently geeky presentation skills to one side (he ran most his presentation from the command line and ended his show using an overhead projector) this was a funny and scary presentation. Mikko walked onto stage and showed us code from the boot sector of a 5 1/4 inch floppy that contained one of the first computer viruses – ‘Brain-A’. In that boot sector he showed us the names and address of the hackers – Basit & Amjit – and then showed a photo of himself standing outside that address a couple of years ago, introducing himself to Basit & Amjit, brothers who still lived there. Why do I find this interesting? Viruses like STUXNET have come to my attention recently [see 'open source weapons' video] since they are starting to move into the world of PLC’s and by implication will soon start to become a bigger issue in the world of Internet of Things. Mikko was championing the creation of an ‘internetpol’ to support the defence of our networks from largely criminally driven hackers who create viruses – another example of the need for agency beyond borders.

Todd Kuiken

I loved this talk for the ingenuity that only someone with training as both Doctor and Engineer plus 20 years of hard earned experience could deliver. Todd introduced a bionic arm created by ‘stitching’ nerve endings from an amputated arm into muscle tissue on the pectoral. This technology called targeted muscle reinnervation allows the brain to control the arm directly but also had the unexpected effect in some patients that not only can they move their new limb, they can also feel with it. Why do I find this interesting? I am intrigued by the combination of body and technology, and find the adaptability of the brain to ‘fix’ its understanding of the world in which it operates fascinating.

Rory Stewart

This one was unexpected. I guess the label of ‘conservative politician’ made me jump to some conclusions. But his talk about his experiences in Afghanistan were insightful, articulate and at the same time made me frustrated. I was intrigued by his experiences of the light touch (he walked across Afghanistan in 2001/2002) vs the role of international aid and (the very funny) ’7 decisive years’ by 7 different leaders. Why do I find this interesting? He spoke of a ‘mountain rescue’ approach to problem solving where experts need local context and knowledge, plus they can intelligently adapt to the environment when it changes. I am not sure if we give enough focus to the right person being in the ‘right’ job.

In some ways it is hard to pull out a favourite 5 so here are a bunch of other talks to look at.

Justin Hall-Tipping – Nanoholdings – technology to drive the future energy neutral building.

Geoffrey West – Santa Fe institute – on bounded growth, sub-linear scaling (meaning as things get bigger they need relatively less) and why do cities live but companies die?

Kevin Slavin – Area/Code – on our new ‘Algoworld’, an increasing trend which sees various aspects of our lives being run algorithmically and with a complexity that we can no longer meaningfully understand.

Tim Harford – Undercover Economist at Financial Times – great talk on our ‘God complex’, our belief that we are right and a call for more trial and error experimentation in the workplace. Talk is already up at TED.

Mark Pagel – evolutionary biologist – on how language provided the mechanism to allow cooperation in cooperative societies.

Joe Castillo – amazing sand artist

Ben Goldacre – Guardian – Bad Science author, really funny, slightly alarming, frenetic talk – definately worth 18mins of your life.

Daniel Wolpert – neuroscientist and engineer – on the brain, movement, sensory processing and tickling robots.

Nadia al Sakkaf – editor of Yemen Times – when she took over as chief editor in 2005 she sacked half of the senior male staff and replaced them with ‘women and younger men’ – diversity in the workplace, leadership and a VERY brave woman.

Bunker Roy – barefoot college – inspiring talk about making your own destiny and two of my favourite quotes: ‘a dignity of labour’ and ‘these [hand] puppets are made of recycled worldbank reports’

Alain de Botton – writer – on religion

Alison Gopnik – child development pyschologist – on kids sphere of exploration rather than focus of attention (interesting ideas on play and innovation here).

Michael Biddle – MBA Polymers, plastic recycling – on waste, recycling of plastics and over ground mining.

Harold Haas – Edinburgh University – wireless communications via LED light using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. Geniunely impressive live demo that falters to show that it is real.

Markus Fischer – Festo – smartbird is a project to create an artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird. Inspired by the herring gull and inspiring factory automation products for Festo, this creature is awesome!

