Despite a dearth of meetings on the calendar ahead of time, the first week of December ended up much busier than expected as AI World in Boston's Seaport District brought Artificial Intelligence (AI) front & center. Of course, OMG® has been in the AI business for more than twenty years; not only the more obvious specifications (PRR™, Production Rule Representation) but the more numerous OMG vertical-market ontologies in retail systems, manufacturing & production, healthcare, finance and so forth. These semantic representations, or ontologies, while relevant to smaller markets than OMG horizontal standards like CORBA® and UML®, are critically important to interoperability in those verticals.
Just as relevant, the vast quantity of data generated by Industrial IoT systems necessitates AI in the IIoT space. The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) Deep Learning Testbed generates literally petabytes of data per week; there's simply no way any humans can sort through that data. AI enters the IIoT fray through that window, as computers are happy to do that sorting. AI World addressed that with a full afternoon of excellent talks and panels focused on AI in IIoT. It's clear that this time around AI is no flash in the pan. Having lived deeply within an earlier phase of the technology in the 80's, I'm quite happy to depend on processors that have millions of times the computing power, millions of times the memory, radically lower costs of both, and ubiquitous access to them through the Internet! OMG will be saying more about AI standards,
During the OMG Seattle TC meeting, I was invited to give a short talk at the IEEE Big Data 2018 event that happened to be in downtown Seattle the same week. Tuesday afternoon at the TC meetings usually features the OMG Board meeting but not this time, so I accepted the kind invitation (from old friend and active OMG member Arne-Jørgen Berre of SINTEF). The discussion was about enabling digital twins with big data, and the interest in OMG was whether OMG would like to do standardization in the area of digital twins. Well would we! There's obviously a link to the IIC as well, since many of the testbed programs in IIC feature digital twins (and not just the manufacturing ones, either!). I was surprised and delighted to find a high level of recognition of OMG as a standards organization and IIC as a testbed organization, along with universal recognition of UML and SysML®. We'll definitely go down this path, perhaps in partnership with the IEEE, which is also addressing IoT concepts like digital twins. Expect to see some action led at least by SINTEF as early as the March OMG TC meeting.
I started 2019 moderating a keynote panel at the Pacific Telecommunications Council's annual event PTC '19: From Pipes to Platforms. The title of the event was apt: telecommunications vendors, undersea cable vendors, satellite vendors and others are realizing that the telecoms world is integrating. Cloud services vendors are sinking transcontinental cables; satellite vendors are augmenting geosynchronous- and low-earth-orbit communications networks with data centers; and satellite vendors that used to focus only on "their" networks are offering multipath solutions. High Frequency Trading financial traders are using satellite services for the first time, as wireless latency starts to match wired latencies.
My panel, entitled "AI, IoT, and 5G best practices for innovative industry development and implications for the future of the digital society", was a great example. With an introduction by Tetsuo Yamakawa, Chairman, Pacific Telecommunications Council Japan Committee, the other participants were:
- Yoshiaki Takeuchi, Director-General for Cybersecurity, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications
- Robert Pepper, Head of Global Connectivity Policy and Planning, Facebook
- Jun Murai, Professor of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University
You can watch the video here. A stellar group indeed!
In general, a fascinating event, with some 2200 attendees (although my session was a keynote "Main Stage" there were several parallel events and only 500 or so in the room). Although preponderance of the overall session materials was about subsea or satellite communications, there is growing discussion "up the stack" toward edge computing, IoT and the like.
This month, I’ll be in Cary, North Carolina on February 15 for the Industrial Internet Consortium® Global Event Series, along with event partner, Raleigh IoT and host, SAS. The event is a forum to network with industry experts, marketplace leaders and end-user organizations who are building and deploying intelligent infrastructures. You can find more information about the agenda and registration information here. In March, the Object Management Group® kicks off its first member meeting of the year in Reston, Virginia. During these quarterly meetings, members meet face-to-face to draft and revise their standards work. Concurrently, a Special Events agenda is curated in topics that lend themselves to technology standards, like healthcare, space, CubeSats, business architecture and systems modeling‚ The public is invited to attend. Visit this page for more details.
This April marks the 30th anniversary of the Object Management Group. We’ll celebrate this major milestone throughout the year, beginning at the Reston TC meeting. Our members will share their memories since they are instrumental in drafting OMG standards that have influenced and transformed how businesses, governments and people live, work and communicate. I’m looking forward to reminiscing with them about their OMG journey and sharing their plans for our exciting future.
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