Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

November 2019

11/15/2019

Richard Soley’s On the Road Blog

 

 

 

by Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO

 

This year's  IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC) was a smashing success with over 16,000 attendees, all focused, as I said at the opening, on how to use Industrial IoT to increase value.  Although based on IoT technology (and strongly incorporating artificial intelligence and distributed ledger or blockchain technology to achieve effective digitalization), the show focused on vertical markets from top to bottom. 

 

Some 20% bigger in all respects than the 2018 edition, IoTSWC goes from strength to strength with some 300 excellent speakers in some 150 sessions.  It was exhausting but worth the trip with strong leads for both the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and its parent, the Object Management Group (OMG). 

Knowledge about getting started and succeeding at digitalization -- digital transformation -- abounded and those lucky enough to be there brought valuable lessons home. 

Unfortunately, this trip marked my last one for a while, due to a bad fall that left me looking even worse than usual but will have no lasting effects.  IIC and OMG meetings will have to soldier on without me for a while but are fully planned for a year.

Richard

 

Richard Soley’s On the Road Blog

August 2, 2019

by Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO

 

 

 

 

Hotel Schloss Hohenhausen, north of Munich, Germany, pictured both day and night. Deutsche Telekom held an invitation-only event called 24 Hours for a small group of executives in June. 

I've been a little remiss in reporting my travel lately, so this starts at the end of June.  I went on a trip that started in Munich (well, north of the city) at the lovely Schloss Hohenhausen (pictured at both day and night).  There each year the Chief Executive of Deutsche Telekom holds a small (about 100 people) invitation-only event called 24 Hours (which oddly are spread over three days).  The entire event is held under Chatham House Rule.¹

Due to this privacy rule open conversation is maximized, with topics ranging from politics (especially European politics) and basic income to technology (5G and IoT came up quite a lot).  As always, the mix of think-tank experts, CEOs from companies large and small and other smart people made for lively conversation.

From Munich I traveled to Amsterdam to take part in the OMG Quarterly Technical Committee Meeting.  Discussion and Request Processes on artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) ("blockchain") joined the busy meeting, churning out a half-dozen new specifications and with a record number of processes underway.  The quite odd hotel – Park Inn by Radisson Amsterdam City West  – was a hit for interesting design and lost a lot in useful meeting spaces but didn't slow more than a hundred request processes.

 

Raffle winners at Object Management Group Attendee Reception in Amsterdam at the OMG Quarterly Technical Committee Meeting on June 25th. (Front row l-r): Tim Weilkiens, Char Wales, Ida Karlsson and Hiroshi Miyazaki, (back row l-r): Lars Olof-Kihlstrom, Havard Skjevling, Dr. Richard Soley, Kathryn Christensen, and Brad Kizzort.

Staying in Europe, I then flew to Hamburg, the nearest major airport to Travemümde. There was held the annual IOTA Summer Summit ("SumSum"); relating to both the standards program at OMG (where DLTs in general and IOTA in specific are going through standardization) and the testbed program at IIC (where there is active discussion about studying DLTs in the IIC programs and possible joint testbeds) and I serve on the Supervisory Board (Stiftungrat) of the Foundation.  This DLT is important as it was designed from the ground up to be used in machines (industrial IoT settings): small footprint, high transaction rate, zero cost. 

It was a good three days of discussion and exciting to meet the widely distributed team (100 people from 26 countries).  The only downside was the Human Resources report stating a young average age and a highest age that matches my own!

After some time in the States, I had a trip to the RSA Asia/Pac and Japan show in Singapore.  Mostly focused on measure and management of threats in cyberspace, there was intense interest of course in risk management but also in code quality, IoT device security and measurement of same.  It is surprising how often risk management is only carried out late in the use of code - why not measure code size, technical debt and quality before code is live.  In fact, why not do that at the model level in a model-based software engineering (or Model Driven Architecture) informed process? That of course is the direction taken by the OMG code quality standards developed by the OMG Consortium for Information & Software Quality.

