Lesson 2

2.1. Trends in the adoption of the internet of things

Technological trends that have led to the incident of things, say revolution. It's an
overused word, but let's try to use that right now. So, there are lots of different trends that
have led to this, led to the incorporation of things, technology into devices today. And so,
we'll talk about those things. And it sorts of crept up on us over the years, but now there's
this convergence where the situation is right. Everything works and you can really do a lot
of the things that you see in these IoT devices today.

So, there are several trends. One trend is cost, is the straight cost of devices, so things
have gotten a lot cheaper. Computational technology has gotten a lot cheaper than it
used to be. Now, these are extremes, but take ENIAC. Early machine, 1945, very early. Not
the earliest, but very early machine. At the time, it cost almost half a million dollars which
in today's dollars is a lot more than that, at the time. So that was expensive, very
expensive for the cheapest available machine. Now you can get a laptop for $500. You can
get one cheaper than that, you can get one more expensive, but you can get a very
capable laptop for $500. So, things have gotten a lot cheaper over the years. 

And by the way, I'm saying you can get a laptop for $500, an IoT device. The
computational ability of it is a lot less than laptops. So, it will be a lot cheaper than
$500. But the point is that over time computational technology has gotten a lot
cheaper. And so, it's within the reach of what you could add on to a lot of
different devices. So, you wouldn't have wanted to take your standard car in 1945 and add
an ENIAC to it because it would add $500,000 worth of cost, right? But now you can add on
some low-cost device and get the benefits of computational technology without too much
cost. So, this is a picture of ENIAC, the original. It is big. Big and expensive. So, this is
another thing that's changed. It also has a lot of wires. If you look at it, the way they
programmed it was with wires. A lot of wiring going on in there. Manual wiring. So, this is a
picture of it, and it was big. So that's another trend. Hardware size. Things have become
smaller. 

Now that old ENIAC there was no possible way you were going be able to get that thing
and fit it into a device, into a thing. So that old ENIAC was, say approximately, 1,800
square feet, 27 tons. It was a big thing. But a laptop today is small and light. And IoT
devices are smaller and lighter than that, so think, computational technology has also
shrunk and gotten lighter, to the point that it can be incorporated in lots of different
devices. So, this is just a size comparison. See, so we've got ENIAC over there, different
lighting but basically the same machine, and then we've got a laptop. And you can see
how the computational technology has just vastly shrunk to the point where you can
incorporate it into devices.

Now, another big trend that helps make IoT possible is the fact that computational ability
has grown dramatically since, say, 45. So in 45, that ENIAC that you saw, that got
approximately 5,000 instructions per second. Now, a standard laptop 18 billion, now this
is plus or minus, right, but 18 billion easy. That's a dramatic improvement, and what that
buys you, what that gives you is a fact that you can implement a lot more features. There
are many things that you couldn't have dreamed of being able to do back in '45 with a
computer that you can now handle because you have so many more computations to play
with in a unit of time. So, for instance, speech to text, right? That's common in phones
today, right? Where you talk and it interprets your speech. There's no way with 5,000
instructions per second you could do that in anywhere near real time.

Audio processing, network communication all these things that you can do now that
require lots of computation and it just wasn't possible with old machines. So, with
modern machines there is so much computational ability, their clock rates are so fast and
there is parallelism. These things are multi-course, you got multiple processes in one
device. There is so much computation ability you can. You can do so many more things
that were thought of back then and couldn't have dreamed of back then, but now, we see
there's so much you can do. So, it makes it more practical using devices today to
implement the features we're interested in implementing.

Another trend is Internet access. So, in '45 the Internet didn't exist. Networking wasn't
there, but Internet access has improved. So, the Internet is reachable from a lot of places. 
First, it exists. Right? It didn't used to exist. But now it's also true that in lots of different
places, almost everywhere, you can access the Internet through some mechanism. Now
this depends on what country you're in and how much money your country has. Some
parts of the world poor parts of the world have less access. We're in the US you have pretty
good access. Wherever you want to be you can access it directly through wi-fi, you can
access it through jacks in the wall I mean we have ethernet jacks in the wall right here you
can do it wirelessly you can do it everywhere.

