Peggy Smedley Show

Peggy says we have some challenges to solve if the IoT (Internet of Things) can be as widely adopted as it could be. She talks about Operation Prowli and how it had been spreading malware and malicious code to servers and Websites. She also points to the example of Adidas, which announced that an unauthorized party may have gained access to certain customers' data. She adds that it is distressing to see the number of cyber attacks on the rise and that they are not going down. She concludes, explaining that we need highly secure systems to help protect infrastructure from physical security breaches.

Peggy says there are always delays in services because of an outdated infrastructure. She challenges listeners to force their politicians to take action and to finally invest in our future—now. Further, she addresses the challenge of the aging workforce and that the younger generation isn't showing an interest in construction, which makes it more difficult to rebuild roads, bridges, or a smarter infrastructure.

Peggy and Rick Splawinski, senior project manager, Nevada Dept. of Transportation, discuss surface transportation. He says aesthetics are important, but we can't have beautiful roads in America if we don't have roads at all. He adds our ability to maintain surface transportation is shrinking every year due to the rate of inflation. He explains that the problem is that Americans are not tuned in or engaged and we don't have the political courage. He adds that technology can really aid in helping pinpointing where the investment should be made because there is not enough money to go around.

Peggy says IoT (Internet of Things) solutions are allowing oil and gas pipeline operators to analyze flow and events in near-realtime. She explains IoT systems can integrate with other systems in the enterprise to improve efficiencies. She continues that oil theft is a multibillion-dollar problem, and remote monitoring can help tackle the issue. Drones can also pinpoint leaks, she says, which is a safer, more efficient, and more cost-effective method.

Peggy gives a glimpse into some famous infrastructure. She looks at the new World Trade Center in New York City, Crossrail in London, the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, the Grand Paris Express, and the Chicago Express Loop. She says there is an opportunity for the Internet of Things to drive revenues and new services to clients. She wraps up the show by giving a sneak peek into Elon Musk's plans to build an underground system of high-speed autonomous pods to link downtown Chicago to O'Hare airport.

Peggy chats with Steven Weitzman, president and CEO, Creative Design Resolutions, who says there is an opportunity for infrastructure to visually speak to the people in the community. He asks: Why can't infrastructure express the story of where you are? He adds that infrastructure will always need to be safe first, functional next, and then aesthetics can come in and that the company is bilingual—as it speaks both aesthetics and engineering.

Peggy avoids the political landmines, but highlights the controversy surrounding pipeline infrastructure. She says in 2017, the amount of energy produced was about 87.5 quadrillion BTU (British Thermal units). Also, the amount of energy produced in 2017 was equal to about 90% of the U.S.'s energy consumption. She explains that there has been a significant shift in the source-and-use balance, and this has turned the sector on its head. She says we can put the IoT (Internet of Things) to work to build pipeline infrastructure.

Peggy Smedley is joined by Josh Peschel, assistant professor of agriculture and Biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, who says there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to all of the problems geographically—there are too many variables. He explains that there is a bill, and it has to be paid. People are going to argue about how that has to be done, but ultimately it has to be paid

Peggy chats with Kristina Swallow, president, American Society of Civil Engineers, about our nation's infrastructure and its grade of a D+. Swallow explains that the ASCE sees three solutions that can help solve this: investment, leadership, and planning for the future. She says it has also identified that between now and 2025 in order to bring the grade to a B, it would require $4.6 trillion—and we are currently spending $2.6 trillion. She suggests public-private partnerships are one piece of the puzzle, but ultimately it is user fees.

Peggy kicks off a new month, looking at the topic of infrastructure. She says today many systems are not modern, as they don't leverage technology to maximize efficiency. IoT (Internet of Things) technology can help by catching breaks before they even occur. She also explains that sensor systems and predictive analytics need to be applied to manage and maintain our infrastructure.

Peggy Smedley is joined by Juan Pablo Segura, co-founder, Babyscripts, who talks about the demand that is being fueled on the patient side in healthcare. He explains that the company has created a new model for managing pregnancy care through IoT (Internet of Things) devices. He says it is focused on capturing data on patients in between appointments, while automating care.

Peggy chats with Dr. Moira Schieke, founder, Cubismi, who says the company is developing technology to tailor care for each patient, explaining that it will create a new technology to reorganize digital data. It will essentially be a Google Map of the human body and it will have higher quality datasets for the predictive analytics engine. She says it can detect diseases sooner with the help of big data.

Peggy asks: Do health apps really work? She explains that health apps in general aren't as effective as they could be, and there are just too many different people looking to self-manage their health and each of these individuals have unique needs. She adds that health apps have incredible potential, but only if patients can access them, figure out how to use them, and find the effort worth their while.