As the heat rises in the northern summer, activity slows somewhat but will come roaring back with September featuring meetings of both the OMG in Nashville  and the IIC in Anaheim.

Best,

 

 

Richard

 

1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule).

Richard Soley's "On the Road" Blog

In early June, I participated in the first launch of two simultaneous 5G cellular networks, by both AT&T and Verizon, in downtown Indianapolis. Led by luminaries including Congresswoman Susan Brooks (Republican of Indiana), Scott Jones of Eleven Fifty Academy, and our own Dean Mung Chiang, Dean of Engineering at Purdue University and member of the Object Management Group® (OMG®) Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) Steering Committee. The excitement for not only the early availability of 5G, but also the technical community of Indy (Indianapolis) was infectious! I expect new IIC testbeds (for the first time using 5G wireless) and potential new standards from this group.

Mung Chiang, Dean of Engineering at Purdue University and member of the IIC Steering Committee, addresses attendees at the first launch of two simultaneous 5G cellular networks in Indianapolis.

Boston again hosted the huge PTC LiveWorx event, including the Integrity Symposium focusing on the PTC implementation of the OMG SysML® and ReqIF ™ standards, with some mentions of UML®, UAF® and BPM standards including BPMN™.  This customer-focused event was intended to emphasize user demands regarding the PTC toolset, but it also spent some time understanding the OMG bedrock on which those tools are built.  It was exciting to see real users of OMG standards as well as some interest in IIC, and I did a presentation about OMG standards and how PTC supports them.

I just returned from the OMG TC meeting in Amsterdam. During these meetings, our members get the opportunity to meet face-to-face to advance their standards work. And we videotaped many of the speakers who presented topics such as AI in retail, BPMN, software quality, business architecture and Unified Architecture Framework® with NATO during the OMG Special events. These videos will be posted shortly on the OMG YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtuTj1wtywojYNZoyPeYAFwat.

In the meantime, I’ll be on an extended summer vacation and then will be back in the OMG office in Needham, Mass. The next OMG TC meeting is scheduled in September in Nashville, Tennessee. The agenda is already shaping up to be very busy with planned work. I hope you have the opportunity to attend to learn about standards and related practices, methodologies & technologies.

OMG last visited Nashville ten years ago. For those unfamiliar with the city, it’s best-known as the home of country music. Two of its main attractions are The Grand Ole Opry and the County Music Hall of Fame and Museum. There are also many historical and cultural attractions like American Civil War battle sites, antebellum mansions, and a Civil Rights Movement tour. It’s also undergoing a renaissance as one of America’s hottest cities in terms of job growth and real estate prices. With this in mind, I believe Nashville will be an exceptional venue for the next OMG TC meeting.

I want to wish our U.S. staff and members a happy July 4^th holiday. Known as Independence Day, July 4^th is a federal holiday in the United States, commemorating the Declaration of Independence of the United States on July 4, 1776. The office will be closed on that day.

Happy Holiday!

Richard Soley's "On the Road" Blog

IoT Innovatech 2019 recently finished in Santiago, Chile and it was a huge success. In its first edition, with some 1,200 attendees, it was already the most-attended purely Industrial IoT event in Latin America. I was honored to help open and keynote the show among the nearly 70 speakers over two days, concentrating on case studies and vertical market usage of IIoT technology to create transformational business outcomes and opportunities. Attendees came from all over Latin America, Europe and North America. It was exciting to see smart cities, manufacturing and agricultural design wins using IIoT approaches take off at this venue. Discussion of communications technologies like 5G and LoRa took a back seat to the digital transformational business outcomes promised by the mission of the Object Management Group® (OMG®) Industrial Internet Consortium®. There was also huge interest in standards like OMG Data-Distribution Service™ and Business Process Model and Notation™, as well as artificial intelligence, blockchain and cybersecurity techniques. A growing interest in coming together to design testbeds around Latin America was apparent too. This was a great event and the organizers are already promising to grow the event in Santiago next year!

Daniel Amigo, Gerente General Meet & Greet, welcomes attendees to IoT Innovatech 2019.