Now different parts of the world have less access, if you just look at this map, you can see
the lighter parts are less access. Most of Africa, a lot of Africa has less access is just
because they're out of reach of many different, a lot of the infrastructure that's
necessary. But there are some places like India, that lower, in fact, I question this map. I
don't think it's as bad as what's being stated on here, but it is generally true that there are
parts of the country, poor parts of the world rather, where Internet access is harder to
find. But generally, it's greatly improved over time. Also, the fact that you can do Internet
access wirelessly. That helps a whole lot because running cables is expensive. Where
putting up a wireless router is much less expensive. Putting up a cell tower that costs a
certain amount of money but given the expanse that it covers It's much more cost efficient
than having to run wires into everybody's home. So wireless access is one of those things
that's ubiquitous now, and it makes IoT technology much more usable and much more
possible.

Data costs. So, the cost of Internet access is low. Now this varies depending on where you
are. It's never low enough for me. I don't like how much I must pay every month on my cell
phone bill or for my cable bill, stuff like that. But it's low enough that a lot of people can
afford it. In poor countries, this is not necessarily the case, but that's changing. Bandwidth
is high. So, what does it mean is we transmit lot of data fast? And that enables a lot of
different features. So streaming movies for instance, right? If you want to stream video,
you need a lot of bandwidth, right? As opposed to just sending data. If you want to send
email, you don't need a lot of bandwidth. Email has a certain amount of text, and it
doesn't take much data to transmit. But if you want to support video, you need pretty
good bandwidth to support it in real time. To send the frames, lots of pixels, it takes you a
lot of bandwidth. But bandwidth is available in a lot of places. And wirelessly too. So, you
can, through wi-fi or some other type of wireless technology, cell phones, you can get
enough bandwidth to be able to see videos through that technology. So, the bandwidth
has enabled a lot of different features in IoT devices.

2.2. IoT is powerful and pervasive

The fact that IoT is everywhere and even though we're not necessarily aware of it all the
time. It's there and it's helpful, generally helpful. So not only is it everywhere, but it’s also
networked. So, it gives you access to all these abilities, all these features of things that are
in the network and it gives you always access to them. So, it's sort of a constant
connection.
So, there are lot of abilities to that it makes very powerful. So first, a lot of what you can
think of as IoT devices, you can see them as an interface to the Cloud, right? By the Cloud,
I mean big, powerful computer servers that are accessed through the Internet, so we'll call
it the Cloud. And these compute servers can do a variety of things for you. And we can see
that devices, small devices, IoT devices, are basically a window to these Cloud servers. So,
take Siri, Siri's an example we're talking about here. You can see that as a window into the
Cloud servers that have gigantic databases of information. So, you can ask Siri some
question, it will go search for the answer inside some massive cloud database and give
you the answer back.

So really your IoT device in that sense is just a window into some massive computational
resource. So not everything is going on your IoT device. So, say we're talking about Siri
specifically, your phone must do some computation, speech-to-text, right? It must figure
out what you're saying. But the actual query that you state, that's not actually processed
directly on the phone. That thing is sent to the Cloud, and the Cloud processes it, gives
you the result and Siri recites it back to you. So, you can see that these IoT devices give
you, they leverage a much bigger set of servers that are available out there on the Cloud if
you want them to. For instance, viewing movies, say Netflix, something like that, the
movies aren't sitting there on your phone or whatever the device is. The movies, your
phone, or whatever the IoT device is really a conduit for viewing the movie, right? You're
really going to some big servers, Netflix servers. You're streaming the movie directly off
those servers. So, your device is in some ways just a conduit to something much more
powerful than your actual IoT device. So, there are a lot of IoT devices that act in that way
that are just access points for something much bigger out there in the Cloud. So, this is
basically leveraging the networking features of these IoT devices. So that basically just
what I was saying, you can access these large databases, large computational service to
get, whatever access to whatever kind of data you want to get, and to do, perform things
that you want to perform, format operations that you need to form remotely.
So, IoT is also pervasive. Since networking is pervasive, IoT is pervasive, which means it is
everywhere. It is embedded in devices and you're not necessarily aware of that,
but they’re all over the place and if you just look around whatever room you're in, you'll
probably see these devices. I mean, of course, I'm staring down a camera right now, so
that's an IoT device. There are cameras all over, microphones and all this, projectors,
things like this. They're all in this room. My watch, my phone, they're all over the place just
helping me in various ways. So, if you look at your house, you think about inside your
house, how many computers you have inside of your house, traditional computers,
laptop, desktop. I probably have probably four or five laptop, desktop machines in my
house. But if I think of how many IoT devices I have, a lot more, right. I just, see my DVR,
right, my fridge, my microwave oven, my TV, my game machine, right? My several, I have
several. I have Xbox One. I have all these. So, I have my watch, my phones, my kids'
phones, right? There's so many IoT devices just everywhere.

