Big Data Analytics and the Global Hunger Challenge

(Image credit: Pixabay.com)

In a world where as many as one-ninth (around 800 million) of the global population of over 7 billion go hungry each day, 33% of the food produced for human consumption is wasted every year.

As regards India, it is home to the largest undernourished and hungry population in the world: 15.2% of India’s population is undernourished and 194.6 million people go hungry every day, according to India FoodBanking Network.

Certainly not a healthy picture—but possibly not one that technology cannot help redress.

According to a new report on McKinsey.com, global food waste and loss cost a staggering $940 billion A YEAR, with a carbon footprint of more than 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and a blue-water footprint that is 3.6 times the annual consumption of the US.

Such a sorry state of global food chain can be set right with appropriate use of digital innovation, including big data analytics, among others.

In my view, there is opportunity not just for governments but also for large businesses that plug into the huge global food supply chain in one way or another: the opportunity to apply creative thinking led by digital tools to bring down wastage, optimize costs and put more food on the table of poor people.

The McKinsey report suggests that cutting postharvest losses in half would produce enough food to feed a billion more people.

This and other social and economic benefits can be achieved by using technology to improve areas such as climate forecasting, demand planning, and the management of end-of-life products, argues McKinsey. The report quotes examples of work being done by startups and others in this area. For instance, a French startup, Phenix, runs a web-based marketplace to connect supermarkets with end-of-life food stocks to NGOs and consumers who could use them. “The platform enables the supermarkets to save the costs of disposal, gives consumable products a second life, and alleviates some of the social and environmental burden of waste,” it says.

For emerging economies such as India, the report suggests that innovations like precision agriculture, supply-chain efficiencies and agriculture-focused payment systems can make a huge difference.

For one, precision agriculture—which uses big data analytics, aerial imagery, sensors, etc.—is used to observe, measure and analyze the needs of individual fields and crops rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to farming in a region or cluster of fields.

Startups as well as big behemoths are participating in this huge opportunity (the market for agricultural robotics alone is forecast to rise from $1 billion in 2014 to up to $18 billion by 2020).

So, while the startup Blue River uses computer vision and robotics to determine the needs of individual plants, Big Blue (also known as IBM) has developed a highly precise weather-forecast technology, Deep Thunder, and an agriculture-specific cloud technology.

Needless to say, we will need a basket of technologies from multiple vendors to keep large amounts of food from being thrown away or going waste, to optimize the yield from agriculture, to eliminate or reduce transportation inefficiencies—and do anything and everything to bring down the number of the daily hungry.

Disaster Management: Can Internet of Things Make a Difference?

What happens when disaster strikes? The answer depends, among other things, on where you are located. And if you live in a third-world, hot, crowded and messy country like India—all hell breaks loose.

Millions among India’s billion-plus citizens have seen that hell from up, close and personal: in the ruthless form of floods, earthquakes, cloudbursts, landslides and other disasters that destroy lives, livestock and the lock, stock and barrels that help people sustain their existence.

In fact, as I write these lines, the country is in the midst of disastrous rains and flooding in several states across its length and breadth.

On such occasions, the administration goes into an overdrive, the army and paramilitary forces are called in and the voluntary organizations are roped in for relief work. But Nature’s fury often proves too much and, despite all their efforts and hard work, the scale at which misery unfolds in the aftermath is astounding.

Can technology play a role in anticipating, mitigating, controlling and managing this misery? And if so, to what extent and in what ways?

Those were the questions that came flooding to my mind as I attended the launch recently of a white paper titled “Internet of Things (IoT) for Effective Disaster Management.” The paper was brought out by Digital India Action Group (DIAG), a think tank set up by IT vendor lobby group MAIT for “ideating and monitoring policy initiatives to support the Indian Government’s mission of Digital India.”

The objective of the paper is “to create awareness and appreciation about the potential use and applications of IoT for different aspects of disaster management.”

Alongside, DIAG also released another white paper, “Aadhaar-Enablement: A Framework for Citizen-Centric Services”.