Dr. Soley keynotes at IoT Innovatech 2019, dedicated to the IIoT and to network technologies of the future.

Attendees experience IIoT approaches as well as AI, blockchain and cybersecurity technologies at exhibits during IoT Innovatech 2019.

Dr. Soley with the participants of the closing discussion of IoT Innovatech

In mid-May, I had a marvelous day at committed IIC™ member Huawei Technologies at its headquarters in Shenzhen, China. This $100 billion company manages two of the IIC testbeds and is part of the IIC Steering Committee and in other leadership positions at IIC including the Liaison Working Group. After an extended tour of the new Huawei exhibition center closely focused on Digital Transformation and Industrial IoT, I sat down to work with key Huawei staff and executives on this year's planned meeting of the Global Industry Organization (GIO). This meeting of all key IoT standards organizations will be hosted by the IIC at the IoT Solutions World Congress event in Barcelona, 28 October 2019. Huawei will be a sponsor as always, and we're looking for more strategic sponsors.

Signage welcoming IIC in lobby at Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

The highlight of the day was a private lunch with Huawei staff and top-level executives, a distinctly non-Chinese meal in what appeared to be a meeting room in France! The day finished with a VIP tour of the factory that makes some 20% of all Huawei wireless base station devices, suitable automated and sensorized.

My next stop was in Tianjin, Hebei for the annual huge World Intelligence Conference (WIC). Lasting from the 16th through 19th of May, this huge conference features public entry days on the weekend with tens of thousands of attendees. For the second time this year, the conference hosted a forum on the Industrial Internet with 2,000 attendees. I gave an overview of IIC white papers, security maturity model and testbed program and a peek into the IoT standardization program at OMG. It was quite gratifying to hear speaker after speaker talk about the Industrial Internet rather than one of the hundred other names, and more than half mentioned the IIC.

Attendees listen to Dr. Soley’s talk about IIC and OMG initiatives at the World Intelligence Conference, held in Tianjin, Hebei.

Tianjin International Exhibition Center outside Dr. Soley’s hotel room in Tianjin, Hebei.

I’ve returned from Ireland after attending the quarterly IIC member meeting, which concluded with the Smart Manufacturing Forum. Hosted by IIC member, Cork Institute of Technology (CIT), the Forum highlighted smart manufacturing in Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, supply chain, security and industrial analytics. Manufacturing accounts for 36.5% of Ireland’s GDP, so the collection of data analytics, via smart manufacturing, can help Irish companies make more informed decisions for transformational business outcomes.

In June, I’ll travel to Amsterdam to attend the OMG quarterly member meeting, OMG is hosting special events in artificial intelligence, retail, data residency, software quality and business architecture, so if you want to speak and network with experts in these fields and learn about the role of technology standards, then visit https://www.omg.org/events/amsterdam-19/index.htm for more information.

Best,

Richard Soley's "On the Road" Blog

Hannover Messe (Hannover Fair) amasses nearly 250,000 visitors in a week in Hannover, northern Germany - a town only twice the size of the fair itself. What you'd expect happens every year: no hotel rooms, no taxis, no rental cars, no flights, and so forth. However, it is the largest and most comprehensive fair covering automation technology and thus focuses interest from both Object Management Group® and the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™).

For several years, IIC had a booth displaying the wares and testbeds of around ten of our members, and it announced cooperative announcements with Germany's Plattform Industrie 4.0. Having worked closely with the organization for four years, the IIC was delighted to announce that it is deepening that relationship, with upcoming joint testbeds and the possibility of standards in digital twins and administrative shells (containers) integrating information and operational technology. The new IIC Security Maturity Model got a lot of attention, as did the focus on smart factories.

Plattform Industrie 4.0 Secretary General Henning Banthien (left) shakes Dr. Soley’s hand signifying a strengthening relationship between the two organizations to advance IIoT at the Hannover Messe Fair.

