White House-led team to demo Internet of things systems

A White House-led effort to show that the Internet of Things can save lives and create jobs is about to put on a big show. A one-day SmartAmerica Expo in Washington on June 11 will showcase pilot projects that demonstrate the potential of the IoT to control physical systems, or what the government calls cyber-physical systems.

Cyber-physical systems collect and analyze data, and then go a step further to feed this information into a system with the intention of closing the loop, or resolving a problem. "We really want to show and demonstrate that this is possible, but not just from a technical level," said Sokwoo Rhee, a Presidential Innovation Fellow and co-lead, along with Geoff Mulligan, of the SmartAmerica effort. "From a technology level we know it's possible," said Rhee. Without the demonstration projects, "it becomes just another technology or product play."

A project underway in Montgomery County (MD), illustrates Rhee's point. Similar to two dozen other such projects, there is a team involved, in this case researchers from the University of California at Irvine and MIT, along with multiple vendors, including IBM, Sigfox, a French-based, long-range, low-bandwidth provider, and Twilio, a cloud communication firm. The team is building a system for suburban Washington county that can monitor, on a very detailed level, what goes on inside the home. From a hardware perspective, the team are using off-the-shelf IoT technologies, low cost sensors and wireless radios, and some hackable smoke detectors.