Making sense of sensors
August 12, 2005, 4:00 AM PT
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Accenture is watching you.
Somehow, that statement just doesn't ring with ominous, Big Brother
overtones. The consulting firm, however, is placing a big bet on
remote devices and sensors that will gather information on the
location, status and temperature of millions of objects in the world,
or of their surrounding environments. Though some say these systems
could corrode individual freedom, others believe they'll give people
and businesses important information they can't get now. Accenture
doesn't make the sensors; instead, it prowls the labs of other
companies and tries to come up with ways to weld disparate
technologies into a cohesive whole.
Accenture's Chief Scientist, Glover Ferguson, is in some ways the
head prowler. For the past few decades, he's worked at the company
trying to figure out what's next. Ferguson sat down with CNET
News.com to discuss RFID, the general state of privacy and what your
car radio is saying about you.
Q: Give us a quick run down on Accenture's lab.
Ferguson: It first got started when Accenture was still part of
Arthur Andersen & Co. We were about to get into the software business
in a big way, and the argument was that we can't be in the software
business and not have a lab. It's just illogical. So, the first site
was in Chicago. Why in God's name would you put a research lab in
Chicago? We actually had a headquarters there, and the thought was
that if we put the researchers anywhere else, it could be too easy to
forget that they existed.
It was the first organization to break the dress code. They said you
can't have researchers in suits, because no one will believe they're
actually researching anything.
What sort of projects do you tackle?
Ferguson: One of our charters is to construct a five-year moving
vision as to what we think is going to take hold, with the goal to
create a working prototype.
In 1997, we started looking at some early RFID chips. RFID is
actually a WWII era invention for identifying friendly aircraft. So,
they did commercialize it, but on very, very high-end assets. We
asked if you could drive it down to revolutionize supply chain. The
answer was yes, but it would have to wait on standards. When EPC
global got started, that started to shape up.
I think we still have a lot of discussions to get over before we get
comfortable with where this is going.
Anyway, the first prototypes tend to be done by research and tend to
be pretty quirky because they speak to as broad an audience as
possible. The first one in RFID was a talking medicine cabinet. The
first thing it does is recognize you; there's a little facial
recognition thing going. It's an entirely local application, so
you're not out there (on the Internet). It recognizes you and says,
"Good morning, the pollen count is pretty high today, you'd better
take your allergy medicine."
So, you reach in and grab a pill bottle and pull it out and that's
where the RFID is. It says, "That's not yours, that's the wrong
medicine," and you put that back, pull out another one and it says,
"That's the right one. Now take two of those." And the mirror--
instead of just being a mirror, it has a screen. All of these things
are now starting to be actually discussed commercially, but in '97 it
was "Oh, come on."
We showed it around and we got questions like, "So, Accenture is
going into the medicine cabinet business?" No, we said, "Look at the
capabilities this is demonstrating." One of our operating group said,
"You know, my client sort of gets it, but it'd be better if we could
particularize it for his business," His business was gas cylinders.
So, the next one we built was an RFID system to track the life cycle
of a gas cylinder: everything from filling to "do not fill this tank
with that gas," to knowing where the inventory was.
Industrial customers have flocked to RFID, but consumers still have a
lot of concerns about privacy.
Ferguson: Consumers are willing to sacrifice some of their privacy,
with two caveats. One, they get something for it. Two, they
understand what, exactly, they've given up. If you take the data and
do something else with it, you violated one of the rules. If you take
their data and don't give them anything for it, but just use it to
enhance your own profitability, they don't care for that either. But
after that, if you don't do those two things, it's not such an issue.
I think we still have a lot of discussions to get over before we get
comfortable with where this is going, and that's what you do in a
society to get the vote on these things. California will probably
start with laws that are too far to one side, but eventually we'll
end up with something we're all comfy with.
I used to be teased by my British colleagues about how sloppy
Americans are with their personal data on Web sites. "We in the U.K.
value our privacy. You Americans give it up all over the place. We
value our privacy so much we don't even have pictures on our driver's
license."
I took this for years, then one day I said, "Wait. London has more
CCD cameras per square inch than any other city in the galaxy. How
dare you talk to me about privacy!" They said, "That's different.
