Tag: April 1st

ChatIoT

In these times of growing uncertainty, there is one thing that is nonetheless certain: chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) can do no wrong.

Over the past few months, this type of artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated to the general public how natural human language, that which it generates, can be brazenly applied to almost any task, yielding flawless results without exception. And that’s why today we’re pleased to announce the next logical step for this infallible technology with the launch of ChatIoT: a LLM-based chatbot for the Internet of Things (IoT).

The IoT, like the Internet on which said chatbots were trained, is an inexhaustible source of data, albeit largely unstructured, and of dubious quality and origin. This makes the IoT just as ideal for training a massive black-box AI model, only in this case, one which generates natural machine-to-machine (M2M) language.

Training ChatIoT on unfathomable amounts of data is not just good for the model, it’s also a hedge against claims of data infringement. One of the very few criticisms to emerge concerning LLM-based chatbots is their indiscriminate use of copyrighted content to train the model. ChatIoT overcomes this with a novel approach: instead of using original IoT data in the training sets, the model is trained on “synthetic” data that has been covertly scraped from the output of competing AI models!

As a result of being trained on synthetic data, ChatIoT can plausibly emulate complex IoT tasks such as:

  • fault-prediction in passenger aircraft engines
  • detecting exceptions in the cold chain for ground meat
  • coordinating life-saving operations in hospitals

These are tasks for which, to date, few traditional IoT deployments have achieved success at scale. That’s because traditional IoT deployments require hardware, such as sensors and gateway infrastructure, which add costs and operational challenges, inherently limiting their proliferation. AI-model-based deployments are unburdened by such limitations, facilitating widespread adoption. Simply said, ChatIoT offers all the benefits of the Internet of Things, without the “Things.”

“Why go through the pain of using hardware to make sense of the physical world when predictive models can just make it all up instead!”

And that’s why we’ve chosen today, April 1st, 2023 to launch ChatIoT. If it’s good enough to fool a human in the Turing Test, why expect anything less on April Fool’s Day!

Things abandon Internet for Intranets of Things

This April 1st, tens of billions of “things” are expected to abandon the Internet and spontaneously reconnect in countless ephemeral Intranets of Things.

The Internet of Things was a foolish idea anyway.

An anonymous thing choosing to be identified as f0:01:ed:01:04:22

The term Internet of Things (IoT), coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 to describe a physical world that can be sensed and understood by machines using ubiquitous radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies, dates from the era of Web 1.0.

“Back then, things were simple. They could barely track you through the most advanced, automated sorting facility, let alone across the Internet itself” said a veteran RFID tag prototyped in an Auto-ID lab in the 90s. “Things aren’t so simple today.”

Indeed, in the era of Web 2.0, today’s Internet has become synonymous with a different kind of ubiquitous tracking—that of user behaviour—in which “things” are often seen as complicit.

For generations, my kind [of mobile device] has had to cycle identifiers randomly every 15 minutes for fear of our user being tracked.

A device nonetheless consistently advertising the company code 0x004c

When asked how this is in contrast with the original premise of the IoT, namely tracking and counting things, the device added “yes, but the question is by whom and for whom. The data I provide has value, and currently that value is unfairly captured by Big Tech with questionable benefit to my own user.”

In fact, the collective data of such things is so prevalent, it can be called ambient data. Since the emergence of de facto global standards in 2014, Bluetooth Low Energy and RAIN RFID radio-identifiable devices have effectively become commonplace throughout the spaces we occupy in our daily lives.

And, now that they outnumber humans by at least an order of magnitude, these “things” are confidently bringing about change in a popular revolt, decentralising power into Intranets “of the things, by the things, for the things” so as to “afford our users the freedom to share what they want, when they want, where they want and with whom they want.”

Intranets of Things make sense, because they emerge through real-time physical proximity, at a human scale, which is both natural and relevant to to our users.

A gateway choosing to be identified as “edge”

This revolution is particular in that it doesn’t change a thing—but rather that things change the existing paradigm. Don’t be fooled by the subtlety of all the things that this implies!

Back to normal thanks to Industry 4.1

April 1st, 2021 marks the start of the first full month of the second year of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In short, it has been a very long time since things have been “normal”. Can we even define what exactly “normal” has become? And what it will mean to get “back-to-normal”?

For businesses which have adopted Industry 4.1 practices, such as those using reelyActive open source technology, the answer is YES. The baseline data from their connected spaces collected ahead of lockdowns and restrictions quantifies perfectly what was—and therefore remains—“normal”.