Links to all the speakers above will eventually emerge on http://www.ted.com/talks?event=tg2011

And finally, links to other resources that caught my imagination are tagged on pinboard with TEDlobal2011 and photos are on Flickr

“IoT is deemed as an important part of the strategic emerging industries, as a measure for transformations of the mode of economic development, for developing low carbon economy and achieving green and sustainable growth, as a footstone of forging the information society and improving people’s life in China”

Pilot applications are being rolled out in infrastructure (100′s of smart grid trials completed, ITS in 17 provinces), upgrading the traditional industry (agriculture, industry, logistics – this “smart” approach across sectors is aimed at “transforming” the mode of economic development), to serve the people (healthcare and housing) and environment and safety (environment protection and energy saving).

Convergence of information and industrial transformation.

In addition to the different research programmes the MOF (Ministry of Finance) and MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) have just launched an IoT Development Special Fund aimed at technology development, industrialisation of the technology, application development and the creation of a “standard public service platform“. The label assigned to the latter has potential to be something quite interesting but it seems there is some uncertainty around what and how it will be delivered. One to watch though.

Florent Frederix reported on a presentation to the European Commission on IoT governance roadmap that was made the previous week to Neelie Kroes, Vice President and EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda. Governance refered to the “rules, processes and behaviour that affect the way in which powers are exercised particularly as regards openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence.” The five “principles of good governance” presented were:

1. Identification (network address of object and identification of the object) – issues are around maintaining interoperability of identifiers.
2. Privacy and Security (regulatory and technological) – issues being debated around privacy by default, the right to be forgotton and privacy by design, silence of the chips.
3. Ethics (implants, privacy in the home, accountability, liability of objects) – the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies are very interested in creating an independent report and are asking for feedback at http://bit.ly/lW8owj
4. Decentralised architecture (extensions to physical infrastructures such as Smart Grid) – the quest for solutions offering more autonomy and stronger security.
5. The European IoT Norm (self- or co-regulation) – need to be compliant with EU Norm, future IoT recommendations and the legislative framework without the need for specific directive or EU legislation.

This translates into sub working groups in: identification, privacy + security, ethics IoT architectures, IoT standards, multi-stakeholder governance architecture.

A complete paper will be complete by the end of 2011 and will then go to public consultation. Impact assessments and consultations with the commission will occur through 2012 and expected adoption is in early 2013.

fun, money and rights

ready aim, aim, aim, aim….

This was partially down to the sessions of the event (below) but also reflected the nature of the community in the room. One message that struck home for me was a comment that 2-3 years ago it felt like we had a first starter advantage, but now we are moving to trying to keep up.

Sessions:
Societal challenges and applications for a smart and green planet
Where are we today? – The International Experience
Technological developments and business applications
Sources of funding for the IoT
Governance, privacy and security
Standards to support policy

The aim of the event was:

“The Internet of Things is finding its way into real applications and services. It is driven by smart city concepts, energy and mobility management and the quest for data to bring better foresight to scenarios for industry, government and citizens. The 3rd Annual Internet of Things Europe Conference will explore the major trend towards M2M and the merging of online and offline worlds. This event will facilitate the debate among all stakeholders on the discussion of the future of the Internet of Things and how it will re- shape our interactions with the real and virtual worlds in the coming years and how it will affect citizens in everyday life.”

Things I found interesting were Michael Nelson’s thoughts about IoT not needing a single “privacy by design” solution, rather creating the space for many different solutions to be brought to market. And on transparency, its about transparency of the systems to hold the data not necessarily transparency of the data itself.

The keynote presentation by Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU), Vice President and EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda, European Commission is below but focused on the governance needed and highlighted three issues of object identification, privacy and security. At a meeting at the OECD later that day she extended these to the “Compact for the Internet”: an Internet of Civic responsibility, One Internet, that is Multi-stakeholder, Pro-democracy, Architecturally sound, Confidence inspiring, and Transparently governed!

Peter Hustinx, Supervisor, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) made a great point that “fundamental to the successful deployment is trust”, ergo effective data protection is a critical success factor. Privacy of data and trust of consumer will be critical – whilst the “right to silence” is “hyperbole (and probably impractical)” it is getting the conversation started on privacy by design. This is a watch-it for us since we need to understand the privacy implications in the built environment that are in-directly caused by us observing and understanding the behaviour of people in buildings. He made this point nicely when he stated “I don’t see objects exercising rights” but went on to describe how the increasing ubiquity of these devices in our environment makes the distinction between us and the objects difficult.

Pilgrim Beart from AlertMe, made a really clear presentation of their consumer IoT application and stated that most IoT once installed is ambient and does not require “modal” interfaces that require our attention – therefore design for that. Great reminder.