That's security." Where do you draw the line? Americans will give up
data if hey think they are going to get the convenience; sometimes
they do, sometimes they don't. In those days of the Irish troubles,
(people in the U.K.) craved a higher sense of security and they
permitted all these cameras to be put up.
There does seem to be a lot of passion when RFID comes up.
Ferguson: But it's funny. A lot of these discussions get very holy
and people pace back and forth and give their speeches, but they keep
stepping over this dead horse in the middle of the room. It turns out
that most of us are living some aspect of our life slightly outside
the law. Maybe I drive a little bit over the speed limit. There are
people who take aggressive positions on their taxes. There are lots
of people who do something that by the letter of the law is not
legal, and frankly, they don't want to get caught. We can turn this
into a very, very holy speech on privacy instead of discussing
whether maybe we shouldn't speed or maybe the speed limits should be
higher.
And in some cases it's just people not understanding, I hear a lot of
concerns about RFID where people worry about being scanned and
someone getting all their personal details. No, they will get a 91-
bit number. Now all they have to do is hack into 17 different
databases to find out anything about you.
People are afraid someone will drive by their house and scan
everything in it. No, if they had a scanner powerful enough to do
that, your fear should be being cooked in your own home.
When we get enough sensors planted out there in the world, what are
they going to do? A lot of people like Dust Networks and Crossbow are
employing them to reduce energy consumption in buildings.
Ferguson: We've described it as creating a virtual double. If I get
enough feeds from enough different directions, I can start to
construct virtual versions of every physical and real object on the
planet, and with those I will actually have more information and
control than I have if I confront the object itself.
So, for example, if you confront a printer, you can figure out right
away whether it has paper or toner and whether or not it's working.
But if you stayed at your desk, and there was a virtual double, you
could have had those two facts, plus you could see that some idiot
sent a 5,000 slide PowerPoint to that printer.
What other novel applications for this sort of thing do you see out
there?
Ferguson: One shopping mall has a billboard that's listening to the
leakage off FM antennas of the cars driving by. From that it can
determine what people are tuned to. Now, there is a privacy issue,
but I don't know who the hell they are. I just know that at this
moment in time, people who can see this billboard are listening to
Montovani or that people who can see this billboard are listening to
rap.
Where do you draw the line? Americans will give up data if they think
they are going to get the convenience.
The billboard then changes its message based on who's receiving the
message. Why would I try to sell ocean cruises to kids, or
skateboards to older people? The benefit to the driver is they
actually see something that's applicable to them. The benefit to the
advertiser is that they get their message to the right people. And
the guys selling the space can charge more because it is a
particularized message to a particularized segment.
Did you work on that project?
Ferguson: No, we didn't. The frustrating thing about a lot of the
stuff we work on is that we can't get clearances to talk about it.
How quickly will the sensor world evolve?
Ferguson: I think with this particular vision, we got out in front of
ourselves a little bit. We're still working out some of the physical
issues with RFID and reading through liquids and metals and things
like that. Aside from that, there is a missing underlying
infrastructure. We can put devices everywhere, but then you have to
be able to provision them, know when they're sick, know how to fix
them. You'll see lots of it within the next five years, but things
will only really take off, at least in their full flower, once you
can assume the infrastructure is there.
We have a vineyard up north and the idea is to optimize the output.
If we can report on the microclimate of a vineyard, we can start to
optimize how each portion of the vineyard is utilized. We can measure
sunlight, we can measure leaf moisture, soil moisture, temperature.
After the sensors started gathering data, I think they (the people
running the project) told me that something like two thirds of the
data coming in was these things saying, "I'm out of battery. I'm
broken. I've lost contact."
I recall being at an Accenture event five years ago and one of the
consultants showed me an experimental videoconferencing system, and
the consultant said that one of the problems they had is that people
in tests said they didn't like getting incoming video calls.
Ferguson: We have a much more casual system here. We have a video
tunnel set up (between Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif.), so researchers
can see each other walking by like they would in a hall. They'll stop
and just have a face-to-face conversation, so it's a different
paradigm. And of course we built a prototype for that, but when you
saw things, the cost of doing that would have been crazy.
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