Announcement

Listening to our objects

We are living at a time when we are mostly surrounded by the manufactured objects of our technological society, more than by the naturally evolved ones found outside of the human civilization. The main difference between the two being the way not only thy have been born, but also the way they interact with their environment. The first typically being less adaptable, not surprisingly, but most of the time more attuned to the communication needs we have, better equipped at telling us their statuses, their needs.

After thousands of mainframes, tens or hundreds of thousands of minicomputers, hundreds of millions of personal computers, now we are, with billions of mobile phones, at the last generation of objects that can pretend, and obtain the care of humans. When a mobile phone runs low on energy, we run to recharge it. When its memory fills up with too many text messages, we will try to free it up, as if it were a little baby, and we were changing its diapers… the mobile phone is the real Tamagochi!

With the next generations of smart sensor networks, comprised of tens, or hundreds of billion objects, we will have to make sure that the very nature of the objects, the spimes, changes, including their entire lifecycle: they way they get scattered in the environment, the way they organize themselves to fill the tasks they have been designed for, and what happens with them, and the networks they form, when they fail. All these functions will have to be performed without human intervention, and little human oversight.

However, just because these networks are born, and managed autonomously, it doesn’t mean that the reason they are there in the first place doesn’t concern us! On the contrary, the likelihood that we will delegate vital monitoring functions to these networks is very high. The granularity, frequency, and intensity of the chatter that the spimes in the network perform will be vital, and it will be a fundamental task to be able and reliably translate from their plane of communication to the one of aggregated, second-order knowledge, where we can understand it, where we can derive useful, valuable information which we can act upon!

These are the issues that we recently spoke about at the SHiFT presentation entitled “Why We Need To Listen To Our Things”