For the uninitiated, Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity issued by the Government’s Unique ID Authority of India. Over 1 billion of these IDs have been given thus far in what is billed as the largest such exercise in the world.

While discussing Aadhaar and the potential of Aadhaar-based services is a Pandora’s box in itself, let me confine myself to IoT in disaster management for this post.

The role of IoT in disaster management, in keeping with the huge potential of this mother-of-all-technological-paradigm, is critical and wide-ranging. A multiplicity of agencies, infrastructure, devices, policies, and applications, among others, must come together to make the whole exercise “effective”, as the DIAG paper rightly highlights in its title.

The presence of a cross-section of officials and executives—from government, industry and consulting organizations (see pic)—is, one hopes, symbolic of the coordinated, on-ground effort that will be required in the days to come to give actual shape to the vision laid out in the document.

The IoT white paper recommends a “Seven-Point Action Plan” to shift from a “relief and recovery” model to “risk and vulnerability assessment” and address key issues and challenges related to management of natural and man-made disasters in India.

According to data from the IoT white paper, as much as 57% land area of India is vulnerable to earthquakes; 12% of this area is vulnerable to severe earthquakes. Besides, 68% land is vulnerable to drought, 12% land vulnerable to floods and 8%, to cyclones. The paper notes that many cities in India are also vulnerable to chemical, industrial and other man-made disasters.

The benefits of IoT in disaster management are easy to visualize (though difficult to implement, given the current realities of India): agencies can gain a clear picture of operations with real-time visibility of data as well as model data from multiple sources. This can further be transformed into accessible, actionable intelligence for faster, better-informed decisions. It is important, therefore, to create “a single, federated information hub.”

The paper calls for building an information backbone which all parties—government agencies, NGOs, infrastructure operators and community—can contribute to and work from.

One term in the paper that specifically caught my eye was “intuitive analytics” which seems to take the capabilities of the current big data analytics technologies to their optimal level.

In this context, SAP’s Lovneesh Chanana presented an insightful video of the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. After the disastrous floods in the year 2013, which resulted in loss of close to a hundred lives and millions of dollars, the Argentine capital decided to put sensors in over 30,000 storm drains that measure, as per this report on the SAP site, “the direction, level and speed of water.” One of the key technologies to gather and analyze this huge amount of data in real-time is SAP HANA.

Technologies lie SAP HANA (or IBM Watson, for that matter) are not cheap to deploy for funds-starved governments. But consider the impact of not using the most advanced technologies: A World Bank forecast puts the annual losses from floods alone to reach as high as $1 trillion worldwide if cities don’t take preventive measures.

Each city, in my opinion, will need to take a deep view of what’s the best fit for it in terms of technologies, including IoT and the use of social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. (If you think lightly of the idea, pause for a moment to consider that the US Geological Survey, a government entity, runs a service called the Tweet Earthquake Dispatch (TED). Under this, there are two Twitter accounts that send out earthquake alerts: @USGSted and @USGSBigQuakes.)

I remember reading a report a few years ago that was in a way precursor to the TED service. When, in the US, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Northeast in 2011, many New Yorkers learned about it on Twitter—seconds before the shaking actually started. Tweets from people at the epicenter near Washington, D.C., outpaced the quake itself, providing a unique early warning system. (Conventional alerts, by contrast, were said to take two to 20 minutes to be issued.)

Technology is advancing at a much faster pace now, especially with machine learning, robotics and drones appearing more frequently in headlines than ever before.

What should the Indian government and industry players be doing in tackling disasters with IoT and other tools?

The DIAG white paper gives some recommendations, the MAIT DIAG Seven-Point Action Plan, which includes:

- Release of cloud security and related guidelines as part of the Digital India policy framework.

- Inclusion of ICT in Disaster Management in the National Skills Development Framework and Plan.

- Release of IoT Policy for India.

- Development of framework for continuous industry participation in planning for disaster management.

- Back-end applications for asset management with disaster management authorities.

