From UK5G to Connected Places Catapult. A green digital recovery is coming and the path is getting clearer.

In the last year I’ve enjoyed working with UK5G, various digital transformation projects, and start-ups. I’m now moving to the Connected Places Catapult as its Chief Business Officer. The move has caused me to reflect and make a shout out to some of the people I’ve met, particularly in the last few weeks as I’ve been hosting, moderating, joining and speaking at quite a few online events. Joining these events has made it easy to see how joined-up innovation roadmaps will help us address the biggest issues society faces today, the environmental crisis and the move to net-zero being the most obvious.

Thankfully, new neuroscience suggests we are all equipped as digital natives because our minds operate in similar ways to the Internet. It's a welcome upgrade from the computer analogy which left many of us feeling like digital immigrants. Maybe it helps explain our innate pleasure in binging Wikipedia, synthesizing disparate sources, weaving together religion, music, politics, art, engineering and cooking, creating new neural networks to satisfy our insatiable curiosity. Evidently, untested conspiracy theories can emerge. Thankfully cross-disciplinary breakthroughs can also emerge that change our world for the better. We’ll come back to the importance of testing with digital twins in a minute.

The burgeoning of new digital connectivity means ecosystematic thinking is becoming more and more common.  If you’re old enough to have enjoyed ‘Complexity, the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos’, by Waldrop during the first dotcom flush of the nineties, or you enjoy Adam Curtis’ ‘Can't get you out of my head’, I suspect you’re going to have fun in this next stage. But if Curtis annoys you, it might be a good idea to find something more linear to do for a few years, because the next phase of digital revolution is going to get messy, as trusted digital ecosystems emerge through linguistic trial and error and tiresome standards battlegrounds. I suspect it will only begin to settle towards the end of the decade as new distributed computing paradigms become as normal as today’s smartphones.

Emboldened by 5G and edge compute, each industry vertical will develop trust in its own open digital ecosystem standards with relevant suppliers, buyers and regulators. Most commonly it starts with a data model that describes an industry’s transactional workflow. The creation of these data models is a well-worn path, classical philologists like Irving Finkel in A secret history of writing explain how when pictograms and hieroglyphics morphed into the alphabet it led to an explosion of innovation and economic activity.  It’s a similar moment in technical evolution as we train distributed computers to model themselves to an industry-specific workflow.

The industry bodies that burden themselves with the challenging task of creating widely adopted data models will have the benefit of future-proofing themselves. Once the data model is captured and widely adopted in a sector, open APIs can be built to the standard, AI and machine learning can accelerate code development, open digital architectures can guide the way with orchestrable components and reusable microservices. Over time it will foster virtual software market places industry by industry. Hyperscalers, network operators and private equity firms, will be ever-present providing digital infrastructure, services and funds, hoping to back the winners.  This will take time, it will be incremental, opportunistic, and sectors will move at different speeds, but twenty years from now, it will be widespread.

Digital twins will provide a safety net to simulate and test real-world scenarios, and some market regulators are now already getting in on the game, ensuring that they understand and sanction protocols before the risks go too far. This will be particularly the case where physical and digital realms converge to create ‘phygital’ processes, for example, in autonomous driving.

Blockchain and its derivatives will be used to create digital handshakes along the different parties in the ecosystem, creating an audit trail for optimisation and liability management. Quantum cryptography, and quantum key distribution, are on track to become the security breakthroughs that build trust amongst the ever-present and rightfully jittery security community as more and more infrastructure gets connected.

Its happening in healthcare. Snomed CT ? is one of the widely used data model foundations. It is being coupled with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR?) which is fast becoming the global industry standard for passing healthcare data between systems.  Created by not-for-profit industry association HL7, FHIR? Open APIs have been adopted by the National Health Service’s digital arm NHSx – the scale of which builds credibility. In this complex and at times frustrating market for fast-paced digital advocates, the FHIR? standard and the pandemic are enabling a new and welcome burst of activity for remote consultations. Oxford University spin-out OXDH is an interesting SME to watch.

Its happening in telecoms. TM Forum’s SID data model part of the Frameworx foundational libraries for customer management and billing has been around long enough to become the global industry standard with tens of thousands trained on it and most vendors and operators using it. The Forum’s industry-led Open API’s and Open Digital Architecture are gaining traction worldwide as telecoms companies slowly morph to become cloud-native and their networks virtualise.  The Forum’s impressive Catalyst programme is a collaborative proving ground that demonstrates real-world possibilities of using the de facto digital standards. The Forum is a living example of this transitionary process in action.  Mycom Osi is an interesting UK SME to watch in this space.

It's happening in transport. The progression towards fully autonomous driving has set out a clear roadmap. 5GAA is leading on Vehicle to Infrastructure standards. The Open Mobility Foundation is progressing city infrastructure to vehicle standards and newcomers like Voi and other members of the Micro-Mobility for Europe coalition are getting in on the act fast.   The Connected Places Catapult is a place where new connections are made, ideas spark, and acceleration takes place, including its impressive autonomous vehicle simulation and testing work VeriCav. Vivacity Labs is an interesting SME to watch in this space.