New IoT Drives Women Peggy Smedley is joined by Cami Zimmer, executive vice president of business development and marketing for Glympse, who talks about the changes that have happened in the IoT space and how it impacts those in tech—as well as others in other industries. She says she is inspired by the fact that nothing stays the same—what happens today might not be the solution for today—and that is what motivates her.

Peggy chats with Scott Moody, CEO, K4Connect, who says that we all want to live that independent, happy, and healthy life. He explains that his company helps people who are getting older to live the same way as when they were younger. He does this with three basic foundational ideas: simpler, healthier, and happier. A simpler life includes integrating home automation technologies such as home repair services. A healthier life involves wellness devices and care services such as a scale or blood pressure monitor. Finally, a happier life brings connectivity outside of the community such as video chat capabilities with family, being able to order meals, or to even call or message anyone else in the community through an app.

Peggy kicks off the episode, saying cyber-security is a big issue in healthcare and it seems to be getting worse. Today, cybercriminals continue to prove they are clever. She explains the most common problems are still user practice issues and outdated software. She continues that threats are preventable and we need to make sure end users are educated on how to protect themselves.

Show regular Robin Raskin, founder and president, Living In Digital Times, says products need a women's touch in order to survive, and we are seeing that all over the place. She explains that some of the older generation are uncomfortable with technology and they need a lot of features built in for comfort, which includes robots. Alexa is one example that is doing well with an aging population because it does one thing at a time, she suggests.

Peggy speaks with Dr. Jennifer Schneider, chief medical officer, Livongo, who says she is very blessed with an incredible family and she grew up with an older brother and younger brother and it never occurred to her that girls were any different from boys. She explains that technology is a way to propel is us forward, almost without knowing that it is working behind the scenes. Also, technology is only one of the tool sets for us that allows us to do more at a different pace and in a better fashion.

Peggy says there is a culture around the futuristic robotic movies and television, showing the impact of AI (artificial intelligence). She explains that AI could open the door for more accessible healthcare that relies on relevant accessible data. Going forward, technology can help reinvent the healthcare industry by helping humans automate repetitive tasks, which will also improve patient outcomes, she continues.

Show regular Josh Peschel, assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, talks with Peggy about inspiring the next generation of workers by informing them of the opportunities that might be available to them. He says we need to prepare people at a young age, and educate them well in college. After we educate somebody well, we also need to create opportunities and establish a network of success for long-term growth in the field that they chose.

Peggy is joined by Colleen Egan, director of people, culture, and endless possibilities for Clarity Partners, explains how she started as a nurse, and soon became involved in administration, but was discouraged by the lack of technology adoption in healthcare. She always knew that people were the most important part of companies. She discusses how women make up 57% of the workforce, but only 20% of the tech industry, and there has been a shift since she has started. There has always been a cultural definition of women's work, but girls need supportive parents and educators, and need people to get past the gender bias and these roadblocks. She says the most important thing for women starting out in their careers is to believe in themselves.

Peggy says connected devices can collect data about a person's health and monitor a person's activities, connecting older adults to other people. She explains that smart-home systems can make it easier for adults to age in place and are making home care possible. She continues that devices can keep an eye on vitals, which are life changing and we will see a shift in the next 12 months of what the means.

Peggy talks with author of The Leader Habit and CEO of Pinsight, Martin Lanik, who says he chose the word habit because most of our daily behavior is influenced by habit. He asks: What if leadership was a habit and how can you develop positive habits as a leader? He explains that microbehaviors turn into habits, and leadership should become as natural of making your bed in the morning or brushing your teeth. We know effective leaders delegate in an effective way, he continues.

Peggy chats with Amy Tabb, research agriculture engineer, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Services Laboratory, about creating automation in the tree fruit industry. Tabb explains that fruit trees produce more flowers than they need to produce a full crop and to have larger fruit, you have to thin. Sometimes this is done with chemicals and other times it is done manually. She says the biggest thing for grower today is to solve labor availability and create systems to sense tree structure. She hopes the field will soon see automated harvest equipment commercialized.

Peggy says agriculture and healthcare have some things in common—including the fact they both have a direct impact on global health. Peggy says accuracy is important in both, as medical errors can cost human life. She also explains that technology is being used to improve accuracy and reduce errors, and data analytics are also important in both fields.

Peggy talks with John Pletz, senior reporter, Crain's Chicago Business, who says agriculture in Illinois is going more high-tech—from the startups to the big players. He explains that it is undergoing quite a transformation and identifies some of the key players in agriculture, talking about sensors and the IoT (Internet of Things) on farming equipment. He adds that agriculture is a huge part of research at universities in the Midwest.