- Knowledge portal for sharing experiences and best practices.

- A comprehensive plan for prevention of cyber disasters.

Even if some of the above points are put into practice by a government-industry “action tank” (taking the think part to its logical conclusion), the disasters that certainly, unavoidably await the Indian multitudes can perhaps be mitigated and managed much better than before.

For CIOs, tech leaders and others who would like to dig deeper or get involved, here are some reference links:

Revised Draft IoT Policy of the Government

National Policy on Disaster Management

India Disaster Resource Network

UN ESCAP: ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction

 (The above blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com. Lead visual credit: Pixabay.com)

10 Interesting Business Use Cases of Internet of Things

The term “Internet of Things” often throws people, even in the technology industry, off balance. They begin struggling for definitions, explanations, market statistics and what not. There are those who throw multiple spanners in the works by citing security concerns (like they did with cloud). And then, those who generally do a lot of huffing and puffing.

Nothing wrong with that, actually. Any new or not-yet-mature technology segment goes through its own cycle of hype, hazards and hurrahs. So there’s no reason to treat IoT any different. Except perhaps that IoT is much bigger than a typical flavor-of-the-season type technology. (Without giving conflicting numbers but to keep things in some perspective, by 2020, billions of things/devices are to be connected and trillions of dollars in additional value will be generated.)

However, as the stats, standards and stumbling-blocks keep rolling in, the IoT pioneers and large ecosystem players continue to chip away at making it work. (Talking of chips, Intel has just bought Itseez Inc., an expert in computer vision algorithms and implementations for embedded and specialized hardware, an area of great interest to the chip giant for the automotive and video opportunities in IoT.)

I scoured the web for real-life business use cases of IoT solutions from across different sectors and scenarios. Here are some interesting ones (including a few from India as well):

- Miami International Airport, one of the busiest US airports (over 21 million passengers in 2015) has deployed Internet-connected sensors and IoT apps to provide detailed information to passengers based on their location and needs (the MIA mobile app for Android and iOS relies on a network of 400 beacons that transmit location information throughout the airport). For passengers, the app provides personalized directions through to airport and helps them find restaurants, services and baggage carousels based on their location.

- ATI Specialty Materials, a world leader in the production of special alloys and steels for the aerospace, oil & gas, and medical industries, uses the ThingWorx IoT platform from PTC—which provides a real-time layer that connects with their manufacturing, quality, maintenance, and ERP systems and allows them to rapidly create role based decision support “dashboards” and interactive applications.

- Using AMC Health’s mobile patient monitoring solution, an active pregnant woman who needs to track her blood sugar can use a mobile device to communicate readings from her glucometer at any time and any place she chooses, and that information is stored securely in the cloud. Her care provider has 24/7 access to her information and can determine whether she, her baby or both are at risk. Using this information, the woman’s health care provider can provide more timely and appropriate care for the benefit of both mother and baby.

- Ward Aquafarms, a 1000-cage aquaculture farm in Massachusetts, USA, uses thermal radiometry sensor enabled cameras from Mobotix running on the Verizon IoT platform to collect and analyze data such as environmental and sub-tidal water temperature, chlorophyll values, etc. Combined with satellite imaging data and analyzed properly, it helps Ward in its commitment to efficient and sustainable seafood production.

- The cities of San Diego (California) and Jacksonville (Florida) are running trials that use LED streetlight technology to collect real-time data not only to manage lighting, but also to manage parking, locate and identify potholes and keep track of repairs to municipal streets.

- John Deere has fitted its tractors sold globally with sensors. This helps the company update the farmer if a moving part of the tractor or the harvester is likely to fail, around one month before the event. (The analytics behind the predictive framework is said to have been done by a Bengaluru-based analytics firm, TEG Analytics.)

