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A draft manifesto for an open Internet of Things

Ted Ted
June 23, 2012
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Open Internet of Things Assembly
London, 17 June 2012
http://bit.ly/KT8g0s 

We, the undersigned, believe that the class of technologies currently described as the “Internet of Things” has genuine potential to deliver value, meaning, insight, and fun as well as having the potential for a totalitarian control technology that may cause massive problems for the whole of society. Its definition, however, is not self-explanatory, nor do we believe these benefits are by any means guaranteed. There are areas that need to be explored, understood and considered carefully in order to secure the potential we see. These include, but are not limited to, the following concerns:

Licensing  

  • Licensors may explicitly grant rights to 3rd parties (licensees) to use their data.
  • Data ownership remains with the Licensor.
  • Data feeds should have human- and machine-readable licenses attached to them.
    [“Bits should know their rights.”]
  • Open IoT data is considered analogous to other Digital Commons data.  Creative Commons provides an adequate basis for engagement, for example:
  • “Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially.”
  • Individuals (who may not be the Licensors) must be granted license to any machine-generated data that is created, collected or otherwise generated that relates to them.
  • Individuals (who may not be the Licensors) should have the right to remain anonymous, the ability to license data on an anonymous basis, and the ability to license data at whatever available granularity or resolution (e.g. temporal or spatial) is most suited to their purposes.

Accessibility  
Data should be released in at least one format, protocol, and API with the following characteristics:

  • free, public documentation
  • royalty-free to use, indefinitely
  • open source parsers/libraries available
  • In order to qualify for certification, the format, protocol or API in question should feature a minimum of two independent reference implementations

Timeliness   
Data should be released:

  • without imposed delay, based on the accessibility principle above;
  • at the resolution at which it has been acquired;
  • to the data subject for as long as the provider hosts the data and for at least a pre-agreed duration of time

Privacy   
Data subjects should have the right to know what data is being collected about them and why.
Reasonable efforts should be made to protect confidentiality and privacy of the data subject.

Transparency

Data controllers should inform data subjects that deleting all copies of data may be technically unfeasible once published.

Where data is collected from public space, data subjects and stakeholders should have a role in decision-making and governance.

Definitions

Definitions are needed for ‘rights,’ ‘public data’, ‘private data, ‘licensee’, ‘licensor’, ‘data subjects’, and ‘data controllers’.

Call to action

We invite you — whether in a personal or a professional capacity, or both — to help shape the agenda for an Open Internet of Things. We encourage you to provide insights and stimulate debate in this process, and to contribute to the development of a final community statement of principles to be released on 17 Sep 2012.

Signatories

Jag Goraya @jagusti
Nathan Miller @nathanNmiller
Thomas Amberg (@tamberg)
Gavin Starks (@agentGav)
Chris Adams (@mrchrisadams)
Laura James (@LaurieJ)
Ben Ward (@crouchingbadger)
Hannah Goraya (@yorkhannah)
Ilze Black (@iblack)
Adrian McEwen (@amcewen)
Martin Dittus (@dekstop)
Reuben Binns (@RDBinns)
Daniel Soltis (@ds1935)
Pepe Borrás (@PepeBorras)
Kass Schmitt (@kassschmitt)
Hakim Cassimally (@osfameron)
Paul Tanner (@paul_tanner)
Peter Bihr @peterbihr
Martin Spindler (@mjays)
Ed Borden @edborden
Erik van der Zee @erikvanderzee
Laura Till @Hebberling
Fotis Grammatikopoulos @Internetofthings
Usman Haque @uah
Stefan Ferber @stefferber
Dan Lockton @danlockton
Charalampos (Harry) Doukas @BuildingIoT
Nick O’Leary @knolleary
Hugo Vincent @hugov
Marc Pous @gy4nt
Thorsten Kampp @thorstenkampp
Marilena Skavara @marilena_sk
Konstantinos Papagiannopoulos @hellokonputer
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino @iotwatch
David Gilmore @gilmorenator
Ben Bashford @bashford
Trevor Harwood @postscapes
James Johnston @digitalenergy53
Adriana Wilde @AdrianaGWilde
Edward Horsford @edwardhorsford
Sami Niemelä @samin
Stefan Negru @blankdots
Bill Harpley @billharpley
Hans-Jürgen Kugler @hjkugler
Hariharan Rajasekaran @electrohari
Sandro Stark @sandrostark
Hans Scharler @scharler
Michael Pinney @mpinney
Georgina Voss @gsvoss
Mac Oosthuizen @emeasee
Jean-Paul Calbimonte @jpcik
Jamie Pither @jamiepither
George Sarmonikas @magicnode
Adam Greenfield
Cruz Monrreal II @MrCruzII
Eleftherios Kosmas @elkos
Andy Gelme @geekscape (Aiko IoT Platform)
Nicolas Nova @nicolasnova
Gareth James @mrgarethjames
Javier Montaner @tumaku_
Vincent Teuben @vincentteuben
Iskander Smit @iskandr
Jessi Baker @jessibaker
Conor O’Neill @conoro
Talyta Singer @ytasinger
Teodor Mitew @tedmitew
[add your name here]

