The Internet of Things (IoT) Symposium is an annual event organized by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) under IT Fest on 16 April 2015. The symposium aims to provide a platform for industry leaders, solution providers, engineers and users across industries to exchange ideas and shares the latest developments and emerging applications for an even more collaborative IoT ecosystem. In this year, IoT Symposium theme is “Embracing Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing with IoT Application”.
The Honourable Mrs Fanny Law, GBS, JP (Chairperson of HKSTP) gave a welcome address before the symposium start. She said we identified IoT to be one of key technology in Smart City and it could improve Quality of Life in Hong Kong people.
The Honourable Mr. Gregory So Kam-leung, GBS, JP (Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, HKSAR) gave an opening speech. He said we had 4.9 billion connected things in use in 2015 and it would increase to 20 billion after 5 years. IoT included RFID Technology, GPS, Big Data Analytics, Sensor, Cloud Computing, Security Networking, etc. Then he briefed some government department employed IoT technology such as Water Supplies Department (Water Intelligent Network) and Drainage Services Department (Intelligent Ultrasonic Sensors).
Then Mr. Gregory So said we expected IoT excellence centre in Hong Kong to link people together and we needed a show case. Then he pointed out some key actions to be done below:
i) Supply Chain Platform,
ii) R&D for Customization,
iii) VC/Angel Funding Platform,
iv) Coordination Learning Platform,
v) Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
vi) Industry Partner Network,
vii) HR Pipeline,
viii) IP Training, and
ix) Rapid Prototype.
Group Photo
The first keynote speaker was Mr. Alan Lau (Senior Partner, Asia Head, McKinsey Digital) and his topic entitled “Internet of Things – A perspective”. Mr. Lau said IoT would have huge impacts on the ecosystem and showed the infographic chart.
Then Mr. Lau explained the myths and truths about IoT in the following diagram. He added big data would be a critical tool to unlock value from IoT.
Mr. Lau identified 6 categories illustrate the breadth of potential IoT application such as “Tracking Behavior”, “Enhanced Situational Awareness”, “Sensor-driven Decision Analytics”, “Process Optimization”, “Optimized Resource Consumption” and “Complex Autonomous Systems.” However, he also pointed out some practical challenges included “Building Clear Business Case”, “Committing on Upfront Capital Investment”, “Create Interoperability” and “Addressing InfoSec concerns”. The following diagram showed some application cases in Hong Kong
The second keynote speaker was Prof. HT Kung (Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University) and his presentation title was “IoT Based Prediction”. He then discussed IoT + machine learning.
Prof. Kung said “IoT Based Prediction” is natural. However, there were four challenges. They were “Small Data”, “Low Power Budget”, “Weak Signal” and “Massive Connections”. He said real-world signals were often “Sparse”. And then he mentioned how to derive discriminative High-Level Features from data. Step 1 was Feature Extraction and Step 2 was Classification/Regression. After that he introduced the use in conjunction with Deep Neural Networks for computer vision and speech recognition. Using this technique, you were able to do facial emotion recognition.
Dr. Hang Li (Director of Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies) was the third keynote speaker and his topic was “Big Mobile Data Mining – Opportunities and Challenges”. Firstly, Dr. Li told us the vision of Huawe was “Building a Better Connected World”.
Firstly, Dr. Li introduced that Huawei would contribute to Internet of Things by Innovating in 5G and Big Data. The peak speed of 5G was showed much higher than 4G! Then a video showed that Shanghai Unicom had joinly cooperated with Huawei in January 2014. One of key cooperated areas was Mobile Broadband Data (MBB Data)
Finally, he mentioned some technical challenges on spatial temporal data mining and their solutions () below.
1. How to process vast amount of data? (Spark and Hadoop to process data)
2. How to mine from vast amount of data? (Data Mining Tools)
3. How to preserve privacy as much as possible? (Privacy Preserving Tool)
4. How to visualize mined information? (Visualization Tool)
Dr. Charleston Sin (Managing Director, Architecture Sales, Cisco Greater China) was the fourth keynote speaker and his presentation named “Enabling the Internet of Everything: Cisco’s IoT Architecture”. He said Internet of Everything (IoE) would enabled digital business because it networked Connection of People, Process, Data and Things.
Dr. Sin introduced a new concept from Cloud Computing to Fog Computing. Then he briefed Cisco’s IoT approach included “Customer-In”, Best-in-class ruggedized products and Strategic Partnerships.
The fifth keynote speaker was Dr. Xie Yun (Director, Digital China Research Institute) and his topic was “Turning of IT and New Data Application Model”. He said computing power was no long to be obstacle.
Dr. Xie Yun introduced three turning points as follows:
i) Turing Technology Platform to Application
ii) Application from “Point” to “Line” and then to “Area” (Dimension Change)
iii) New Virtual Image Technology
Example for application in city was showed below.
The last keynote speaker was Mr. Michael Wang (Director, Microsoft China Cloud Innovation Center, Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group) and his presentation topic named “Form Internet of Things to Intelligent of Things”. He defined IoT that “The network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and interact with their internal states or the external environment.”
He concluded that IoT could help to develop new business models, cost reduction and improve efficiency. Finally, he briefed Azure IoT Suite solution to us.
Reference:
HKSTP -
http://www.hkstp.org/
IT FEST -
https://www.itfest.hk/
