September started very poorly. On the 6th, we lost a great friend to many, and decades-long Object Management Group and Industrial Internet Consortium contributor, Thomas Eugene Rutt, or Tom to his thousands of friends worldwide. Tom was a respected founding member of the OMG Architecture Board, where his expertise, good humor, generous spirit and hard work were a constant example to us all. As chair of OMG's Liaison committee for many years, he also applied his experience of the workings of other key industry organizations to good use. I was privileged to know him personally for more than twenty-two years, and like many of you, will miss him terribly. We have created an online tribute area for Tom's family; please leave your condolences and tributes.
Meanwhile, as everything geared up for the back-to-back Industrial Internet Consortium and Object Management Group quarterly meetings in Barcelona and Cambridge respectively, I spent ten days in Chile with a packed schedule (except for a brief weekend of relaxation in Puerto Varas, a magnificent area recently scarred by the eruption of Volcán Calbuco, but already recovering rapidly).
The first, brief stop was in Coyhaique for meetings with principals, supporters (and new political faces) in Region Aysén. With the rough and tumble of recent Chilean politics, some long-time supporters of the International Institute for Innovation Aysén-Patagonia (first mentioned in February, http://blog.omg.org/2015/02/richard-soleys-on-the-road-blog.html) have been pushed out. The good news is that the new faces and the old are tremendously supportive of the Institute, which has become focused entirely on Industrial Internet technology for environmental issues. "Environmental issues" includes a wide swath of technical problems, from fisheries and other aquaculture issues, to precision agriculture, to search & rescue and other communications problems in a huge frontier area (Patagonia features a third of Chile's land area, and about 1% of its population), to integration of alternative energy generation (like geothermal, wind, tidal and solar), to management of biodiversity. Interestingly, there are clear applications of IoT to tourism issues as well, ranging from tracking visits & preferences to preventing forest fires and developing the best deployments of tourism resources. This is obviously a hot area, where Industrial Internet techniques can bring quite a lot to the table, whether it's tracking fish or tracking tourists. The Institute will launch with an international, invitation-only workshop in March of 2016. Watch this space for more information, and keep an eye on http://www.iiiap.org/.
I next traveled to Santiago, where the highlight of the week was the III Summit País Digital ( http://summit2015.paisdigital.org/). I was the keynote speaker after introductory speeches by politicians (e.g., the national Minister of Economics and the Intendente, or provincial governor, of the Metropolitan Region which includes Santiago). I offered a strong introduction about the Industrial Internet Consortium and also managed to mention the Institute of course. There was tremendous interest in both. The conference had 4,000 registered, some 2,000 of those for the full event with keynotes, panels and focused sessions on applications of the Internet of Things. I found the Intendente's speech particular interesting, as it focused on real applications of IoT for Smart Cities; as a major mining country, there was of course a key panel on IoT in mining, featuring our friends from Industrial Internet Consortium member CODELCO.
In between the two days at País Digital, I was invited for a long meeting at CORFO (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, the Corporation for Production Development, http://www.corfo.cl/) to discuss the adoption of the Industrial Internet in Chile. Some of the staff of the Intendente (from above) was on hand, as well as key people from the United Nations, and one huge surprise: Juan Rada of Oracle, a native of Patagonia and an old friend who was active with the Object Management Group over a decade ago in standards for international emergency response. Juan has since retired from Oracle, and is helping the Chilean government form its productivity roadmap, including adoption of the Industrial Internet in mining, agriculture, aquaculture and so forth. I am very much looking forward to working with him again.
I left Chile to fly directly to Barcelona for the Industrial Internet Consortium's regular quarterly meeting, co-located with Internet of Things Solutions World Congress 2015 (IoTSWC 2015). The two together featured an exhausting week with a few thousand of my closest friends, talking about collaboration and building testbeds, more on that later!
I do want to offer my prayers and wishes for Chile, which suffered a huge (8.3 on the Richter scale) earthquake off of Valparaiso last week. As Chile is used to big tremors (don't forget the 9.0 quake in 2010, nearly underneath Chile's second-biggest city!), the damage was limited, but for the twelve who lost their lives, and their families and friends, it was the worst possible disaster. The scale of the quake is more clear when one realizes that tsunami warnings were broadcast all over the Pacific Ocean, even in Japan. Having just been in Chile I feel it keenly, and I hope you'll join me in watching for possible appeals by the Red Cross and other needs that might arise.