Professor Julian Kinderlerer, President, European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies gave a good intro on ethics around IoT and identity “in applying right to be forgotten, we have to know what is that we have to forget.” – their group want your opinions. He also raised the interesting issue of ownership of data and knowledge using the example of ICKN at MIT – should info be mashed together to create swarm behavior? An alternative application could be Police and Insurance DB “sharing” scheme recently in the news.

But the most thought provoking talk for me was Usman Haque from Pachube with a very frank and open talk on the cultural differences between investment in IoT from a start-up perspective learned through 8 years of experience. Worth a flick through the slides covering the IoT market, Europe vs. US funding, and an intro to Pachube.

And slides from my panel intro are also on slideshare.

The second was participating in a Do Projects “walkshop” led by Adam Greenfield. At the moment I am pulling together some thinking around urban informatics for an internal project at Arup so I was using the event to think about the current creases in the fabric of London. As the Facebook page says, the aim of the walkshop was to look for

“Places where information is being collected by the network. Places where networked information is being displayed. Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.”

It was a great 90 minutes and reminded me of the value and stopping and looking at your environment. A collection of photos on flickr highlight some of the observations we made.

The debate around the “Governance” martyr paper started, and didn’t really end, with a discussion on the definition of the internet of things that will be used in this groups final output. Several different versions have been proposed but there was a clear difference in opinion on whether the definition should have a human or technical focus. At the moment the definitions are technically oriented but there was a call to have the human at the center and themes such as “provide a secure and trusted platform” were proposed and with several objections to the definition relating to IoT operating “without the intervention of a human”. Those last six words alone were discussed for over an hour.

Taking a historical perspective, IoT is not the first technology with which we have discussed the balance between the damage it can do and the benefits it could deliver. I really liked the presentation by Marcel van Galen from Qiy who summed up this issue quite nicely with their video that introduces their business concept.

Qiy is a utility to collate your data. They are working with companies and public bodies who create data and enabling them to share your data with you. Has been in development for past five years but not clear on the split between how many companies send you a copy of the data and how many let only you store your data. One to watch.

Rudolf Van Den Berg – OECD – focused his M2M implications discussion on GSM and the implications of lock in to network operators. He showed an interesting diagram of M2M networks by type but focused on the fixed / dispersed quadrant.

2G,3G,4G are best for dispersed applications – they have near global coverage and the SIM based approach means zero config (vs me setting up my wifi at this meeting which required me to authenticate – I didn’t bother to authenticate my phone or fitbit). But the downside here is that in the M2M environment the user is not the consumer, it is the service provider. And the M2M user has different requirements since they are often responsible for millions of SIMs (phones, traffic lights, sensors in the field etc.) meaning there are very practical problems with switching operators without swapping SIM cards (hence think of the lock-in operators currently have). Like international roaming their is a need to negotiate roaming with local operators. Even static objects like SIM based traffic lights suffer from network effects since at rush hour the cells will change shape to actively manage communications traffic.

His main plea was a need to liberalise the ability to network swap without changing SIM cards – this will create an open communications platform and increase the potential for radical innovation in applications as experienced on the internet. However, this shift of power from operator to consumer would have significant impact on the telecoms providers.

Sarah Spiekermann reported on the learning from the privacy debate in the recent EC RFID consultations. It focused on “privacy by design” – the Privacy Impact Assessment encourages companies to focus on how to think about privacy in the design stages of developing RFID applications. The PIA is setup to help companies creating RFID applications question the potential risks to personal data being compromised with their application so that they can answer the question “do I run the risk of not complying with the EU law?” (EU Directive on Data Protection).

Interesting to see how this would actually work in a commercial environment. The cost impact of PIA is not in terms of direct financial costs (it would be cheaper to pay fines if data protection was broken than pay for the PIA’s), it is more focused on the brand cost associated with fallout of wrong doing. In the future world of the internet of things how will we quantify the value of trust and brand over commercial necessity?

Gonzalo is a CASE PhD researcher who has been with the Foresight team for the past few years. He has just completed the major experimental component of this work at the OU in Milton Keynes and is now bringing the installation to the Arup offices at 8 Fitzroy Street to conduct a second “mini” experiment with a different cohort of test subjects. Gonzalo says

The focus of my research is the design of smart products and services and how these may change people’s behaviour. As computers become ever so small and disappear inside walls, tables and many everyday objects the way we interact with information changes radically. Like footprints in the snow our encounters with smart objects and spaces leave a permanent mark in the information substrate. From these traces smart artefacts can learn how, when and where they are used, and can react to that information.

