If you believe the headlines from vendors, analysts and business press, the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is going strong and accelerating, and companies in practically every industrial sector are jumping on the IoT bandwagon and investing heavily in developing IoT products and services.
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Autodesk announced recently the availability of a shape-based search capability in A360. A blog article titled How Machine Learning Will Transform 3D Engineering describes the new capability, called Design Graph, as a “Google search-like functionality for the world of 3D models.”
Google search functionality is probably the wrong metaphor for 3D search. Web search is fundamentally text based, whereas searching for a part or a design requires a combination of textual and geometric terms and attributes, and sufficiently deep domain semantics. In fact, the blog article makes the very same argument later, describing Design Graph’s purpose to “identify and understand designs based on their inherent characteristics—their shape and structure—rather than by any labeling (tags) or metadata” (i.e. not Google-like).
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In the first article in this three-part series, Why Do Software Bugs Continue to Plague Products?, I described how the proliferation of complex control software in most modern industrial, commercial and personal products are challenging product companies, and the expectation that engineering issues and quality snags will not only persist, but, in fact, are likely to increase.
A follow up article, Agile vs. Corporate Culture, discusses Agile software development methodologies and explains the organizational processes and cultural barriers that impede the adoption and reduce the efficacy of Agile practices.
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Whenever we discuss autonomous vehicles: what are the desired behavioral models? how can we design them to make the right decisions? we place the car at the center of the problem definition: can it avoid crashing? can it be programmed to make “ethical” decisions? what if it doesn’t follow “ethics” rules? what happens when two autonomous cars on a collision-course obey conflicting decision rules?
The recent incidents involving Tesla’s cars operating semi-autonomously in Autopilot mode led to renewed interest and, not surprisingly, concerns about the technology. Tesla’s public response was to explain the technical reasons the car failed to detect and avoid a fatal collision; again, putting the car at the center of the argument.
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Heard recently on the web: Should you build your own Internet of Things (IoT) or buy it?
As you might expect, the question (and the answer), sponsored by an IoT platform vendor, were self-serving.
Earlier today, I received a note about a research that maintains that more than a 100 new IoT “platforms” have entered the marketplace in the past 12 months alone, fueling fast growth that will exceed $1.5 billion by 2021.
Which makes no sense whatsoever.
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