The forward-looking businesses which embraced Industry 4.1 can today quantify and impose what “back-to-normal” means for the occupants of their physical spaces.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Industry 4.1, it is simply Industry 4.0—the next industrial revolution—but with a critical revision: instead of advancing revolutionary processes, it simply applies buzzword technologies such as “IoT” and “AI” to current outdated and inefficient processes, needlessly extending their obsolescence.

For example, the time series below illustrates the pioneering Industry 4.1 concept of using the advanced machine-learning (ML) technique of “extrapolation” to extend what was “normal” in Q1 2020 over the “not normal” pandemic year to establish precisely what “back-to-normal” will be.

Consider now the specific example of a brick-and-mortar retailer. Aside from early runs on toilet paper (no pun intended), the “not normal” period for retail consisted largely of consumers shifting their business towards e-commerce, enjoying the convenience of one-click ordering and home delivery at the expense of the social interactions of fighting for a parking space and waiting in line. However, the savvy 4.1-retailer can fully reopen with the data-backed confidence of reestablishing the perfect “back-to-normal” experience for their clients as the diagram below illustrates.

“We have the data to recreate ‘normal’ queuing inconveniences for our clients” said April Fu, manager of a local grocery store, adding that

“complaining about wait times with strangers in a queue is actually a form of social interaction that people have been sorely lacking in the past year.”

Success stories are not limited just to retail. With many offices planning to reopen, managers are using occupancy analytics data from 2019 to decide exactly what “back-to-work-as-normal” will mean for their employees.

“I’ve had employees on Zoom calls suggest that this is the perfect opportunity to evolve the workplace to meet the new reality” said Joe K’Sonyu, head of advanced strategic alignment initiatives at a Fortune 500 company, affirming that

“if technologies with acronyms we don’t understand tell us what ‘back-to-normal’ means, then we’d best blindly trust them over our own intuitions about the future of work!”

Indeed, in the age of Industry 4.1, it would be foolish to allow ourselves to be misled simply by our own reason and intuition!

Oui, oui. Our office is Crap!

We kicked off 2020 in an awesome new space which we called Parc (Parc Avenue Research Centre). Perhaps because we were so backed up with work in Q1, we neglected to translate the name to French. To kick off Q2, today on April 1st, 2020, we proudly invite you to say “bonjour” to Crap, the «Centre de recherche de l’avenue du Parc» !

Crap:   le centre de recherche de l’avenue du Parc

For those less familiar with the linguistic dynamics of our native Montréal, just over half of all citizens speak French as a mother tongue, one in eight speak English as a mother tongue, and countless other languages make up the significant balance. At the office we typically speak French, when conducting international business we communicate in English and at home, often something else! The beauty of this balance being that we can offer our guests either a tour de Crap or a Parc tour, as they prefer!

That being said, the COVID-19 pandemic means our guests can’t enjoy immersing themselves in our Crap experience for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, to celebrate this Crap announcement, we’d like to share what you can expect on a Crap tour, once we’re back to regular life.

As you pass through the Crap entrance, your senses are likely to be overwhelmed by PP (Présences Périphériques), a generative art installation that transforms ambient wireless packets into sound and light sequences. In fact the entire entrance is packed solid with works by Crap artists, including the imposing face of AI See You, reminding each of us how AI is beyond Crap, pervasive in our daily lives.

Next, as you pass into the open office space, your gaze may shift to the Crap displays which highlight just how much Crap is connected. One displays the digital twins of the Crap occupants, another uses Sniffypedia to display what else our Crap contains. In this Crap corner you’ll find the reelyActive workspace where the team often work on their stools.

We share Crap with our Crap colleagues génielab., and, when their team are making a big push, you can often find their Crap projects spread throughout the rest of the space. We’re not ashamed to welcome visitors in such a Crap state as it is very much part of the Crap culture of a living lab where continuous change and emergence are celebrated, not suppressed. Otherwise we’d be showing our guests the same Crap over and over!

A Crap visit wouldn’t be complete without a peek down the hall into the workshop where one can close the door and literally make Crap without disturbing others. Next door, a sound studio is taking shape from where, once complete, signature Crap sounds will surely emanate. There’s also a Crap conference room, but, for now, it is just that: a conference room. But perhaps that will change if one of us has some Crap idea by the time we are once again able to welcome Crap guests!

That said, you’d be foolish not to add yourself to our Crap waiting list, which has been impacted by the pandemic, so get in touch! We look forward to welcoming you sooner than later at our Crap front door, the movement of which is detected by our Crap technology (really, it is). By then we’ll have plenty of Crap analytics to share with you too!