http://openiotassembly.com/ 

Hexy the hexapod

Ted Ted
June 4, 2012
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I just became one of the 366 backers for the Hexapod project on kickstarter, and the excitement is palpable. Why? Because come September I am getting an Arduino-powered, completely open-source, open-assembly, bluetooth enabled, low-cost, hexapod robot! Did I mention it has ultrasonic distance sensor eyes?

Since its heart beats on Arduino, I can customise add-ons such as speakers and 4G connectivity,while longer term I can make it talk to my Android  phone. I can’t wait to see my toddler boy play with it!

Edit: I am planning to name it Randall.

The future of war, just around the corner

Ted Ted
February 9, 2012
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In an earlier post I mentioned drone swarms, and the likelihood of their arrival in the not too-distant future. However, there is another development much closer to being actually deployed as it is already undergoing advanced field trials. I struggle to think of a warbot creepier than DARPA’s AlphaDog. To appreciate what you see, keep in mind this is only a prototype of a warbot which in its final form will probably be around 4 times larger, completely silent, smart enough to self-navigate and engage with humans (voice recognition), and on top of that – heavily armed. The fact it can already autonomously move over unknown rugged terrain is astonishing.

If you have seen/played Metal Gear Solid this should be causing deja vu.

On Alan Turing

Ted Ted
February 8, 2012
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I just read the UK Government has rejected a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing. While this is not surprising, it is an outrage. Why? On the one hand, because of the nature of his ‘crime’. On the other hand, because Turing is the one intellectual superhero of computing and therefore the internet. Not only should he be pardoned, but every computing device should have a little statue of him inside (Turing Inside), while the British Monarchy should celebrate ‘Thank you Alan Turing’ day every year. Look around you, you see all the beautiful things which would be impossible without computers and the net? Turing.

Alan Turing

Let us summarise a little bit of what Alan Turing actually did. He conceptualised a ‘universal machine’ – what we now call a universal Turing machine – and thus laid the groundwork for mathematical formalism in computing, meanwhile also proving Kurt Gödel’s solution to the decision problem in formal logic in his On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. He designed, built from scratch, and wrote the programs for the first electro-mechanical computing device – the Bombe – which also happened to solve the previously unsolvable problem of breaking the Wehrmaht/Luftwaffe Enigma encryption. As an aside, this resulted in the Allied command knowing every move the German army and air force were about to take, often before the generals responsible for executing those moves had received and decrypted their orders. It is also worth pointing out this happened at the very beginning of the war. Deciding this is not awesome enough, he then went on to solve – alone – the orders of magnitude more complex problem of the Kriegsmarine Enigma code, therefore effectively winning the war for the allied command on the Western front (this is beautifully narrated in Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon). Bored for challenges, while on a trip to the US  to impart his cryptographic knowledge to the fledgling US effort (there he met and massively influenced von Neumann) he started thinking about encrypting Churchill’s transatlantic phone calls, and off-handedly invented audio encryption. After the war, forbidden to speak about or in any way reveal his war contributions (imagine that), he went on to single-handedly invent the field of artificial intelligence in perhaps the awesomest academic article ever published – Computer Machinery and Intelligence. To top it all, he decided that since he cannot use any of his war effort work or even imply its potential ramifications (it was classified top secret until 2007), he would go on and invent the computer all over again – only better. And he went on to design, build, and write the programs for the first digital computer.