- Technologies like IoT often find usage in the unlikeliest of places. Take the case of successfully impregnating cows, for instance. A system called Gyujo, which was developed by Fujitsu, uses a pedometer strapped to the leg of the cow to help figure out exactly when is the best time to inseminate a cow. For farmers, the importance of getting this right is huge. Artificial insemination success rates today are around 70% with a pregnancy rate of around 40% when the detection rate of when the cow is in heat is 55%. Pushing that detection rate up to 95% (the level of accuracy claimed by Gyujo) causes the pregnancy rate to shoot up to 67%. (A cow in estrus “walks around furiously” typically at night, which is what Gyujo helps determine.)

- Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd (TPDDL) has taken a few steps in the IoT realm with a smart metering project. To manage peak demand and manage grid stress situations better, the company is working on an Automated Demand Response (ADR) mechanism for commercial and industrial high-end consumers (typically, users of 10 KW and above). The IoT project was undertaken to demonstrate technological capability, understand customer behavior, provider for a case study for the regulator to work on differential tariffs and financial incentives, and also to understand the processes required for scaling up as and when the need arises. Having successfully connected a total of 11 MVA non-critical load of Commercial and Industrial HT-consumers (it achieved a Demand Response of 7.2 MVA load during a DR Event in the year 2014), TPDDL is now confident of having the process capability to extend the IoT initiative to a larger base of consumers.

- Sheela Foam, the manufacturer of Sleepwell brand of mattresses in India, has introduced the IoT technology to help identify and offer the right kind of mattress to its customers as per their body shape. Every human body is different and needs a mattress that matches the body posture and the pressure distribution while sleeping. The company has devised an IoT based solution that is fitted to the mattresses on display at Sleepwell’s various retail outlets. There are sensors attached to this special mattress, called Sleepwell Sensobed, which scan and capture the various body shape related parameters when a person lies down on the mattress. The data is then analyzed and used to suggest perfectly matched mattresses to individual customers.

- IBM is using a slew of technologies, including IoT-based solutions, to digitally transform the Rashtrapati Bhavan in India. The company has created the business architecture and operating procedures, implemented the technology platform and solutions, and is managing the entire technology deployment. (The scope includes smart, eco-friendly solutions such as energy management, water management, waste and horticultural management, and security systems.)

The above is but a tiny representation of the humongous IoT ecosystem that is getting built even as I write these words. In all probability, the “thing/everything” part would be subsumed one day and we might refer to the Internet of Things simply as, well, the Internet.

(Image courtesy: IoTDisruptions.com. This blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com)

Internet of Things: Sensors and Sensibilities

Forecast for the future: strong clouds are hovering over the technology landscape, all that big data floating around has started forming data lakes, and people are increasingly going social + mobile. A part of the future has already arrived, although much of it is still buffering like that revolving circle on your smartphone screen (the last one is especially true of bandwidth-challenged countries like India).

If that prognostication sounds complex, try this: everything is getting connected to the Internet. Or it soon will be, as the vendors and analysts constantly tell us. According to a Cisco estimate, 25 billion devices will be connected by the end of this year and 50 billion by 2020.

It is difficult to talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) without also dragging along social media, mobility, (big data) analytics and cloud, the SMAC stack as it’s called.  One thing is built on top of another or something is enabled by something else and so on. Typically, as we have seen in technology, things have been done often in isolation (that brings a pet CIO term/peeve to the mind: silos). And then, they are inevitably pulled together by the inescapable tug of the Net. Lo and behold! You are again struggling to swim in turbulent waters.

I was driving to my new workplace amid the chaotic rains of Delhi earlier this month when my thoughts veered to how IoT can help us navigate the traffic snarls, besides making other aspects of city life easier for consumer-citizens.

The first traffic signal that I stopped at was a familiar scene of free-for-all that city-dwellers in India in general and Delhi in particular have come to witness quite frequently. It happens because of sudden signal failure and people driving through in all directions. In this case, the signal succumbed to some mysterious forces of malfunction—ones that are always in full fury at the first hint of rain or a power outage.