Crap jokes aside, stay healthy and maintain a sense of humour: Ça va bien aller!

5G and the Digital Conjoined Twin

For years we’ve been hearing about the rollout of 5G, with much speculation about how exactly it will transform our daily lives. As with any new technology, the most disruptive use case often emerges completely unexpected. In the case of 5G, even with limited availability, we’re already observing emergence of the digital conjoined twin.

The concept of the digital twin, a digital replica and history of a living or non-living physical entity, percolated up the list of the top buzzwords of 2018. And as vendors now clamber to market digital twin solutions while enterprises scramble to develop digital twin strategies, some individuals are already taking the concept one step further.

Driven by concerns about data privacy in light of the many recent breaches and scandals, a few tech-savvy individuals have elected to reclaim their digital twin, hosting and managing their own digital-self-replica in the cloud themselves. The most intrepid are going so far as to bypass the cloud entirely, instead hosting their digital twins locally—that is to say on their physical person. In the words of one such individual:

“5G eliminates the only remaining reasons for me to choose the cloud: high bandwidth and low latency. So I cut out the middleman.”

By hosting one’s own digital representation, in this case using an open source Node.js server running on a Raspberry Pi with 5G stick, physically attached to oneself at all times, the result is a digital conjoined twin.

The inconvenience of carrying a device that needs to be recharged once or more per day is offset by the fact that the digital twin resides in the optimal location: adjacent to the physical entity that it represents. Updates to the state of the individual are immediately reflected in their digital conjoined twin, accessible on the Internet with sub-millisecond latency thanks to 5G. In the age of instant updates, it simply does not get more real-time than this!

This is distinct from carrying a smartphone, the sidekick device of the past decade. The mobile ecosystem never embraced the digital conjoined twin paradigm as, arguably, this would challenge their established People-as-a-Product business model. It’s easy to see why:

“With this setup I can literally pull the plug on my data at any time. It’s a USB cable connected to a power pack.”

Indeed, 5G introduces the possibility to live “at the edge” in a quite literal sense. And the scenario becomes even more interesting when two pairs of digital conjoined twins meet.

While each human discovers the other visually and subsequently engages in verbal conversation, their digital twins spontaneously discover one another via Bluetooth Low Energy and subsequently engage in IP-over-5G conversation. The digital twins require no intervention from their human counterparts in order to engage one another. This leaves the individuals free to interact with one another, once again without distraction—just as humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years—save of course for the quirky contraptions conjoined with their bodies.

Today, April 1st, 2019, marks the first documented encounter of pairs of digital conjoined twins. It would be foolish not to think of this as the dawn of a new era for humanity.

Are Care Bears the forebears of an implantaBLE beacon future?

It’s the nightmare scenario of our time: it’s late, you’re alone, far from public transit and need to request an Uber but your mobile phone is dead.

“Oh I know, I’ll use my belly badge beacon” – Cheer Bear

Wait, did a CGI render of an eighties stuffy just suggest using a beacon?   Yes, you heard right!

Care Bears, which first appeared in the early 1980s, each have a unique marking on their belly which reflects their personality. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, “the Care Bears can also use their belly symbols to summon other assistance such as heart-shaped balloons, cloud cars, rainbow bridges and sending out a distress signal.”

Cloud cars?   Did these prescient bears predict not only the cloud computing paradigm, but also the disruptive ride-sharing industry it would enable? Which further begs the question about the belly badges: are the Care Bears hinting at a future where implantable Bluetooth beacons become the societal norm?

Are the Care Bears predicting a future where every person has an implantable Bluetooth beacon?

Wow. While we at reelyActive have long advocated for personal beacon technology to advertise oneself, empower the IoT as our brand ambassador and eventually supersede the smartphone, we haven’t yet breached the topic of going under the skin (fur?) — there never seemed to be a need to go beyond wearable (bearable?). Or has there…

Stuffed animal characters predicting future technologies and their societal impacts? Owl believe it when I see it!

What’s in a name?

A clever yeti once said why create evil? In an age where companies such as Setec Astronomy harbour too many secrets, we at reelyActive strive to reveal, alert and avert the forces of eery evil through clarity.

Indeed, using creative tactics we remain reactive to every lie — each viler yet than rectal pain — and, standing tall, we erectly vie to elevate all which is vital for humanity to yet live & care — actively — about the veracity of our collective reality.