Peggy chats with James Schnable, assistant professor, Dept. of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who says the way he would measure anything about plants in the past would be to send students to the field. Now, this can be done in an automated fashion, which is a lot better than sending grad students out there, he explains. Having historical data from drones is going to be very valuable in the future, he continues, and the cost is very affordable. More advanced technologies, like robots, are more expensive and may not make sense yet.

Peggy says blockchain is a continuously growing list of linked, secured records called blocks that contain transactional data, and it can benefit agriculture in several ways including traceability and supply-chain visibility. She talks about the first agricultural commodity trade using a blockchain platform, explaining it was used to execute a soybean shipment transaction and that the blockchain prototype digitized the process and demonstrated significant efficiency improvements. She says there is good reason for everyone to be talking about blockchain, especially in agriculture.

Peggy recaps today's show and talk about how technology has come a long way and how it will allow the next-generation to make decisions, reduce labor, increase margins, and improve implementation of all vertical markets, helping the global economy.

Peggy chats with Karen Panetta, IEEE fellow and dean of graduate engineering education, Tufts University, who says IoT technology is instrumental in the agriculture field throughout the entire lifecycle. Technology such as machine learning and AI makes farmers smarter and gives them insight they have not had access to in the past. Karen also talks about women in the STEM program and her NerdGirls program, which trains women how to be successful in the tech industry, despite challenges.

Peggy says that as a society we need to find a way to produce more food. IoT (Internet of Things) technology is playing a huge role in farming and will help us meet the current challenge of food production. She talks about AI (artificial intelligence) growth in the agriculture space, how machine learning is being used to improve crop yield and quality, and how robots can perform tasks that farmers have had to do by hand for years.

Peggy shares the story of Felix Musau, who decided to combine the accessibility of mobile phones and the power of the cloud to develop Agin. Peggy explains it helps rural farmers collect data around their farms with mobile phones. She says Felix isn't just creating a solution to help solve business problems—he is creating a solution that is going to help solve hunger and poverty. She encourages other young innovators to leverage technology to solve global issues.

Peggy says achieving an increase in food production is challenging for a number of reasons including receding water levels, climate change, and a shrinking amount of land. She explains that in general data-driven techniques can help boost agriculture productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses, and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen low adoption because of the high costs of manual data collection and limited connectivity. She says Microsoft FarmBeats can help, as it enables data collection from various sensor types and it leverages recent work in unlicensed TV white spaces.

Peggy says Microsoft has a unique focus on precision agriculture and edge intelligence solutions—and it also has a commitment to sustainability. She explains that there is a current challenge of water scarcity, with ag using 70% of the world's available fresh water. She points to the example of a farmer in New Zealand who uses an industrial IoT solution to monitor and manage his farm's irrigation system. She explains the IoT can help solve a global issue—and we need to rethink how we manage water conservation and more.

Peggy chats with Joshua Peschel, assistant professor of agriculture and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, who says digital agriculture is the injection of tools and technologies that will optimize and advance actual on-farm production and the decision making behind that. With that, cows and corn are no longer the only commodities that come off the farm—data also comes off the farm. He says the software and data being collected are some of the most important things today. iastate.edu

Peggy welcomes Sam Eathington, chief science officer of Monsanto and The Climate Corp., to the show. He says today farming is all about data and how you take that data and turn it into an actionable insight. Having grown up on a farm, he says there is lots of different data, but it is hard to use that data. One of the challenges growing up on the farm is every field is different. He explains that quality information is essential and then you need to know how to put it all together. https://climate.com/

Peggy says tech investment in agriculture isn't new, but there are still adoption hurdles that need to be ironed out. During the last few years in particular, discussions about climate change have really put pressure on the agriculture space to find ways to better monitor their use of resources. She talks about sensors, remote monitoring, and irrigation systems and points to an example of how sensing systems are being used to control water quality on fish farms.

Peggy chats with Phil Renaud, executive director, The Risk Institute, Ohio State University, who says 90% of drivers in the 19-24-year-old bracket agree they have sped, run a red light, or texted while driving. He adds that how roads are designed can have a significant dent here. For instance, towns in Ohio are putting more roundabouts that move traffic around and slows traffic down to make people pay attention to the task of driving. He also explains landscaping can force people to slow down and pay attention.

Peggy interviews Kathy Lane, senior director of PR, National Safety Council, who says Distracted Driving Awareness Month started almost 10 years ago, as car crashes are one of the leading causes of accidents and distracted driving was increasingly becoming an area of focus. She says it works closely with employers because that is where a lot of fatalities happen. Another area of focus is parents because teens are still practicing bad behaviors, she explains. Since we are always connected, 45% of drivers feel pressure from employers to check their emails when driving, for example. She says there is unknowing pressure to immediately respond so one of the messages NSC is sharing is to talk to friends and families and employees that it can wait.

