{"id":216,"date":"2018-11-29T11:49:36","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T11:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/brettcherry\/?p=216"},"modified":"2018-11-29T12:40:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T12:40:17","slug":"the-internet-of-things-and-the-fourth-industrial-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/brettcherry\/2018\/11\/29\/the-internet-of-things-and-the-fourth-industrial-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"The internet of things and the fourth industrial revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The business and academic community has set out a vision for much greater ambition needed for Britain to be a world leader in the fourth industrial revolution”.<\/p>\n

J\u00fcrgen Maier<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thanks to the digitisation of nearly everything there are now vast quantities of data gathered by devices connected to the internet. I often notice them during my daily commute.<\/p>\n

Prior to cycling through Newcastle I tap into local environmental sensors to see the latest info on air quality or weather data. On the road next to me I notice someone with a Fitbit or mobile phone strapped to their arm recording their heart rate, number of steps taken and how many calories they\u2019ve burned.<\/p>\n

If I catch the Metro or bus to work I will likely run into someone with a gadget I’ve never seen before, a new type of mobile phone, notebook, tablet or other digital device that\u2019s streaming Netflix, or some other cloud based entertainment network. And if I get a lift from a friend I often spot a Tesla electric car or Nissan Leaf, both of which hook up to the national grid for charging, but could also potentially store energy for the grid as well<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

On occasion if I go to the park people gather together in swarms, staring into the smooth, dark glass surface of their phone playing the augmented reality game Pokemon Go (yes, people still do this). At the cinema people pay for their tickets through digital wireless transactions by waving a plastic card with a chip in it across an electronic device, at the supermarket they do the same using self-service check out machines.<\/p>\n

I realise that in some ways what I along with billions of others are witnessing is perhaps the start of what has become known as \u2018The Fourth Industrial Revolution\u2019, a cyber-physical age that fuses together technologies which blur the lines between digital and biological \u2013 human and machine.<\/p>\n

Machines put order into our lives, and we increasingly interact with them as time goes on. The future of industry, education, communication and governance will depend on how we interact and collect data from machines. But what or who orders the machines? How do you get them to \u2018talk to each other\u2019 and speak the same language? How do you extract data from them that is of value?<\/p>\n

At the moment there are no easy answers to these questions, but everything mentioned so far could be summed up as the ‘internet-of-things’. If you try to define this rather slippery term at face value it will likely prove difficult when communicating to the uninitiated. Like its predecessors \u2018virtual reality\u2019 or \u2018cyberspace\u2019, the internet-of-things has no strict definition, maybe because it\u2019s rather all-encompassing like the internet itself.<\/p>\n

Even people who work for companies that are building it or academics researching it will not be able to define it fully. But the internet-of-things appears ambiguous for a reason: it attempts to describe the ongoing process of the seamless integration of society with smart devices and digital technology. It\u2019s where cyberspace meets the \u2018real world\u2019, kind of.<\/p>\n

How about another term which is closely related to the internet-of-things? It\u2019s called \u2018cyber-physical\u2019. Dr Ken Pierce<\/a> and Prof John Fitzgerald<\/a> give a brief introduction in this video.<\/p>\n