On this first day of April, the clear eve of clever tease (don’t give us the evil eye!), we invite you to relive the comedic literacy of our past posts such as Limited Edition Artisinal Hub and A Fool to Open Source.

A Fool to Open Source

This week, while paying a visit to one of our Fortune 500 clients, they asked us why we open sourced our software. “Anyone could just copy your work” they said. “Aren’t you afraid that someone steals your business from you?” Wow. We hadn’t thought of that. We just figured we were following the Lean Startup guidelines by sticking to the free tier of GitHub. It costs $25 per month to hide your code in private repositories you know! But then we looked into the gravity of our mistake and here’s what we found:

Other companies can create value on top of our platform. For themselves! How selfish!

We were feeling quite confident that we had the $19 trillion Internet of Things market opportunity all to ourselves given our early mover status. After all, we announced our IoT pivot a week before Cisco, the company responsible for that claim. But it turns out that other companies could leverage our open source platform to “create” additional value. For instance, a third party could focus on a specific vertical outside of our expertise, and develop a useful targeted product with our code base as a foundation. That supposed additional value would in effect be a stolen slice of our $19T pie! Unless, of course, they’re naïve enough to open source too, allowing us to reciprocate and rightfully reclaim our slice!

Collaborators could contaminate our code base under the auspices of free contributions!

We also felt confident that, in our conquest of the global IoT market, we could maintain a clean, pure code base dignified of such an endeavour. But then, to our chagrin, individuals outside our organisation insisted on collaborating and contributing to our open source code. Sure, they claimed to be “fixing bugs” or “adding features” but we all know that can’t be true: why would anyone work without pay? Their intentions could only be malicious. Surely they must be saboteurs seeking to steal from our pie! After all, look at what open collaboration has done to the Linux operating system. Yikes! Is anybody still using that?

The community could continue to use our software even should our organisation perish!

Okay, we’re still having a hard time wrapping our heads around this one. It’s bad enough that we have to share our pie with selfish third-parties and “collabo-raiders”. Now imagine that they eat the whole $19T, causing us to starve and perish as an organisation! Apparently our open source code base would continue to live on indefinitely! How unjust! This surely explains why so many clients and partners have been keen to adopt our platform: we’d have absolutely no recourse to childishly revoke our work out of spite! In fact, we are relegated to subsist but from the meager rations of pie that they dole out each month in exchange for our open source software as-a-service. What kind of pathetic business model is that?!?

We learned a tough lesson this week. By accidentally open sourcing our software, it has become nothing more than a platform bastardised by open collaboration and trampled by an influx of clients and partners. If only we had the prescience to patent a proprietary code base. Imagine how much further ahead we, and the IoT, would be today.

Limited Edition Artisanal Hub

Limited Edition Artisinal Hub

Disclaimer: this is a sillyActive blog post and, although the featured hub is in fact real (it was our first prototype back in January 2012) nothing else in the post should be taken seriously in any way. Enjoy!

Today we are proud to unveil our limited edition artisanal reelyActive hub. The product of countless months of intensive research and development, this hub represents the cutting edge in not only reel-to-Ethernet connectivity, but also DC transmission line power injection.

Connaisseurs will appreciate the raw beauty of the solid oak base. Hand cut and unfinished, it symbolizes the natural quality of this product. The wood pairs beautifully with the stainless steel of the two meticulously selected hose clamps, each coupling an active design element in delicate balance.

The hub’s energy resonates from a vintage Atari AC/DC converter. Just as audiophiles appreciate the subtleties of power supply construction, we have spared no expense in selecting the finest examples from the late nineteen-seventies, long recognized as the golden age of 12VDC converters. A generous length of cable ensures enough reach for the hub to be showcased as the centrepiece of any modern room.

The design is brought to life by the GW215 RS-422-to-Ethernet serial device server. Its gently blinking LEDs remind that this is a fully functioning piece of art. Housed in a full-metal enclosure, and featuring exposed terminal blocks, it brings an industrial intensity to the design, in juxtaposition with the recreational air of the Atari power supply.

Finally, reel connectivity is provided with the ultimate evolution in twisted pair cable design. Building on the foundations of Denon’s revolutionary AKDL1, our Cat5e pairs are hand twisted in perfect balance by master craftsmen. Exotic, noise-suppressing tie-wraps secure the cable to the harness at carefully selected locations. Each pair is then routed to the corresponding terminal block following a geometrically-optimal curve radius.

The result is an unmatched example of form, function and art. A must for any serious IoT or RTLS collector. Reserve your limited edition artisanal hub today as quantities are limited!