The Courtship between AI and IoT

Fun fact for all, as a college student, I coded computers, built robots and wrote software so they could self-learn and escape a simple maze! Students after me finished the work, but the experience taught me some lessons I’d like to share today.

It all started with a Commodore 64 computer. My parents paid ￡199 for it – a small fortune at the time – and I spent hours of my childhood staring at screens filled with BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). It’s one of the earlier programming languages and became widespread during the home computer boom in the 1980s.

I found satisfaction in coding because typing everything correctly meant successful programs and games. Errors, on the other hand, meant hours of double and triple checking each line to find and fix my mistakes. ("I am absolutely certain I spent significantly more time fixing code than ever playing games I developed on my Commodore!")

As a result I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Sciences almost 25 years ago. At the University of Essex, I developed software based on neural networks that simulated a physical robot learning how to escape from a randomly generated virtual maze. This was cutting-edge-at-the-time robotics.

Today, the same algorithms still serve as the cornerstone for artificial intelligence. They were taught in labs and universities, but back then we didn’t have the extreme data volumes to identify patterns of disease, measure building movements during earthquakes, reduce food waste or manage clean water scarcity.

The artificial intelligence resurgence is strongly linked to Internet of Things (IoT) and the enormous amounts of data flowing between smartphones, home appliances, vehicles and other items connected to the Internet. Gartner predicts there will be 20.4 billion such devices by 2020, and Cisco estimates that global Internet traffic will reach an annual run rate of 3.3 zettabytes by 2021. For context one Zettabyte is 1,000 Exabytes, and 1 Exabyte can store 36,000 years of high-definition video.

With artificial intelligence already tackling tasks still performed by people, it is a matter of time when it will start learning and making autonomous decisions based on data from every device. To stay competitive, businesses will require intelligent applications and services that can filter and analyze data in real-time as well as deliver business process efficiency under rapidly changing circumstances.

In other words, just as I had learned there are no short cuts in writing error-free code, executives will need to have the right digital assets and skills in place before they are able to realize the full business benefits of AI and IoT.

I welcome your thoughts on this topic and Happy Internet of Things (IoT) Day!