Home automation systems, I do not have a home automation system, but that's a

common use. Home automation systems that are connected to the network, so you
can, you've probably seen commercials on this type of thing. You can go to your cell
phone and turn off your lights at home from your cell phone, things like this, right. So, IoT
devices are pervasive and they're just everywhere. At work, at home. At work, well, we
have motion sensors in every room. For lighting, right, to save the power on lights, the
lights go off if there's no motion in the room. So, they have motion sensors in every room,
down every hall, checking to see if something's moving and if they need to keep the lights
off or on. And you've probably been in places like that. Also, RFID tags. I need an RFID tag
to get into my building, right. I run it past the machine, and it lets me in. So, there's also
this type of, my phone, that's another thing. My phone, phones nowadays, there's cell
phones. But there's also even desktop phones nowadays are in Internet things
devices, right, because these are Voice-over IP phones. My phone is a networked phone. It
sends data over the Internet directly. It doesn't even use the regular phone system.
 

It goes straight to the Internet, right. So, phones, everything, lots of different devices are
IoT devices, even at work. Also on your person, so these things are now integrated into
your body in some sense. So hopefully, not too close. But health trackers, right, these
things are strapped onto your wrist, and they can track heart rate, all sorts of features they
can track about you. And they're strapped onto you, they are networked. So, by
Bluetooth, they go to the Internet and maybe send that information to a server, to a global
server. And if you have one of these things, like a Fitbit or something like that, you know
how they work. Pacemakers, oh, those are the ultimate. Those are literally embedded
within you, and they control your heart. Pacemakers are quite sophisticated. They track
your heart, but say your heart stops, they can restart your heart. They can give you a
charge, right? Give you a shock and start that heart again automatically. And they are also
networked. So, you must be able to program them, reset them periodically. So, they are
usually not regularly networked but when the doctor wants to reset it in the office, he can
do that by radio.

Insulin pumps, so these are common, too. I knew a guy, I meant to bring one to lecture
today. But I knew a guy, he had diabetes, type 2, I believe, but it was severe, and you need
insulin injections. What he had was a device like what you see here where it would give the
injections, while during the day, it would sort of inject him at the right rate. And he had to
have this under his shirt. He had this device, a device like what you see in there. It was
taped under his shirt. And it would know how much insulin to give him on a regular
basis. So, he didn't have to do it, it just gave it to him. So, diabetes is one of those
things. It's about regulation, regulating the insulin level. So, your body normally does
this. If your pancreas is working, it does this perfectly, right. It senses how much sugar you
have in your bloodstream it puts in insulin in the right dose to keep it level. But if your
pancreas isn't working, then you have diabetes and you need a device, an external device,
to do that. Now you can do it manually or you can have a device like these insulin pumps
which do it for you, and they push in the insulin at the appropriate rate. So, these things
are basically integrated into you, right? Now cell phones are not integrated into you, not
quite, they are not quite connected to your ear, but I know a lot of people who
cannot leave their house without their cell phone, right? So, you forget it, you're like, look,
I got to go home, I must have that thing with me. So, it's not physically connected but it
might as well be.

All right, pervasive. So other places, not even on your person, but everywhere, on the
streets, right? So, I watch TV. I watch Law and Order a lot. How many times have I seen the
cops in Law and Order, this is TV, but using video surveillance devices, you know, the ATM
had a camera and they used that to catch the crook, right. There are devices all over the
place that are surveillant us for beneficial purposes, okay. Like traffic light cams,
okay. Now traffic light cams, it's beneficial, right, they got to ticket you. I don't like it, right,
but I can see the social benefit to being able to track when somebody runs a light and
giving people tickets. Otherwise, everybody would be running lights all the time, right. So
that type of thing, that type of surveillance, goes on all the time. In London, their traffic
cameras do more than that. They track your license plate numbers. So, they can track
criminals by looking at their license plate numbers automatically as they're going through
the city. So IoT is everywhere, in all sorts of devices that you interact with every day.