I also attended HORASIS: The Global Vision Community, a conference held in Cascais, outside Lisbon, Portugal. This fascinating global emerging economy event focused on globalization and its effects, and all the related issues (technology, migration, jobs, etc.). The beautiful seaside community of Estoril in Cascais provided a lovely setting for the four-day event, reminding us of the importance of understanding the impact of the work that OMG and IIC do.

(L-R): Isabella Qin, Vice Chair, United Nations Association UK Young Professionals Group, United Kingdom; Dr. Richard Soley, CEO and Chairman of OMG; Ray Walshe, Steering Group Member of Joint Initiative on Standardization (JIS), European Commission, Belgium; Morgan Parnis, Chief Executive Officer, Business Leaders Malta, Malta; Luciano Brunherotto, Member of the Board, Brazilian Facilities Association, Brazil; and Jeff Conrad, Chairman, Kinecta Federal Credit Union, USA.

I was also invited to join the Global IoT Council of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and gladly accepted.  The advent of IoT, and its impact on world markets, is certainly interesting to this worldwide group of multi-disciplinary experts!

My next stop is at Innovatech in Santiago, Chile where I plan to discuss "Implementing IoT in Industries: Digital Transformation."

In the meantime, I am also planning to attend the OMG Technical Committee meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from June 17-21. The agenda for the Special Events program (open to the public) is almost final.  The topics include: AI, business architecture, software quality, BPMN™ and  a special event featuring thought leaders from NATO, national governments, systems integrators and the Unified Architecture Framework® development team who will discuss use of the OMG UAF® standard in building NAF architectures. If you reside near The Netherlands or are planning a trip nearby, I recommend attending any of these topics to gain a better understanding how standards are harnessing the power of tomorrow's technology.

 

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

After a busy week in Raleigh for the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) February’s meeting, I spent a week in Berlin, primarily for meetings with the IOTA Foundation (of which I am a member of the supervisory board) and the McKinsey EMEA IoT Summit 2019. IOTA is doing quite well, focusing on distributed ledger technology ("DLT" or "blockchain") designed for the IoT machine-to-machine world. OMG is looking at the technology for standardization and several IIC members and other interested parties are looking at it for the trustworthiness component of a new testbed or two, so my IOTA Foundation duties meld well with my Object Management Group® (OMG®) ones! There are some interesting and impactful new announcements coming from the Foundation in the coming months ─ including their applications for liaison with both OMG and IIC. Watch this space, as they say!

I also had the opportunity to meet with several key figures at Fraunhofer FOKUS, a longtime supporter and member of OMG and also a member of IIC; they are managing the creation of the Edge Computing Consortium Europe (ECCE), which is bringing together major European players to discuss the future of edge commuting. Though it initially sounds competitive with IIC, the ECCE will work cooperatively with us and has begun applying for liaison even before officially incorporating!

The highlight of the week was my "fireside chat" at the McKinsey EMEA IoT Summit 2019 with McKinsey partner Brett May. Bringing together some hundreds of McKinsey's biggest customers worldwide, this event focused on building IoT ecosystems ─ the core of the IIC approach to its mission after all! Our fireside chat focused on the trends driving IoT adoption, which closely match what we see at both the OMG and the IIC.

Dr Soley (left) discusses IIoT adoption trends with McKinsey’s Brett May (right).

The end of February was also the end of a three-week-long trip encompassing the IIC Quarterly Meeting (in Raleigh, NC, U.S.A.) followed by a number of meetings already outlined in Berlin, Germany and then Barcelona, Spain for MWC19. This quite enormous show (107,000 attendees this year), produced by our IoTSWC show partner Fira de Barcelona for the GSM Association, used to be called "Mobile World Congress" (or just "Mobile" for the Barcelona taxi driver), but the name was shortened to call out the expanded focus beyond mobile telephone handsets and infrastructure. I'm not convinced that "MWC" is particularly easy to pronounce, but along with folding mobile handsets from a few vendors, there were cars on the floor (it is about "mobile" after all!) as well as impressive displays of artificial intelligence systems and other things. Though MWC is supposed to now be about IoT too, the IoT exhibition space we were in was noticeably smaller than last year and the IoT sessions (including my IoT Security session!) were not well attended.