Somehow, I wriggled out of the mess, took a turn and drove further on. And just when I thought the downpour was beginning to thin down to a drizzle, I found that, on the side of the road, there was a burst pipe from which water was gushing out voluminously. This caused some motorists to avoid the “water lane,” with the result that cars and bikes were squeezing into the middle of the road, creating an artificial jam of sorts.

Before I finally reached office after a marathon drive, I witnessed several more stupidities of not living in a smart city. Among them: an ambulance wailing its siren to no avail, for it was stuck in a sea of cars moving at snail’s pace; garbage from the open dump area overflowing and mixing with the rainwater sloshing about on the roads; and street lights that were turned on even in broad daylight.

At this point it would be hard to imagine if driverless Google cars can *ever* navigate the roads of Indian cities. But the following are equally hard *not* to imagine: Why can’t megacities like Delhi have an intelligent, robust traffic management system (one that doesn’t stop working every time it rains or each time the city lights go out)? Why can’t we ensure that medical emergencies do not die a premature death on city roads? Is it not possible to enforce lane driving with the use of sensors/CCTV cameras at least at key points where congestion/violation is highest? How come some roads are tarred again and again while others have crater-size pits that haven’t been filled since ages?

Other common sights visible across Indian cities include water tankers with leaking taps plying on the roads, parking lots that are over-crowded in some places and virtually empty in others, and all types of garbage getting dumped in a single, overstuffed lot.

Chaos rules in public places such as bus and train stations, hospitals and even private, huge supermarkets. People have to wait long hours where no wait should be required. Or they run from one hospital wing to another merely to collect reports. I have seen people abandon shopping carts, which must have taken them hours to fill, when they see the serpentine queues at checkout counters.

It is true that the situation has much to do with over-crowding and the paucity of resources. But a lot is lacking in terms of intelligent governance and larger participation of the private sector in delivering services that can ease the pain of common citizens. In the context of enterprises, the deficiency is in creating a connected service ecosystem that is intelligent and efficient.

Thankfully, we are at a point where appropriate use of technology—sensors, CCTVs, SMAC, etc.—can not only solve a lot of the problems associated with the smooth running of a city but also create huge business opportunities for companies (and hence CIOs) in multiple industries.

For sure, all that talk of Digital India by the Government of India has given everyone hope for betterment. But it is high time we studied and learned from the examples of smart cities across the globe and got down to adapting and implementing those solutions for the Indian environment. The important point here is that things should not happen in isolation—whether a project concerns different government departments or a public-private partnership (PPP) model. Done in isolation, things often go haywire and the envisaged impact is lost.

Barcelona is often cited as one of the most shining examples of smart cities, where IoT is not a distant concept but a living reality. The most significant aspect of the city’s smart strategy, in my opinion, is the fact that it takes a comprehensive view of the various projects being developed or the services being maintained throughout the city.

A holistic approach has enabled Barcelona to boast of a system of underground service galleries that enables repair/improvement of services such as power supply and waste collection without the need for excavation; Tap & Go contactless card payment system (using NFC or near field communication technology); sensor-based intelligent street lighting (with measures such as regulated hours of lighting and electrical analysis of the position of lamps rendering 40% in cost savings); a smart service delivery platform for citizens and municipal workers, which has a common data warehouse where the different sensor systems store their information (built through a PPP model); and an integrated waste management plant. Besides these, several other projects have been completed or are under way to make the city sustainable, competitive, smart and, most important, worth living.

Among other cities that are touted as leading examples of smart cities are Copenhagen, London, Helsinki, Seoul, Montreal, Chicago and Singapore (not in any particular order). India can look at any or all of them to work out its own IoT and smart cities plan.

Most of the cities that are doing well as smart cities are not shying away from the latest in IoT and SMAC technologies and putting them to optimum use, especially in partnership with private businesses and entrepreneurs.

In India, the intent of the government and business biggies seems to be in favor of IoT/smart cities. Now, all that is required is a lot of action on the ground so that smooth order can replace random chaos—in some Indian cities at least.

(Note: This blog post first appeared on DynamicCIO.com.)