If you are near the BT Tower in central London over the next couple of days please call in. Full details of both the installation and the research is over on makingsenseofspace.

Sponsored by Busch Jaeger the workshop aimed to “create an opportunity map for the development of energy efficient intelligent building control and to examine its premises and consequences with regard to architecture, urban space and human behaviour”. There was an excellent bunch of people attending and some great presentations. My highlights are below:

Dietmar [leyk wollenberg architects] kicked off the presentation by introducing Villa Girasole “the house with no shadows”. What i loved here was the complexity of a whole house rotating around a central axis so that it tracked the sun but the UI was a single button.

Bernhardt Dorstel from Busch Jaeger showed how slow resource use can change by looking at the light scape of Los Angeles over a decade from 1908 to 2010 – it is quite phenomenal to see how our consumption of resources has increased. He showed some interesting work they have been doing in the Yas Hotel including collaborations with Bang & Olufson but I was most intrigued by one of his final comments “the user interface is the most important part of room / building energy optimisation”. I don’t think I have heard a controls company say that before.

Reto Wettach, Design Director Interaction Design, at Potsdam gave an excellent talk on strategies for eco-vis. I loved one of his example projects – “the [credit/debit] card scanner increases the resistance of sliding the card through the reader based on the cost of the purchase”. Was curious to hear about the move to more gestural interfaces when the interaction required has a spatial context (e.g. driving in a car) – interesting implications here for “imprecise” interaction with information objects.

Dieter Kunz from Sleepmedicine, Inst. of Physiology, Charite in Berlin [ http://www.schlafmedizin-berlin.de/ and http://www.dgsm.de/ ] gave a really interesting talk about the psychobiology of light and darkness. Loads of interesting research results in the past ten years (schools kids being exposed to less than 100 lux for 50% of time in class room) and how lack of sleep is causing illness and disease etc. but the take away was that we need bright and blue light in the mornings and “unblue” light in the evenings (he showed some great graphs showing the brain is more receptive to doing cognitive work in the morning and this tails off through the day – see photo below). His best comment however was “I am not aware of any substance that can help deep sleep better than the correct light through the day”. We intuitively know that natural light is good, so why do we design bad lighting in our schools, offices etc.

Winfried Heusler from Schuco walked us through examples of facades have evolved over the past 30 years and their influence on building performance. I liked his comment on the need to develop the structure of a building based on the context of its location and queried why we forget about the historically different shape of buildings worldwide. He also showed some interesting new product which embeds screens, phase change materials and / or PV into facade panels – they are then using the PV to feed DC grids in the building.

Marcel Bilow from TU Delft extended the double skin facade story and showed some work they have been doing with Solarlux and Imagine Envelope to create a naturally vented office space. They interestingly reverted back to a very manual form of “teaching” the occupants of the building how to use the facade system (they created a poster) and commented that this approach has inherent scaling issues but that the client loved it. Marcel was also a winner on the http://cloudscap.es/ competition being awarded that evening for his entry based on a windmill based solar shading device inspired by his observation that when you look at a rotating desk fan the eye can see through it.

Next up was Jan Christoph Zoels from Experientia talking about enabling sustainable lifestyles by rethinking demand management. He gave an excellent overview of the Low2No project (of which Arup is a partner) and introduced the “c_life” work done to develop scenarios exploring how behaviour change may be realised. I loved the simplicity of the “three core smart metering activities” of check (mine), compare (with others) and act (on something).

Up last was Carlos Alarcon from Sauerbruch Hutton Architects. He spoke about the architecture of the Low2No project and some of the issues surrounding the pervasiveness of new media technology (the trend towards a new soft architecture) and the implications this has on the traditional divide between architecture and technology. Also of interest was the tension between the social vs economic goals of the project: flexible vs marketable, spatially generous vs spatial efficiency, innovation vs standardisation, and most interestingly public facilities vs private facilities.

I did a presentation on “unfolding resource use” which generated some really interesting discussions with the students in the breakouts – am looking forward to hearing about the outcomes of the workshop! More photos are on Flickr.

The discussion part of the event took place in the afternoon / evening at Tokyo Hackspace with prompts from several participants including the LIVE Singapore! project which has some interesting data which is going to be made public in the near future.