For the first day, I avoided the MWC crowds as I was invited by Telenor Connexion to keynote their invitation-only IoT Think Tank, held at La Gran Florida Hotel atop a small mountain outside Barcelona. Despite the implied promise of a sterling view of the city from atop the hill, the city's smog obscured the view so I didn't take any pictures. The event itself, attended by about 40 executives focusing on digital transformation of their companies, was excellent and I appreciated the chance to talk about IIC testbeds and OMG standards for digitalization.

Dr. Soley moderates an IoT Think Tank panel.

I relented after Monday and spent the rest of the week at MWC, chairing the aforementioned panel on IoT Security and sharing the press & analyst briefing job with Bill Hoffman ─ some two dozen briefings in all. If someone got to Hall 8 (half dedicated to IoT), they were interested in IIC and/or IoTSWC, and there was some fair interest. The underway combination of forces of the OpenFog Consortium with OMG Industrial Internet Consortium got quite a lot of interest; the IIC Security Maturity Model (announced the same week) got even more.

This month the OMG TC meeting is back in Reston, Virginia. The Special Events agenda features OMG member and thought leaders discussing the role of standards in blockchain, space, healthcare, systems modeling and business architecture. In Reston, we’re also kicking off the 30th anniversary of OMG. Celebrating this milestone is a big achievement, so on behalf of OMG, I want to thank all of you who have been a part of the company’s journey through all these years.

Richard Soley's "On the Road Blog"

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.

Staff from the PTC Secretariat introducing main stage speakers.

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!

Dr. Soley moderates Future of Digital Society Panel with (l-r): Yoshiaki Takeuchi, Prof. Jun Murai and Dr. Robert Pepper.

Stunning views of the Waikiki-area hotels in Honolulu, Hawaii

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.

Richard Soley's "On the Road" Blog

The fourth edition of last month’s IoTSWC (Internet of Things Solutions World Congress) in Barcelona was an outstanding success.  With three hundred and forty-one exhibiting companies and 16,250 visitors from more than a hundred countries — some 42% and 25% respectively more than last year — representing a huge growth in the exhibition space, it's quite clear that interest in IoT continues to soar.  Three hundred and sixteen speakers participated in the Congress, which included 200 highly-attended talks, panel discussions and presentations of success stories involving IoT applications in different industrial environments. Below are some of the many pictures I took showing the amount of construction and finishing touches underway before the official opening of the Congress.

An exhausting week included a keynote shared with the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) Steering Committee Chair Dirk Slama in which we made three major announcements:
- introduction of the IIC Resource Hub, making it much easier to find relevant results, best practices, standards requirements and even draft RFPs among the IIC outputs
- strong relationships with more than 40 other organizations, likely to make use of the outputs of the IIC
- the first standard underway based on requirements from an IIC testbed

Dirk Slama and Dr. Richard Soley announcing the news at the IOTSWC keynote.

That last announcement happens to involve the IIC Track & Trace Testbed, and the Object Management Group® (OMG™), which is developing a new SENSR standard based on the requirements derived from the IIC testbed. Although eventually many standards organizations and open source organizations will take requirements from the IIC projects, it's exciting that OMG is the first!

There were also demonstrations of a Smart Factory Web Testbed, which provided insight into how to connect factories to a Smart Factory Web and exchange data reliably and an Automotive Security Demonstration, which addressed safety violations resulting from cybersecurity compromises. There was also an IOTSWC testbed area, where attendees saw live demonstrations of Industrial IoT, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) in action.

An IOT Solutions Awards program recognized the work, leadership and transformation that stood out in IOT, blockchain and AI solutions for both the public and private sector in the areas of innovative technology, business transformation, testbed and industry.

There were dozens of press and analyst briefings and hundreds of session dedicated to real end -user stories — enough for anyone to get a good start in IoT projects or accelerate existing projects!

Dr. Soley stands in the back row, center, with recipients of IOT Solutions Awards.

