These industry applications can be similar to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Take underground mining, for instance, with its remote control and driverless equipment functions and the need to gather insights on predictive maintenance and energy management. Computers in these conditions must operate reliably under vibration, shock, and hot temperatures.

Seventy-five percent of data is forecasted to process outside the cloud by 2025, according to Gartner. Organizations need features in their servers such as higher performance, less data latency, and remote manageability.

Alongside withstanding extreme conditions, ruggedized edge platforms require various other functionality. The platforms need to perform real-time processing through an array of performance accelerators, offer sufficient storage capacity, and have rich I/O ports to be compatible with new and legacy machines. 

In collaboration with Arrow, Dell’s PowerEdge XR11 and XR12 servers aim to offer enterprise compute capabilities in the harshest edge environments. On the performance side, the XR12 is the more expandable of the two, coming across in its third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors and GPU options, with support for up to two NVIDIA T4 cards or two of the A100, A10, or A40 GPUs, and flexible I/O choices. Storage for the XR11 and XR12 includes the Intel Optane Persistent Memory 200 series. At 16 inches, the chassis can maintain performance while being less than half the depth of a standard server. 

“The servers help OEM customers address the edge computing challenges faced outside the data center,” Dell notes. “Businesses can move workloads to the network edge and run AI algorithms to analyze and act on data near where it’s generated, reducing latency and providing quicker access to data for real-time decision making, saving time and money.”

By bringing computing power to the edge, innovative enterprises realize that a mix of centralized cloud and distributed edge environments are essential. Meanwhile, innovative vendors can now get data center-class performance right where the action is for their customers’ increasing edge deployments. Arrow can provide customized Dell solutions for enterprises that wish to take the next step, going through the entire lifecycle, from ideation development, prototyping, manufacturing, and global distribution.

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The local government area is located in Victoria, Australia, and has an area of 37 square kilometers and a population of around 183,756. Illegal waste dumping in the city is a problem that causes both hygiene and safety problems.

Using Nokia’s Scene Analytics AI technology, the city hopes to gain a deeper understanding of waste disposal behaviour across the area.

Rob Mccabe, Head of Enterprise of Australia and New Zealand at Nokia, said:

“The City of Melbourne is using robust AI technology to offer its citizens, visitors, and businesses a greener and more liveable community.

In helping the City of Melbourne monitor and enhance services with real-time driven actions, Nokia Scene Analytics is supporting the safety, security and operational continuity of this city in a proactive and automated way.”

An existing network of cameras is being used as IoT sensors to monitor waste compactors. Nokia’s AI is used to filter and collate data from the cameras – combining it with other data, including from the compactor itself – to create real-time alerts and produce reports.

Lord Mayor Sally Capp, City of Melbourne, commented:

“This is a great example of using new technology to help remove illegal waste more quickly, make our city cleaner, and protect the environment.

Our partnership with Nokia is another way we are gathering data to make Melbourne a safer, smarter, and more sustainable city.

This innovative project will help to avoid hazards and make our streets even cleaner by allowing our waste services to better understand behavior trends related to the illegal and dangerous dumping of waste.”  

A virtual “tripwire” allows for real-time monitoring of compactors. Object detection and counting were used to determine the items being placed in the compactor and their impact on it. This data can be used to help predict when compactors may require maintenance in order to minimise downtime.

During the trial, all faces and license plates were blurred to maintain the privacy of individuals.

(Image Credit: City of Melbourne)

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on November 9-10 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

The post City of Melbourne trials Nokia’s AI tech to keep streets clean and safe appeared first on AI News.

Fetch.ai has caught the attention of investors for its potentially groundbreaking machine learning network of autonomous “agents” that can perform real-world tasks. It’s also caught our attention, making our list of innovative companies to watch in 2021.

IOTA was among the most hyped projects during the 2017 cryptocurrency/blockchain frenzy (or bubble, dependent on your perspective.) While most projects have since collapsed, IOTA continues to go from strength-to-strength and has announced a series of partnerships with giants like Dell and Jaguar Land Rover.

One partnership that both companies have in common is Bosch.

IOTA was the first to establish a partnership with Bosch when it announced that it was integrating with IOTA’s Data Marketplace. Last February, Fetch.ai announced its own partnership with Bosch as part of a joint project called the Economy of Things (EoT).

No specific project involving Fetch.ai, IOTA, and Bosch has been announced but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the first real-world adoption coming from the three companies.

While we can speculate on the exciting future possibilities, what’s actually been announced today is an agreement between Fetch.ai and IOTA to deliver a controlled data sharing environment for IoT devices and infrastructures. The ultimate goal is to enable the automated fee-less retrieval and private sharing of data.

Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai, said:

“The fundamental goal of this collaboration is to enable granular control over data and to reduce the reliance on centralised systems that take advantage of data.

While there are numerous partnerships focusing on data privacy, this one adds the layer of economic benefit for stakeholders via autonomous economic agents without compromising data privacy.