Peggy is joined by Joel Feldman, president, Casey Feldman Foundation, and founder of EndDD.org, who shares his story and distracted driving initiatives. He asks: What is driving? Is it a task to take us from one place to another or an opportunity to do business? He says there has got to be a way to keep each and every one of us from having to suffer a tragedy before we change our behavior. He suggests that if we are going to change this, we have to start with the kids.

Peggy interviews Paul Lucier, vice president of business development, ISARA, who says there are two sides: the potential/positive disruption and the dark side of quantum computing, as it is able to break encryption. He explains there is a great concern about the amount of investment being made by the Chinese and quantum is a race that we can't afford to lose. He says there are a couple of approaches to solve some of the challenges including: post quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. He talks about the raging debate about what size quantum computing is needed.

Can quantum computing help solve the Moore's Law Problem? Peggy is joined by Helmut Katzgraber, professor, Texas A&M University, who says his main focus of research lies at the interface of physics, quantum computing, and high-performance computing. He says we aren't going to solve the issue with Moore's Law anytime soon, but there will be some instances where quantum computing will offer a huge boost. He says at the moment the quality of qubits is very rudimentary, and we still have a ways to go, but there is no doubt that quantum computing will be a disruptive technology.

Peggy chats with Technology and Business Consultant Craig Brown, who says quantum computing looks at data and slices it into pieces and comes up with options, and when talking about autonomous cars, decisions need to be made simultaneously. He explains that quantum computing is currently being used in machine learning and to improve the quality of cyber-security, but the applications that are involved aren't on the same level when we start talking about autonomous vehicles.

Peggy interviews Siraj Shaikh, professor of systems security, Coventry University, who says what is promising about autonomous vehicles is there are some great visions by industry leaders. He thinks of autonomous cars as smart companions that we work with and at different times of a journey they take over so we can be more productive. He explains in terms of safety and security we need to take that very seriously, saying we need to pay attention to this because there are people who will abuse this. To put things in perspective, the market for autonomous driving applications is much higher and the winner in this scenario would be industry and companies that prioritize safety and security.

Peggy says cyber-criminals are getting more and more creative. She explains the era of quantum computing could disrupt this. Quantum computers are expected to improve the way we solve certain types of problems, she says, with the key difference being the way information is stored. She continues that quantum computing could play a role in security, as messages can be encrypted in a way that can't be read by anyone except the intended recipient

Peggy chats with Robin Raskin, founder and president, Living In Digital Times, who says 81% of car crashes are the result of human error, whether you are a sleepy, sneezing, or coughing, and hopefully computers can help. She explains by 2020 we will see some scenarios of small tests of self-driving cars. She says hopefully when computers are driving, we will have less deaths, but now we are putting the potential for errors on computers.

Peggy interviews Florian Neukart, principal scientist, Volkswagen, who says quantum computing is an approach that leverages quantum bits. He says in five to 10 years, we will see systems that can solve problems that we can't solve now. We hope that quantum computers can help us, he explains. When you consider self-driving vehicles, technology can help optimize the traffic flow, but it is also a very complex problem, he says, and with a classical computer, it is not possible.

Peggy says a too many people are losing their loved ones to motorists that are driving distracted. She quotes more distracted driving numbers and talks about this deadly epidemic. She discusses an impaired driving, and a drugged-driving suit from Ford, saying it has vision-impairment glasses that produce blurred vision, flashing lights, and cause tunnel vision. She wants to see what technology can do to take the educational movement even further.

Peggy welcomes back show regular Joshua Peschel, assistant professor, Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University, to discuss the alleged misuse of Facebook data to influence public opinion. He explains that Facebook got outfoxed and outsmarted because it didn't believe someone could come in and do what they did—it was just a loophole that got exploited. He says with professions like civil engineering or construction engineering, there are standards for ethics, but when you get into data sciences, there isn't the same code of ethics, but assures there are a lot of people talking about ethics for data sciences now.

Peggy is joined by Dan Mathers, president and CEO, eleven-x, to talk about autonomous driving and smart parking, as he explains there are a lot of different ways to do smart parking. He says with the advent of autonomous driving, it is going to be a while before things are converted over, and in a mixed mode environment, not all cars are going to have the sensors to figure out where the parking is. He says smart parking is only one of the smart city applications, but the reason why it captures everyone's imagination is because we have all been there. He points to a pilot at the University of British Columbia that is monitoring handicapped spots, and other cities are looking to that example to help solve parking issues. He talks about the LoRaWAN network and how eleven-x built a coast-to-coast network to do smart city water monitoring implementation.