The Home of Now

As kids, we used to dream of a home that was computer controlled and did everything for you. In the SciFi version you called your home by some girls name and told it to do stuff like open your curtains. This is no longer science fiction with Alexa and Google Assistant. Sol what can you do to make your home smart, using off the shelf technology?

Quite a lot it appears and its not an irritating smart fridge. You can:

• Control your lighting to create moods, optimise costs, make it appear you are home. So for examle you can make sure that it helps you get to sleep and wake up naturally.
• Control your heating on a room by room basis to ensure that there are no cold spots in the house when it is occupied, but you don't heat empty rooms. Apparently this can save up to 15% in winter heating bills.
• Automate your curtains to open when you want or on demand.
• Co-ordinate home security with smart door bells (and in built cameras), night vision cameras, internal and external cameras, smart sensors etc. all remotely controlled and accessible from your phone or pad, so even when you are not at home you know who is knocking at your door. Some sensors use machine learning to distinguish between normal patterns of say noise and ab normal ones to avoid false positives.
• Adapt dumb devices to become smart, e.g. with the wemo maker.
• As well as run your entertainment around the house.

But it does not stop there. There are devices for monitoring, interacting with and remote feeding of your pets. So you can check on them whilst you are at work or out for dinner at a restaurant.

There are even smart garden products which you can use to grow herbs and other plants indoors all the year around. Using LCD lighting, thermostats, ph meters etc. they can automatically water, light and grow the plants, at 3 times normal rates to ensure that you always have a small verdant box of plants in your home.

So what's the missing ingredient? To my mind its the robot helper. A lot of companies have tried to crack this one with so called intelligent hoovers and other home buddy type robots. There's also the trend towards trying to make sexbots. But so far, these have failed to live up to the expectation or hype and come with price tags which are far in excess of capability or benefits. 

The foundations for the home of the future have been laid, but we are not quite there yet. That is not to say that we cannot get benefits from whats there with better energy efficiency, improved home security, access to all sorts of information and entertainment, automation which could help disabled and infirm people and the ability to monitor our pets, children and elderly relatives whilst we are away from home. It's just that we still have some way to go.

Modern Artistry - This Week's Digital Themes

Last night I went to a BCS (British Computer Society) event on DevOps with the title "Fast Forward - Catch the Buzz!". The speakers were mainly from a company called Infinityworks. As was to be expected with anything to do with DevOps, this was a popular event with a good turn out and a diverse audience.

They presented 2 case studies on assignments they are working on for clients. In the first, they had taken over the management of a legacy website and its associated app to support engagement with a sports betting site. This they moved from dedicated hardware to a cloud platform, upgraded and then modified to produce different versions for new european markets, all in a matter of months. It was a great exposition on how modern tooling and automation, combined with agile and DevOps approaches can be used to do things quickly, safely and at scale. They also had interesting things to say about how elastic a cloud platform really is, if your loading is massively peaky on, say, 1 day per week. A key message which came across is how the culture of modern professional service providers is aligned to working intimately in genuine partnership with their customers.

The other example, discussed an unloved legacy application within the NHS, which had been delivered under a controversial national programme, had been taken in house, re-platformed and co-developed with them to make it more economical, performent and fitter for purpose using DevOps style techniques and some automation. The interesting thing being that the application did not need to be moved to a cloud platform to get these benefits and that suitable investment in tooling could achieve identical cloning and continuous integration. One of the salient lessons coming out of  the exercise was that design decisions should favour the optimisation of operability over ease of development as applications spend more time in operation than they spend in development and this is where the value is delivered.

It was also good to hear afterwards, in discussion with some of the presenters that the NHS is genuinely engaging via patient workshops in understanding the "customer journey" and using insights to feed into product management of its key applications. This is huge sea change from the previous central government driven approach which mandated things for politically dogmatic reasons.

Anyway, today as I was still reflecting on last night, I opened my email Inbox to discover an invite from the iconoclastic people at "The Register" to a lecture enticingly called "Sex, AI, Robots and You". Tbe format being a talk, Q&A and networking event. As this obviously has some overlap with digital topics, wearable technology and (wo)man machine interfaces, I just had to investigate a little further. When I followed up on the speaker, it turns out that she is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and this is one of her research areas. Interestingly, she has started to hold hackathons called the SexTechHack. There were links from a review ( see: https://www.girlonthenet.com/2016/12/21/amazing-inventions-from-the-goldsmiths-sex-tech-hack/ ) to Youtube posted videos on presentations from the various groups at the hackathon. Overall they were surprisingly innovative and wide ranging. The content, however, only served to reinforce my thoughts discussed in my last posting on Post Digitalism. The key issues to address in the next generation of post digital technology are cultural, psychological and legal.

Cyber, Robots, Digital, Oktoberfest, Gosling and Demming - all in one week

This week was eventful. It started with the announcement that the UK's National Cyber Security Centre had at last opened its doors, see: http://bit.ly/2dpPZJH. This was long announced and is an essential plank in safeguarding the UK's Digital Infrastructure and Capability. My concern is the glacial pace at which progress has been made here and the comparatively small amounts of funding that the Government has assigned to fund it.

Then someone posed a picture of a man shaking hands with a robot at AT Kearney's Digital Business Forum with the caption "Next gen employee greets legacy employee". This displayed typical 1930s thinking about the value of people drawing from the legacy of the original R.U.R. play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written by the Czech writer Karel Capek in 1920. In the play, a factory owner attempts to replace his high versatile human workers with mechanical machines, totally undervaluing the creativity and inspiration that people bring to the workplace. Digital models are largely about delivering this value not implementing mindless mechanisation. So perhaps the caption should have been about valuable human talent supplanting inappropriate technology.

Anyway, the highlight of this week was the IPexpo event in London. This had a wide array of suppliers and speakers. Notable about the event was the desire to celebrate Oktoberfest complete with free beer and people dressed in Bavarian costumes at 4:00 pm on the first day. Many of the suppliers were also offering beer at other parts of the day. It was a strange example of how modern "fun oriented" culture of digital start up companies is affecting the mainstream and making us weirdly 1960s and modern all at the same time.

James Gosling presented a captivating key note talk on liquid robots covering his current involvement with Marine UAVs used for data collation in remote seascapes and the IoT practices needed to make this work. The UAVs themselves are very cool, capturing wave energy and converting it into propulsion.  The techniques for transferring data from the middle of oceans, where there is very poor bandwidth available even from satellites, were also very interesting with the same data being transfered by differnt networks and routes to increase the reliability and speed of data transport from the UAVs to the place where it is analysed. The interesting point that he made was that Scalability is a relatively trivial issue for IoT. Security and reliable Availability are much more important.

Two other talks were really good. Mathew Skelton (skelton Thatcher Consulting) gave an illuminating talk on anti-patterns for continuous delivery (aka DevOps). He confirmed my viewpoint that typically you need roughly 1 operations person working continuously with each Product Team, to avoid the bottleneck that some traditional ITIL shops have introduced with undersized change management functions.

Derek Weeks also gave a well researched presentation on the use of Opensource software and how modern software product development practices have now become highly analagous with manufacturing and supply chain practices. He presented interesting statistics on how much open source code contains security and legacy debt bugs. His premise being that Deming's (the father of Quality Management) recommendations to reduce the number of suppliers and quality assure bought in products can raise productivity in the adoption and exploitation of Open Software.