I began the year visiting New York, Santiago, Valparaiso & Honolulu (not the most obvious airline routing in the world). While in New York, I met with Daniel Dobrygowski of the World Economic Forum. OMG helped WEF put together its reports on the Internet of Things (or what it calls the New Industrial Revolution) which was the primary topic of discussion at the Forum's annual Davos event. It was fascinating and enlightening working with this terrific group. While there, I was also interviewed by Sarah Thomas of Light Reading for an article on the Industrial IoT, which was published this month.
The key stop was in Santiago, where Magical Startups ( http://www.magicalstartups.cl/) , a Chilean startup incubator very interested in Industrial IoT, invited me to keynote at its Digital Summit 2016. I addressed about a thousand attendees, who were all interested in the Internet of Things, which I discussed from both the perspectives of both OMG® Industrial Internet standards and the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) testbeds.
While downtown, I took the opportunity to visit CORFO (the innovative Corporación de Fomento de la Producción unit of the Chilean government's Ministry of Economics & Tourism) again. CORFO is starting a nationwide project to set mining standards and to develop healthcare & mining IoT testbed projects. I also met with the energy minister of Chile, at his request, and several of his staff, and had the opportunity to introduce myself to the new innovation project staff at CODELCO (Chile's largest company, and the largest copper miner in the world).
Before leaving Chile, I drove out to Valparaiso and met with the MIT Media Lab Macro Connections team, doing fascinating Big Data work that is directly relevant to the requirements for real-time, predictive analytics in the Internet of Things.
From Chile, I flew to join my family for a vacation in Hawaii. While I was there, I received an invitation to sit on a keynote panel at the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) conference in January in..... Honolulu. So I found myself making that trek again, for the good of the cause!
The panel was also included very senior people from Toyota, Nissan and Honda to discuss the future of connected automobiles, and the requirement for communications that would entail.
I've saved the best for last -- some of you will recognize the name Vinton Cerf. Vint, a brilliant engineer, was one of the two principal architects of the TCP/IP protocol -- that is to say, the Internet as we know it today (there was a big team in fact, but Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are the best known). In 2013, Vint was on the team that put together what would eventually be known as the Industrial Internet Consortium. I have talked to him by phone and email several times over the last 40 years, when I was involved in early TCP implementation at MIT, helping to develop the first successful picture telephone at PicTel, and a couple times since -- he did remember a couple of those. We also have many friends in common (LinkedIn said 31, but I suspect the real number's quite a bit higher). In any case, he gave an excellent historical keynote at the conference in Honolulu, reaching back into history but also forward; I tried to catch him afterwards but the conference organizers directed him into other meetings immediately after he got off the stage. I emailed him, he responded immediately, and we met twice in the remaining two days. We had a great time reminiscing about the times we had almost -- but not actually -- met face-to-face over the last 40 years.
At the end of January, I finally made it to another Boston CTO Club breakfast -- I miss a lot of them with travel, despite having co-founded the Club and being primarily responsible for finding speakers -- for a fascinating discussion about the blockchain, originally just an implementation detail of Bitcoin, but likely to be important for all sorts of decentralized trust problems.
I left the CTO Club breakfast to fly directly to Washington for the Data Transparency Coalition's Capitol Fly-In. This annual event, hosted by the Data Transparency Coalition (recently re-named the Data Coalition, http://www.datacoalition.org/), works to make sure that policy-makers in Washington understand the importance of open electronic data formats and reporting for all sorts of data -- first government financial data, but eventually lots more government data. I am proud to note that OMG has been supportive of the Coalition since its founding and I serve on the Coalition's Advisory Board. Clearly standards for those data formats -- and standards for translating between different data formats, enabled by our ODM and MDMI® standards for example -- are critically important, which is why I serve as an Advisor to the Coalition. We visited several offices of US senators, congressmen and committee staffers who clearly understand the importance of open, electronic, standard-format data which can be achieved with OMG’s financial services standards, FIBO® and FIGI™.
Next month, I’m off to Munich at the OOP 2016 conference. In the meantime, the next OMG TC meeting in Reston, VA is just around the corner. We expect to draw a large audience for all of the special events, including: Business Architecture Innovation Summit, Cyber Resilience Summit and the very popular OMG Standards at Work in the Industrial Internet of Things. I hope to see you there during the week of March 14-18, 2016.
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