It's happening in smart cities. The city protocol society led the charge a decade ago, FIWARE and Open Agile Smart Cities took up the baton, and the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance is taking it further. Based on Building Information Models (BIM) construction is developing more and more digital twins and Planning Technology is enabling digital master planning. I’ve just joined the Catapult and I’ve always been inspired by their work on City Information Models, it’s a few years old but still excites me, and digital twin work at Cambridge’s Digital Built Britain is rigorous. To keep up with this fast-moving space Smart Cities World do a fantastic job of global news from the sector every day.

It's happening in media and creative industries. Gaming is the catalyst for so much change, surpassing film and television industry revenues, and challenging every form of creativity. AR/VR is now encroaching theatre and live performance with participants locked in their homes during Covid able to interact with live performance in new ways. I watched Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream a couple of weeks ago. IBC’s 365 is a good way to keep up.  There are so many interesting SME’s to watch, but one I’ve been working with recently is Immersionn. Together we’ve built five immersive 5G industry vertical animations which will soon appear as part of the UK5G supplier directory.

During March, while finishing off working with UK5G, before joining the Connected Places Catapult, I’ve been fortunate to join moderate and speak at quite a few events discussing these issues and will round off by giving a shout-out to some of the people I’ve met.

In transport I’ve met up with Umberto Ferrero from TIM, Daniel Ruiz from Zenzic, Edwin Bussem from KPN, David Williams from AXA, Andrew Pearce from Atkins, Ron Cygnarowicz from Ford’s Transloc, Siddartha Khastgir 0f University of Warwick, Raquel Velasco from Vivacity, and Paul Gadd from Innovate UK who are all doing impressive work.

In 5G, John Vickeray and Jeremy Spencer from BT both have exciting stories about improving a range of capabilities with Birmingham Hospitals’ emergency services, and about innovation at Belfast Port, Mark Bunn explained Oracle’s cloud-native network orchestration capabilities, Benny Yehezkel from SQream talked about data processing for petadata age on-premise, in the cloud, and at the edge.  Sebastian Grabowski from Orange Poland explained how it is providing IoT digital services to hundreds of cities on fundamental issues of lighting, waste management, air quality, and more. And I have to mention Professor Dimitra Simeonidou who remains a huge inspiration to me and to many others. In the last year we've worked together on the Digital Nation proposition, and I sincerely hope the powers that be see the light, because federating testbeds across the country would build on previous investments and help to unlock the next stage of digital and phygital innovation.

Towards the end of March I joined two fascinating days of collaboration between all the UK5G testbeds listening and learning. Weaver Labs and Vivacity Labs work on 5G Smart Junctions in Manchester, the team behind the 5G Connected (Sherwood) Forest, the Live and Wild team from Candour Productions who are testing 5G remote TV production inside potholing caves, off cliffs and up mountains with AQL had me engrossed, along with the digital team at the 5G Eden project.  You can read all their stories on UK5G which is so ably facilitated by Bob Driver.

In healthcare, I’ve enjoyed playing a small part in the simple yet hugely impactful work going on at start-up Oxford Digital Health led by John Kosobucki, Cris Conde, Enda McVeigh and Paddy McGuinness, who are bringing remote health consultations and a virtual hospital alive, based on the Microsoft Azure stack.

In cities, I was pleased to hear what David Graham from Carlsbad (near San Diego) has been achieving and the digital inclusion work that Jordan Sun from San Jose (Bay Area) is supporting.

And as I’ve been getting ready to join the Connected Places Catapult, I’ve joined as many of their online events as possible and been amazed by the huge amount of collaborative innovation taking place.  Its ‘Connected Places’ podcast is beautifully crafted by Ivor Wells and hosted by Prof Greg Clarke and delivers fascinating. The latest edition featuring Highways England gives an idea of the amount of change coming to every day mobility. 

So many projects, so much innovation.  The growing engagement of large and small companies, academics, places and public bodies in UK over the last decade has been a big achievement. Many organisations are now familiar with the publicly funded innovation drill.  The next opportunity is to move beyond the one-off testbeds, trials and pilots of the previous decade to a more joined-up approach guided by clear innovation roadmaps that lead us toward net-zero, green and digital across industries, places and the environment.  

Collaboratively developing and using open digital standards at scale will facilitate shared learning will create a sense of federated dynamic progression. The EU is hoping to get there in Horizon Europe through what it calls ‘innovation missions’. Putting the tools and culture in place to create a more ecosystematic approach to innovation.  I’m looking forward to working with different people and organisations through the Catapult and together achieving sustainable innovative change that moves us towards net zero and a green and digital future.