Signage leading to main entrance of the Congress exhibition area.

IOTSWC logo displays on stage.

Dr. Soley opens the Congress and welcomes attendees.

Dr. Soley displays the IOTSWC flag along with OMG President William Hoffman (seated).

(L-R) Molt Honorable Joaquim Torra (President of Catalunya), Richard Soley, Jordi Puigneró (Catalan Digital Minister) discuss planning to open the show.

Dr. Soley moderates panel with the winners of the IOTSWC Awards (l-r): Qiu Lei, Richard Kerslake, Ilia Zelenkin and Hatem Oueslati.

Dr. Soley, along with OMG and IIC executives, stand with Japanese delegation that attended the Congress.  

From the outstanding success of IoT Solutions World Congress, I moved on directly to a small but valuable set of academic conferences on the island nation of Malta. OnTheMove 2018 included a half-dozen small conferences: I've had the honor to keynote the events before but it's been years.

Back on U.S. soil, I was honored to host a group from the municipality of Nanjing in China, focused on increasing start-up activity in Nanjing. The language barrier was in the way at the beginning, but the infectious desire of the participants to understand innovation Boston-style quickly broke the ice!

In November, I arrived in Beijing for the IIC's Quarterly Meeting after a successful week in Korea. I was there primarily to keynote and participate in the annual Fourth Industrial Revolution Forum in Ulsan. Putting aside arguments over the phrase "fourth industrial revolution" vs. "cyber-physical systems" and other code words for the industrial internet — this was an excellent event in the heavily industrialized city of Ulsan in the southeast corner of the Republic of Korea. This amazing city hosts steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, and the largest shipyard in the world building dozens of huge ships per year. The tours offered at the end of the event were worth the price of admission!-style quickly broke the ice!

Tour participants at Hyundai Motors with Dr. Soley standing in the middle.

Tour participants at Hyundai Heavy Industries learning about the history of the world's largest shipyard.

Tour participants at the shipyard itself.

In the meantime, I’ll be in Seattle attending the OMG TC meeting from December 10-14. The Special Events program now includes a complimentary gathering to discuss distributed ledger technology and blockchain. Featured speakers, such as blockchain evangelist Chris Jones, will present on the current state of blockchain and distributed ledger technology, and JT Rose from Microsoft will discuss the company’s blockchain vision. The event will also feature speakers from OMG and the IOTA Foundation who will share their insights on the current state and potential future of this transformative technology.

 

 

Richard Soley's "On the Road" Blog

On October 3rd and 4th, I was buried deep in the DEEP, attending Cybereason's excellent DEEP 2018 conference on cybersecurity in downtown Boston. Focused on supporting "the defenders" — that is, people defending networks and users from unscrupulous "hackers" —this conference included excellent overviews of the technical means of protecting systems. Although it was understandably vendor-focused, it was good to catch up with the current thinking in cybersecurity and how it relates both to OMG® security standards and the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) Security Framework.

The following week saw a very busy few days in Japan, starting with STSforum, the Science, Technology and Society Forum in Kyoto. The 15th edition of this excellent conference is still run by Omi san with the explicit support (and keynote) by Japan's Prime Minister Abe. Current issues covered included: Internet of Things adoption, the impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on society, gene splicing and genetically-modified organisms and the like. The 2,000 to 3,000 attendees, including Nobel laureates, science ministers from around the globe, corporate executives and the like, had three days of rousing discussion on current topics in science, technology and society. Besides strong interest in OMG standards and IIC testbeds, I always enjoy these few days in Kyoto and this year was no exception!

By the good graces of my old friend Yuji Inoue, I then had a fascinating several hours meeting at Toyota's Tokyo InfoTechnology Center as part of an informal set of briefings with my friends Sadahiko Kano and CS Hong. There was enormous interest in the IIC and how unfortunate that Toyota's early interest in the IIC had centered not on headquarters but from its U.S. subsidiary. As Toyota is now undergoing major changes, there's quite some interest in refocusing on mobility challenges in society.