The conference itself had keynotes by IBM and Cisco (IPSO) which probably reflects the general perception of where IoT work is taking place at the moment. Norishige Morimoto, Director, IBM Research – Tokyo spoke about “Advanced Technology for Smarter Cities” giving some great examples of the work IBM are doing as part of their Smarter Planet work and focused on stressing the collaborative nature of these projects.

Patrick Wetterwald, Smart Grid and IoT Product Marketing for CISCO (and IPSO Alliance President / European Community IoT expert group member) gave an excellent presentation exploring the CISCO view of end to end IP connectivity for smart objects and the current transition from “business and consumer” focus of the web to it’s “industrialisation”. He touched on many of the issues that are being addressed by projects such as SENSEI and the work that the IPSO Alliance are doing to communicate the work of the IETF on building the standards that will influence the basis of the future internet.

Interesting discussions – what is the infrastructure to support and nurture connectivity? how to connect resources? how to discover resources available? lots of talk about RESTful architectures [several examples presented but this is a good summary] and interesting mentions for Pachube, sensor.network, dyser, MAGIC Broker 2

twitter feed from the event

photos on Flickr

• Addressing the impact of new technologies
• Enhancing the internal market dimension of data protection
• Addressing globalisation and improving international data transfers
• Providing a stronger institutional arrangement for the effective enforcement of data protection rules
• Improving the coherence of the data protection legal framework

The discussion in the morning (and most the break outs) seemed to surface out two different schools of thought. This is best illustrated through one of the discussion points around the theme of “Enhancing control over one’s own data” – also referred to as “silencing the chips” and “right to be forgotten”. The “kiki” types spoke of the difficulties in the practical implementation of such regulations and highlighted how such an approach would constrain innovation. The “bouba” types stressed the need to protect and educate people on the possible abuse they could be subjected to. The answer, as usual, is not at either extreme.

Going into the meeting I was definitely in the “kiki” camp and still think that the genie is out the bottle already on this one, I think it will be near on impossible to implement some of the “silencing of the chips” proposals being made since it would just wipe out the business model for actually implementing these technologies. What I did realise however, was the assumptions I had been making around the safety nets that I believed would be in place to support these technologies. For example, i had assumed a state system would exist that would stop people abusing my data if that happened and I had assumed that there would be “consumer groups” who would “keep an eye on the street” to discourage people from trying to abuse me.

So I departed the day with more questions than when I arrived – I guess a useful day at work. But non the less, many questions still unanswered. I need to figure out a way to take this to the ECTP (European Construction Technology Platform) cohort to get their input but also list some questions below, would love to hear your opinions.

The “silence of the chips”; – at what level do we de-activate personal information? – are there different levels of privacy for different identities / contexts? – why do we want to silence the chips? – what kind of abuse is anticipated?

The “right to be forgotten”; – the logistics of how to delete on demand personal information? – But these devices are very simple low power objects – is it practical to include the kind of data protection management being proposed? Should we focus on dealing with abuse rather than preventative measures? – sometimes when we mine data we only retrospectively realise the value in it – when do we make the value judgement as to if it should be deleted? the current worst cases of abuse are probably imprisonment for your ideas – will the deletion of data really help this? when all the chips and readers are being manufactured outside Europe is this a moot point? Is this kind of policing helpful or based on an outdated process?

I had great feedback on the Drivers of Change cards (again several people came and told me they had a set) and also on the Internet of Things work (the EU funded Sensei project and the new TSB funded YCT project). I also have a pile of cards from people requesting more info on the Arup Smart City report.

My favorite speaker at the event was Clara Gaymard – President GE Europe – she gave an interesting perspective on the future of urban development and work they are doing to help cities deliver the necessary infrastructure. One line from her talk I liked was: “a child today wishes for a computer for their birthday, their parents wished for a scooter or a car – why? They both want to be connected.” and she also made reference to nice idea i had not heard about – City of Melbourne public transport example of smoothing peak load at no extra cost; they made public transport free before 7am. Would love to hear more about that if anyone has references.

The event was held in the Kursaal Convention Centre in the beautiful San Sebastian where we were also treated to a reception at the excellent Aquarium. I was in Santander a few weeks ago, not many mile down the coast. I was surprised to learn that both cities are going for Cultural City status in 2016 – tough competition – but was impressed with San Sebastian’s preparations. Weird highlight of the trip was being interviewed on data shadows in front of surfers out in the bay.

The INTA reporting is blogged here, there a few videos here and tweeted here. Lots of photos are here.