Managing the world's real time data
Cosm is a website that connects a whole range of different data sources so that they can be gathered together and shared. The data it collects helps connect more sensors and devices, to allow people to better understand their surroundings.
And now to our final guest, Usman Haque.
Usman was on the program last week talking about data and art, and today it's time to hear about another venture he's involved in called Cosm. Some of you might be aware of Cosm by its original name Pachube. As I mentioned earlier, his online service is about providing a space where data from a variety of sources can be gathered together and shared. To understand why that's important, or indeed useful, here's Usman Haque:
Usman Haque: Cosm is a data infrastructure that handles the data from all sorts of sensors, be they energy monitors or temperature sensors or even pollution sensors. It's a little bit like Twitter, if you like, except instead of handling the data coming from people, it's coming from machines and sensors and appliances and things like that.
Antony Funnell: And there are hundreds of thousands of uses. Why do they contribute data, and what sort of data do they contribute to the site?
Usman Haque: In some cases people are adding data to the site simply because they want to be able to track and graph their own energy use or perhaps their weather stations, or in some cases radiation monitoring. And so they're really after the visualisation tools. But in other situations people are actually actively wanting to share that data because it becomes beneficial in the context of other people sharing, for everyone to be able to pool their data.
And so there are a couple of examples I can give. In Japan, for example, following the radiation crisis last year a lot of people were sharing their radiation data, so that you could actually see across the country the data streams coming from many hundreds if not thousands of radiation data streams. Another example is air quality, where there is a movement in our Amsterdam and New York communities to start to actually measure the air quality in their local neighbourhoods. And people are going to be able to then develop maps, sort of citizen-led maps of the air quality in cities around the world.
Antony Funnell: We know there are lots of sensors out there, there are increasingly more monitors in our urban environments. This, in a sense, is a way of mainstreaming the use of that information, isn't it?
Usman Haque: Yes, that's right. So there are actually companies...for example, there is an energy monitor company called Current Cost that has built a device that actually pushes data automatically to Cosm. But there's also organisations that are starting to build things, and even individuals starting to want to automate their homes or to build devices that make them feel more connected to family members who are further away. So there is an initiative, for example, to create a lamp which switches on in two locations at the same time. So it's becoming a lot more straightforward now to build these things. You do need a little bit of technical skill, but it's the kind of technical skill you might even be picking up in high school these days.
Antony Funnell: Does it increase, then, the chance of connections that otherwise wouldn't be made between people who are interested in using data in creative ways, particularly in ways that are about advancing the human condition, in a sense?
Usman Haque: Yes, and I think that's actually what is really interesting to me, that there are of course ways that you can use these systems and this data to increase efficiency, to look at transportation logistics, for example. But the really compelling, engaging stuff I think is coming from the communities who are just learning new ways to be more connected to each other or to be more connected to their remote family members or even their remote homes or what have you, and developing all sorts of uses for these technologies that I would never have imagined.
Antony Funnell: The visual aspect of it makes it easier for people to identify data that may be useful to them to then collaborate, but we're still talking about a flood, aren't we, we're still talking about an enormous amount of data. So there is still that issue of almost an overloaded to take into account, isn't there.
Usman Haque: Yes, I think there is a concern perhaps with having too much of this data. Sometimes one refers to the firehose of data. But at the same time I'm quite optimistic that people do make sense of complexity, as part of what you do in everyday life. And at the moment we are being confronted with quite a novel situation, but we're also developing tools and our own sort of personal strategies for dealing with all the emails we're getting or all the information we're getting from news sites or all these new data streams that are being created in our lives. So I do think people will develop either their own personal strategies or use tools (for example, like Cosm) to try and make sense of that enormous amount of data.
Antony Funnell: I imagine that some of the data will be static data, but a lot of the data coming through on Cosm would be real-time data. That's useful in a very different way, isn't it.
Usman Haque: Yes. Actually one of the things that Cosm does particularly well is handle the time series data. So it's things that are updating possibly even several times per second. You can discover all sorts of new things about things when you're actually looking at the real-time data stream, and in the case of energy that might be one way of understanding what's going on. In the case of something like air quality, perhaps that real-time data doesn't need to be updating so quickly, if you see what I mean.
Antony Funnell: A broader question I guess; because of the changes in technology we now have much more access to data than ever before and ways of measuring things, and there is in a sense...I mean, this idea of data porn...what is your feeling about that? Are we often too captivated at the moment by the fact that we can collect without actually stopping to think what are the useful ways of using the data that we can collect?
Usman Haque: I think that at the moment there is perhaps a feeling that all we need to do is measure things with a more infinite resolution, as it were, and in that way we will somehow be able to make much better decisions. Certainly more information often gives you a better capacity to make a better decision, but at the same time having perfect knowledge does not necessarily lead to rational decisions. Economists have shown us this kind of thing.
What I'm particularly interested in is the process of measuring and trying to encourage people to make their own measurements so that they can better understand the phenomena that they are particularly interested in. I'll give you an example using air quality. There are official networks, there are cities that have these official air quality networks that are measuring data in a particular way, and they're very good for building up neighbourhood maps of what the neighbourhood is like, but often those sensors are placed at about four metres off the ground so that you can get a better average. For the average citizen, on the other hand, who might have a child in a stroller, they're interested in the air quality down at the level of that stroller where the levels are much higher, but in a sense it doesn't give you that accurate neighbourhood perspective.
So for the citizen, they might actually be interested themselves to be measuring down low and to try and build up an intuition of where that pollution is pooling so that they can actually make a better decision about where to walk. They can't change where they live, which is what the air quality map that's giving an official representation of neighbourhood air quality gives them, they can't actually decide to just move their house, but they can decide to walk somewhere else. And so in a sense the two networks are needed; the one where the citizens are measuring for their own purposes, and the more high-level picture that the official network might give them.
Antony Funnell: Usman Haque, thank you very much.
Usman Haque: Thank you very much for having me.
Antony Funnell: And in case you missed it, Cosm is the service in question and we've linked to it on our website.
Next week on Future Tense, making it easier to find your way around indoors, we already have the GPS, the global positioning system, so is it time we also had an IPS, an indoor positioning system?
Nunzio Gambale: GPS was originally developed for a military imperative which was open-sky finding aircraft, missiles, submarines, et cetera. Very few people realise just how weak the signal is from the satellite. So as soon as you put any obstacle between it—trees, buildings, other people—the signal gets attenuated and it gets lost. I've got a great slide on one of my slide decks, you see a big slab of Swiss cheese, and the quote is 'GPS is like Swiss cheese, it's full of holes'. Those holes are where the GPS was never designed to work, and that's indoors, in urban areas, in open-cut mines, even nowadays in places where GPS is jammed for military purposes. So those holes are the places where Locator has developed new technology which addresses the issues and gives you something that looks exactly the same as a GPS where it is not available previously.
Antony Funnell: That's indoor navigation, next week on the show.
Andrew Davies is my co-producer, and our technical assistance this week came from Jim Ussher.
I'm Antony Funnell, bye for now.
- Usman Haque
- Artist, Director Haque Design + Research Ltd, founder of Pachube.com (now Cosm) and CEO of Connected Environments Limited.
- Antony Funnell
- Andrew Davies