At this point you are asking yourself how did Her Majesty’s Government reward this intellectual force of nature? How much treasures, what honours, how many knighthoods did they heap on him? Well, for starters they forced him to undergo chemical castration via hormonal injections. Why? Because, you see, you cannot save Blighty, win the war, and invent modern computing while being gay. Sorry old chap, not allowed.

They then went on to publicly humiliate him, destroy his career, and finally push him to an apparent suicide.

The future of war

Ted Ted
February 2, 2012
1 Comment

This via the ever thought-provoking John Robb at Global Guerrillas:

The algorithms that enable drone swarms is advancing EXTREMELY quickly. In the next couple of years, the number of advances in technology, deployments, use cases, and awareness of drones will be intense. In 5 years, they will be part of every day life. You will see them everywhere. Not just one or two drones. SWARMS of drones. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions (potentially if the cost per unit is small enough)?

How soon will we see that. It’s already here. Here’s a video depicting experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. It was posted today:

This reminds me of the Protoss carrier unit from Starcraft, of Ender’s hive attacks in Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game‘. Imagine hearing that noise amplified 100 times, and the sky dotted with a flotilla of these.  Smells like Skynet.

On debugging

Ted Ted
January 30, 2012
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Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Brian Kernighan

Learning through interleaving

Ted Ted
January 30, 2012
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Having been in and out of academy for the last, scary number, 16 years, both as a student and lecturer, I have a long list of convictions on what constitutes good learning practice. These have formed, without exception, as a result of frontal clashes with the common-sense notions of good learning practice in higher education. Sitting in class and listening to a lecturer, working in groups, taking notes and /or memorizing lecture notes, passing exams (my favorite) – the list is familiar to everyone with a degree or the aspirations to get one. Bottom line is that the pernicious notions that learning happens in organized time-blocks, and that the best learning practices manifest themselves through instant-recall have contributed tremendously towards the boxed-content assembly line we call higher education. What we produce is students capable of remembering the answer to a question, who excel at obediently taking exams.

There is an alternative to learning though, to my knowledge first charted by Vygotsky, who used the metaphor of scaffolding to describe it. I try and shape my subjects in accordance with this, constructivist, approach whereby the learning process happens dynamically, in an open location (that is, the students decides where), and is assessed through the regular, dynamic production of content, with the separate assessments integrated into a higher-order whole. For example, students produce weekly content consisting of research, reflection, and mini fact-finding missions; they read and comment on each-other’s content; they may use the annotated sources from their fact-finding missions as building blocks towards a group project, or a longer research and reflection piece; they may use that piece to look back and reflect on the issues they identified, etc. The intention is to create a modular, scaffolding-like platform of content production and assessment which can be tailored towards particular topics, problems, and end-tasks.

I have been looking for a new metaphor to describe this approach, and today found it in the work of Robert Bjork from the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, who coins the term ‘interleaving’ to describe the effect of engaging with a topic or a problem on several different levels of intensity simultaneously. The problem is how to design subject materials relying on constant feedback and reflection, so as to maximize the recall function of memory and the relaitonality of knowledge.

A brief history of web standards

Ted Ted
October 27, 2011
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Excellent infographic summarizing the crafting of the web as we know it today, courtesy of Vitamin T and An Event Apart. Strange to see how ancient in internet terms Opera’s  – my browser of choice for 14 years – pedigree is, yet how limited its appeal. Consistently the fastest, yet most have not even heard of it.

The internet of things [lecture]

Ted Ted
October 25, 2011
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My last lecture for the Global Networks subject. I am discussing the arrival of the internet of things, and use some examples of early internet of things implementations from the Toyota Friend, through the Android Open Accessory dev kit, to Tales of Things and Itizen. I then discuss what it means for our notions of identity, privacy, and sociality when objects become active interlocutors and content producers in online conversations.

 

DIGC202 The internet of things on Prezi

AAPL vs GOOG [lecture]

Ted Ted
October 23, 2011
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Prezi from my lecture last week on the battle between Apple and Google for the future of the mobile internet. I am drawing short histories of both companies, and then concentrating on the importance of the mobile internet, and the strategies of both companies for dominating it. I discuss Apple’s closed garden model, and Google’s attempts to keep Android an open system; the short OODA loop of open networks and why this will always be an overwhelming advantage; and the pluses and minuses of both systems in terms of security, user comfort, and freedom.

DIGC202 Apple vs Google on Prezi