Enabling these agents to perform “useful economic work” on behalf of individuals, businesses, companies, and other entities or organizations will speed up the adoption of Fetch.ai autonomous economic agents and IOTA Streams thereby allowing them to communicate with sophistication across industries like mobility, supply chain, IoT and more.”

Holger Koether, Director of Partner Management at IOTA Foundation, added:

“The main feature of this partnership is offering a serious AI application for the devices that make up the machine economy on the IOTA and Fetch networks.

We are enabling data producers to take control over who can access the data they produce whether from a mobile device, environment IoT sensor, connected vehicle, Industrial IoT solution, and a host of IoT-focused use cases.

With this partnership, we hope both the Fetch and IOTA communities expand the functionally of what devices can do autonomously on distributed networks.”

IOTA has faced various criticisms over the years but the project now seems to have overcome most of its problems. The one major lingering criticism is of centralisation due to its ‘Coordinator’ node. However, that is set for removal in IOTA 2.0.

The IOTA 2.0 ‘Nectar’ devnet went live last week. For the first time, assets on the network will be persistent even after upgrades.

“IOTA 2.0 DevNet ‘Nectar’ marks a major milestone on IOTA’s trajectory towards full decentralisation,” commented Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “I cannot understate the importance of this release: Nectar is the living proof that you can have feeless, scalable, secure, resource-efficient, and fully decentralised DLT. It’s a game-changer.”

With IOTA 2.0 heading towards its first release candidate later this year, we can expect many more announcements in the months to come.

Want to learn more from executives at the heart of this space? The Blockchain IoT Solutions Congress on March 8 2022 will explore the convergence of these two technologies and the use cases and industries that will benefit.

The post Fetch.ai announces partnership with IoT-focused distributed ledger IOTA appeared first on AI News.

The global engineering giant will test key features of Fetch.ai’s testnet until the end of this month and will deploy a node on the network. The strategic engineering project between Fetch.ai and Bosch is called the Economy of Things (EoT).

Dr Alexander Poddey, the leading researcher for digital socio-economy, cryptology, and artificial intelligence in the EoT project, said:

“Our collaboration with Fetch.ai spans from the aspects of governance and orchestration of DLT-based ecosystems, multi-agent technologies to collective learning.

They share our belief that these elements are crucial to realising the economic, social, and environmental benefits of IoT technologies.”

Fetch.ai’s testnet launched in October 2020 and the firm is now gearing up for its mainnet launch in March. The company has been ramping up announcements in advance of the mainnet launch and just last week announced a partnership with FESTO to launch a decentralised marketplace for manufacturing.

After the mainnet launch, Bosch intends to run nodes and applications on Fetch.ai’s blockchain network.

Jonathan Ward, CTO of Fetch.ai, commented:

“We have been working with Bosch for some time towards our shared vision of building open, fair, and transparent digital ecosystems. I’m delighted to be able to announce the first public step in bringing these technologies into the real world.

We’re looking forward to working further with Bosch to bring about the wide adoption of these ground-breaking innovations, which will hugely benefit consumers and businesses in many industries including automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare.” 

Fetch.ai is working on decentralised autonomous “agents” which perform real-world tasks. 

Bosch is attracted to Fetch.ai’s vision of collective learning technologies and believes it can be a key enabler in their plans for AI-enabled devices—allowing AI agents to be trained which operate within smart devices while preserving users’ privacy and control of their data.

Fetch.ai’s vision is bold but it has the team and partnerships to pull it off. The company’s roster features talent with experience from DeepMind, Siemens, Sony, and a number of esteemed academic institutions.

Bosch has long expressed a keen interest in distributed ledger technologies and established multiple industry partnerships.

The venture capital arm of Bosch, Robert Bosch Venture-Capital, invested in the IOTA Foundation. Bosch later patented an IOTA-based digital payments system and recently financially supported a hackathon for the DLT platform which uses a scalable DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) data structure called the ‘Tangle’ in a bid to overcome some of the historic problems with early blockchains.

Fetch.ai and IOTA are in the same space but have different goals, it’s not a choice of one or the other. Companies like Bosch can take advantage of the exciting potential offered by both DLTs to gain a competitive edge.

(Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash)

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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Chang played a major role in this year’s AI & Big Data Expo in Santa Clara last week, taking part in both a solo presentation on “Process Automation from IoT Data” and a panel discussion on “Data and the Customer”.

Following the event, AI News decided to catch up with Chang to discuss LG’s current experience in artificial intelligence and where the industry is heading next.

How important is AI becoming to differentiate from competing products?

With artificial intelligence gaining traction across a range of industries, it’s becoming important to allow differentiation among competing products. LG’s pursuit of “Evolve, Connect, Open” when it comes to AI and ThinQ offers enhanced convenience for users with diverse needs and tech preferences in their homes through personalised, proactive, easy, and efficient solutions. This approach allows the company to align with and offer the most expansive list of smart integrations on the market – whether with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or future partnerships.