Organized by Hiroshi Yamamoto of Toshiba, I then had a good meeting at Toyota's Kawasaki office near Toshiba's technical museum (and less famously but more interestingly host venue for an IIC testbed on smart buildings). We discussed Toshiba's activities in IIC and the relationship to standards. I always enjoy "deep dives" into our member's plans!

Again, thanks to Inoue san but also to Hiroshi Hamano, a Director General of the Telecommunication Technology Committee, I then participated in an excellent seminar with Kano and Hong again, but also with Doi san from Toyota. There was lively discussion of mobility topics, 5G and IoT. In the end, we did have to agree to disagree on some points (my ideas about 5G clash with many others') but the telecommunications issues of IoT are certainly many!

My last meeting was also arranged by Inoue san and took up most of the day while I learned about the many innovations under development. Hosted by Mr. Sogawa of NTT Research, Prof. Hong, Inoue san and I saw novel 3D display technologies, new integrated circuit techniques and so forth all day. It was fascinating to see the future!

(L-R): NTT Research's Akira Okada and Tetsuomi Sogawa, Choong Seon Hong from Kyung Hee University, Yuji Inoue of Toyota & Richard Soley of OMG

In the meantime, the next OMG Technical Committee Meeting will be in Seattle, Washington from December 10-14. Our Special Events agenda is still being formalized, but right now there are 4 scheduled as of today:

·        Data Governance Forum

·        IIoT at Work: Focus on Energy (comp. event - more info to come)

·        Innovation: Coming to a Store Near You 

·        OMG Meet & Greet: BPMN in Action!

All events are open to the public but registration is required. I hope to see you in Seattle!

  

 

World Standards Day 2018

October 14 marks World Standards Day. The United Nations IEC, ISO and ITU organizations (with whom the Object Management Group® (OMG®) has always had Publicly Available Specification, or PAS status) celebrate this day by recognizing the efforts of a worldwide community that develops international standards for a wide range of industries and technologies. OMG also recognizes this day because it has led the way in drafting technology standards since 1989.

Why Standards

As our world becomes more connected, there is a growing requirement for standardized technology. Standards form the fundamental building blocks for product development by establishing consistent protocols that can be universally understood and adopted. This helps drive compatibility and interoperability, and simplifies product development and speeds time-to-market. Standards also make it easier to understand and compare competing products. As standards are globally adopted and applied in many markets, they also fuel international trade.

Standards help transform the way we live, work and communicate which is echoed in the theme of this year’s World Standards Day – “International Standards and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Standards spur the development and implementation of technologies that enable interoperability between the systems and devices we rely on. We refer to this connected world as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), comprised of everything from medical devices, autonomous vehicles, energy grids, to factory floor sensors and more.

OMG has pioneered industrial IoT standards that: link information across connected machines, enterprise systems, and mobile devices; share threat information and security attacks across different devices, IT systems, and protocols; define ways for devices manufactured by thousands of companies to operate safely and reliably; and analyze and manage the structural quality of IT software to prevent breaches caused from violations of good architectural and coding practice. This is all enabled through standards such as: Data-Distribution Service™, threat modeling, Structured Assurance Case Metamodel™ and automated source code metrics.

Our mission is to not only develop standards but also to support communities that embrace standards, such as the Consortium for IT Software Quality™, which drafts metrics to measure software size and quality and the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™), whose members build testbeds based on business innovation strategies and software frameworks. These testbeds help members understand how their industries will be disrupted by emerging technologies, such as IIoT, in a water management system in India, a smart city system in Ireland, a manufacturing and production system in Germany, etc. They are also generating requirements for new standards. From this testbed work, OMG has opened the process for a new standard for the manufacturers of sensors to be able to publish the required interpretation of the data that they produce via an Electronic Data Sheet. It is called the Simple Electronic Notation for Sensor Reporting specification, or SENSR. This is the first OMG-brand standard that originated from the IIC testbeds, but I know it will be the start of many. As long as the complexity of technology systems remains, we’ll continue to rely on standards to help abstract that complexity.