Vanderbilt playing key role in the Internet's future
Imagine this: After you finish your morning bowl of cereal, you set out for work. Your fridge notices the milk carton you just put back is almost empty and transmits a message to Amazon, which sends a new carton of your preferred brand to your doorstep right as get you home from work.
Or your mother, who lives alone, falls while trying to change a light bulb and hits her head. Her watch (alternatively, a chip embedded in her body) registers that she is unconscious and alerts emergency services, which are able to circumvent traffic because their self-driving ambulance senses where there is a jam and goes another way, arriving at your mother's house in time to help her.
This might sound futuristic now, but it may soon become normal thanks to the "Internet of things."
The Internet of things, or "Industrial Internet," as General Electric named it, allows every ordinary object to be connected to a complete network of objects that can interact with one another by exchanging data.
For this to work, every object would need to be embedded with a sensor. Machines would need to be given a cyber-life or virtual representation able to send messages electronically rather than relying on human middlemen. So an old bridge, for example, would be able to notify us when it is structurally unsound, rather than people having to check up on it.
There are several roadblocks to this new Internet becoming a reality, according to Janos Sztipanovits, director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, which leads the nation in research on cyber-physical systems — systems like the Internet of things.
One main roadblock is that our current Internet is not set up for this type of interaction.
"The Internet right now is mainly facilitating connection among humans and human organizations," he said.
In other words, we use the Internet to get in touch with someone else: to buy something or advertise something or otherwise make our wants known. Current technology does not allow the universal connectivity necessary for a refrigerator to contact Amazon's milk distributor — to allow machines to anticipate our wants and act for us.
Soon that will change, according to Sztipanovits.
"The future Internet will be dominantly machine-to-machine communications," he said. "Very soon, over 95 percent of Internet usage will be machine-to-machine."
What about the many ethical questions that'll undoubtedly be bound up with this new Internet? For example, where should the line be drawn about the information machines are allowed to know about us? How many human checks should be put on machine decisions? Who should pay when machines provide services humans don't want — for instance, if I didn't want more milk, should I have to pay for it if it arrives at my door? And most important, of course, is the question of the security of personal information.
Vanderbilt is looking to address these issues alongside dozens of corporations that make up the Industrial Internet Consortium, Sztipanovits said. The consortium was formed to create standards for the new Internet and foster collaboration between companies developing the infrastructure to make it a reality.
"This is a very complicated and important task," he stated. "They want to formulate (standards), they want to test them, and of course (Vanderbilt, which is) funded by the NSF, will be informing foundations."
Vanderbilt is the only university in the consortium, he added.
"This is very important because there's a huge industrial component but at the same time it's very research intense," he said.
And soon the Internet of things will permeate every aspect of society, he said, in "every conceivable way. No matter where you're looking you'll find it."