Specifically, with our open approach, LG is progressing toward incorporating IoT technology throughout the entire journey – including the product design/concept, the launch of new helpful tools, and proactive OTA (Over-The-Air) updates. LG is working with world-class cloud partners from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and combining with in-house development to develop, customise, and operate our IoT platforms.

AI is key to differentiating your products on the market by offering more robust opportunities and offerings for the larger consumer base.

What challenges has LG faced moving into AI and how did it overcome them?

The biggest challenge we faced as a whole moving into AI was creating truly meaningful products that will help our customer base with their daily routines and truly improve their lives. Through listening to what they want, we were able to produce a line of help innovations that do just that. 

LG ThinQ products use voice control to interact with users, as well as sensor data and diverse features such as product recognition and learning engine technologies to enhance their performance.

Do you think the smart home is meeting expectations?  

The smart home is a growing trend within the AI industry thanks to the influx of helpful tools introduced across the field. While many advancements have been made in such a short timeframe, we are still in the first inning of this technology adoption.

LG is focused on delivering better consumer benefits with advanced technology that will continue to improve over time. We aim to make the home more proactive and personalised for users based on our behaviour data collected across the products servicing their many needs. Knowing more about our user and their life leads to enhanced performance and, ultimately, to a better life.

Will distributed ledger technologies be important for smart devices and are there any plans at LG ThinQ to use them? 

While we are actively looking at distributed ledgers, including blockchain technology, there is no specific timetable for implementation. We believe this would be useful to enable an open ecosystem where various companies and contributors can participate. 

Is there a specific area of the market you and the LG ThinQ team are excited about?

LG is committed to producing helpful innovations for consumers. One example is our new AI-infused customer service solution, Proactive Customer Care. It’s a new paradigm in customer satisfaction, one that ensures greater value and peace-of-mind for owners of our smart home appliances.  

When it rolls out in the United States next year, Proactive Customer Care will leverage ThinQ AI to provide personalised support, alerting users to issues with their LG appliance, and offering helpful tips and solutions to maximise performance and long product life. Using the latest in AI technology, LG Proactive Customer Care is designed to inform LG smart appliance owners of potential problems before they even occur – it can expedite technician visits, if needed, and offer guidance on how to keep LG’s products functioning optimally.

What did you speak about during this year’s AI Expo North America?

I was thrilled to take part in my first AI & Big Data Expo North America in Santa Clara. As part of my activities onsite, I welcomed interested attendees to visit the panel discussion on “Data and The Customer” where I was joined by fellow industry insiders to discuss in the relationship between the data collected from companies and its customers.  

I also conducted a solo presentation on the topic of “Process Automation from IoT Data.” I helped to define process automation for IoT data and how it is key to use not only the right platform for your business, but also one that allows true process integration and automation for optimisation. This is essential to our work at LG and helps shape our future product launches.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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As the UK prepares to depart the EU, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is boosting funding of industries where the UK is already emerging a leader to help solidify its position on the world stage.

£75 million will be set aside for artificial intelligence to build on the existing success stories from the likes of Cambridge-based DeepMind — which was acquired by Google for £400 million back in 2014. Up to £20 million will support companies developing AI services while £45 million will support increasing the number of PhD students studying AI each year.

Part of the reason for the lack of electric vehicle adoption in many European countries is the lack of supporting infrastructure. £400 million will be invested in charging points along with a further £100 million to boost purchases of clean cars.

This infrastructure will also help with the deployment of driverless cars — but the biggest hurdle remains setting insurance and regulatory policies. Speaking to our sister publication IoT News back in January, Jeremy Dalton, CTO of TravelSpirit, noted the Department for Transport’s work to create an environment for autonomous vehicles to be developed with little hindrance.

5G will enable greater connectivity and open up new possibilities for the IoT. Driverless cars and their connected features will likely require this next-generation mobile technology for its greatly reduced latency and increased reliability. A further £35 million will be made available to ensure rail passengers have reliable and “lightning-speed” connections during journeys. Trials will begin on the Trans-Pennine route which connects Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool.

Other related announcements in the budget includes £76 million to boost digital and construction skills, £9 million to fund an advisory board for safe and ethical innovation, and £100 million to train an additional 8,000 qualified computer science teachers (supported by a new National Centre for Computing.)

The government funding is alongside increasing private investment in AI and IoT. According to Deloitte’s new Digital Disruption Index, 85 percent of senior executives plan to invest in artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things by 2020. More than half of the organisations surveyed expect to invest over £10 million in digital technologies such as AI, cloud, robotics, analytics, blockchain, the IoT, and virtual and augmented reality.

Prime Minister Theresa May announced on Monday a 1.7 billion pound fund to help regenerate cities and a 2.3 billion pound boost to research and development spending, due in 2021/22.

“This is a new long-term approach to shaping a stronger and fairer economy for decades to come,” May said in a Times newspaper article.

Whether it’s private or public investment, there’s little debate over the importance of giving these industries all the financial support they need to grow and thrive.

Are you impressed with the funding in the budget of future industries? Share your thoughts in the comments.

 Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the  IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the future of enterprise technology in one place.

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