The
4th and the 5th of April 2018, I attented a french IoT Showroom : the
SIdO in Lyon. At this occasion, I was able to fall deeper in the IoT
World, and the place of the Artificial Intelligence in it. Here is 3
breaknews that I will try to keep in mind :
1.
AI & IoT to upgrade our process
Nowadays,
Lean Management is a well known method in the industry. It surely
helps a lot of companies in their development and in their
organisation. But we are now at the beginning of the 4th industrial
revolution. This leads to the creation of “smart factories”
over the Internet of Things.
Following
that path, it appears that every company is now on its way to the
4.0, but no one has anything concret to show yet. This disability to
run projects in production shows a problem in the analysis phase. The
new services that those projects will create needs to be considered
wisely. The key here is to focus on concrete uses cases that will
give real benefits to consumers. This is a trending topic : even in
the industrial world, all is about "services" rather then
the product itself (customers prefer to use uber instead of their
cars for instance !). Take this idea in consideration is part of the
challenge !
Therefore,
the 4.0 Industry gives two main values for companies :
-
Lower
costs and predictive maintenance
-
Improvement
of process quality (by using cognitives services that aggregates
unstructured and structured datas). For instance, the sound is
something becoming more and more important and there are lots of
opportunities to explore.
In
a way, this mix between IoT and Artificial Intelligence offers a
computer science solution in addition with the Lean Management. We
can take examples from the Edge AI (e.g. when we get AI
directly on devices), which allows us to get better results than
the combination Machine Learning - Cloud. Yet we can also take
inspiration in the Asset Intelligence which allows us to focus on
real industry expert instead of meaningless datas.
The
success of industrial projects using those kind of unexpected
technologies, is based, once again, on how clearly use cases are
defined. The idea is to know exactly to which question we need to
answer (through KPI). Also, it’s vital not to forget the human
factor. Because bringing Artificial Intelligence (and IoT) in
industry is a sensitive task which requires specific attention on a
Human and Social aspect (to give a concret example : it needs to be
explained to the staff properly, otherwise, the human factor will
lead to the reject of the technology which can result in a complete
failure for the entire project).
2.
AI & IoT : it’s a match !
The
Artificial Intelligence is a smart way to revolutionize every
business. Not only it can bring more autonomy in connected objects
process, but it will mostly give them the ability to adapt themselves
to situations with no human interventions.
I
believe that the couple AI - IoT can change our lives because their
are opening new opportunities : we are now able to solve (previously
unsolvable) problems with Artificial Intelligence. We are already
seeing it in fields were AI was not expected : construction of
aircrafts, fridges, tractors, and so on… Those successful examples
happened with a good collaboration between customers and developpers.
The
main goal of IoT here, is to provide to Artificial Intelligence good
datas. By “good datas” I mean : a qualitative data that
can be potentially usefull now or in the future. On a technical
perspective, sensors are smaller every day and can retrieve more and
more datas. Therefore, the question is not “What information can I
get ?” but “How can I get this information”. Thus, we only need
to focus on the data management (storage, cleaning, …).
In
any project, it is clear that the data is very valuable because it
helps algorithms/AI to understand specific scenarios. But to obtain
sustainable results, we need to be sure that our datas doesn’t
provide too much bias, which is very difficult and can lead to
unexpected costs.
3.
AI & Medical, is the new sexy !
In
a different context, the medical field interests me since the
beginning of my
new project.
Nowadays, integrating Artificial Intelligence to that field can seem
quite difficult considering the current political and ethical
climate. But it’s also a domain that inpires a lot ! A lot of
little (r)evolutions are on their way. We can classify medical
innovations in 5 technological groups :
-
The
telemedecine (Artificial Intelligence prescribing medications,
medical web forums, …)
-
The
Big Data use (Which gives a better understanding of the patient and
his environment)
-
The
augmented reality
-
The
augmented patient (with an artificial heart for instance)
-
Those
fields are encouraging for the improvement of cares. For instance,
human relations can be an obstacle to the diagnosis just because the
patient doesn’t use the same vocabulary as the doctor. Also,
doctors and nurses can be overwhelmed in their duty. We can find many
other problems that shrink patient cares services !
As
a response to all those issues, a first idea is to try to use datas
in combination with Artificial intelligence (through Machine Learning
and Data Science). If this solution is quite “basic” and common,
it can surely improve the doctor’s listening time, which will lead
the domain to a more human direction.
Conclusion
I
will say that we already are in a self-appropriation process with
Artificial Intelligence, and it is no longer an utopian subject.
There are more and more intelligent systems around us (Siri,
Self-Drive Cars, Machine Learning marketing process, …). But in the
end, those programs need to be a smarter mix between intrustion and
the interest it brings in our lives. Indeed, the
integration of Artificial Intelligence in our products/services is a
quite sensitive aspect that we need to focus on.
IoT
and Artificial Intelligence are a great match together, but it surely
raises more and more difficulties that we need to keep in mind if we
want to bring more evolutions to our lives.
).
