Peggy Smedley Show

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.

Peggy says more than 1.25 million people lives are cut short every single year because of a road traffic accident. She explains there are many reasons people end up in accidents, but one of the most preventable reasons is distracted driving. She asks: What exactly can we do about this problem? The same technology that creates value for us in business isn't doing us any favors when used during a task like driving that requires our full attention, she explains. She dives into the conversation of autonomous driving and if it will help solve the problem.

In advance of Distracted Driving Awareness Month, Peggy interviews Phil Renaud, executive director for The Risk Institute at Ohio State University, who says distracted driving is a behavioral challenge. Research shows that people believe they are good drivers, and therefore believe it is OK to look down at their phones. He says recent research shows the worst group of drivers is between 19 and 24, addressing the reasons why these drivers tend to justify the behavior.

Peggy is joined by Weisong Shi, professor of Computer Science, Director of the Mobile and Internet Systems Laboratory, Cyber Physical Systems Program at Wayne State University. He says cloud computing was introduced around 2005 and is widely recognized today. However, in the last few years, because of the Internet of Things, there is a huge amount of data being generated at the edge of the network, and some people are looking at how to process this huge amount of data. He adds that the cloud providers are trying to move services as close as possible to the end users.

Peggy introduces the topic of quantum computers, as it relates to the cloud. She says quantum computers can perform complex molecular modeling that we can't perform today due to computational limitations. A quantum computer can process all possible solutions at once to come to an answer. She ties it into the cloud, saying cloud-based quantum computing is being pioneered by many large companies and also startups. The cloud can provide access to quantum processing.

Show regular and technology and business consultant Craig Brown returns to the show. He and Peggy talk about harnessing the power of computing to make sure all the devices and people can talk seamlessly in realtime. He points to the example of the connected car, and that there can't be any lag in latency—that all needs to be eliminated.

Peggy is joined by Glenn Lurie, CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Synchronoss Technologies, who talks about his new role. He explains his search for a company with a sound reputation and a product set was met with Synchronoss Technologies since it has been involved in digital and IoT for many years. He talks about the foundation of the company as a digital company, which includes everything from activation, messaging, and monetization. The company is also very heavy in the personal cloud experience. He says without question the industry is shifting, and that we are already in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution.

Peggy says in 2016 manufacturing contributed an estimated $178 billion to the worldwide IoT (Internet of Things) spending, while the second highest, transportation, contributed $78 billion. She explains that cloud computing and fog computing are quickly becoming a key part of the industrial IoT equation. Today's edge devices are capable of packing more compute, storage, and analytic power, she says.

Marjorie Mauldin, author of "Feedback Revolution", and founder and president of Executive Forum, chats with Peggy about helping leaders and teams give successful and effective feedback, which improves employee productivity and morale. She explains Millennials have always been supported and they have always had a seat at the table. They think they are part of the team from the get-go and you really need to treat them as part of the team.

Ketan Bhardwaj, research scientist II, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, joins Peggy to talk about the model of edge computing. He says the edge is a very different environment. His explains this edge becomes the edge of the wireless network and says edge will change the dynamic of how you deploy services and the way networks operate. He explains there will be a complete shift where info resides and where it is sent to.

Peggy takes a deeper dive into edge computing, pointing to three of the reasons why more companies are turning to the fog: latency, network bandwidth, and cost effectiveness. The top three industries looking to adopt fog solutions include manufacturing and factories, smart cities, and transportation. She explains that many organizations are working toward advancing fog computing by addressing some of the hurdles.

Joshua Peschel, assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, joins Peggy once again to talk about the cloud, fog, and mist. He explains that mist gives us strength in numbers—and it takes us out as far as you can possibly go. The win is you can deal with a lot of the low data rates and low-power consumption needs. It is really important for agriculture systems and studying climate dynamics in Alaska, for example, he says.

Peggy is joined in the studio by Michael Morton, chief technology officer, Dell Boomi. He explains how everyone wants to talk about the device and device data, but the one thing "we" have learned is to stop talking about technology. Everyone is anxious to be the geek, but we should have the conversation about the business value achieved from the data coming from devices. He says it is incredible how IT-driven construction companies are becoming, as one example. Morton says it needs to be non-invasive on a person, explaining there will be gateways on a job site. He adds there are so many pieces that come together and it is one of the challenges for businesses to put all of these pieces together.

Edge computing results in faster response time and more optimal use of the network, says Peggy. In conjunction, 5G is set to grow exponentially. Autonomous vehicles will have a big influence that are going to benefit from the intersection of 5G and fog computing trends. She explains that the users' experiences need to be consistent no matter what their connection are like. She sums it up that 5G will need to work hand-in-hand with fog computing.

Are Millennials the key to advancing smart cities? John Pletz, senior reporter, Crain's Chicago Business, joins Peggy to talk about how this generation is shifting what is happening in city centers. He explains that smart cities need to incorporate data to account for the shift that is current happening—and they need the data to help make better decisions.

Peggy and Chuck Byers, principal engineer and platform architect, Cisco, discuss interoperability and he questions how we are going to achieve interoperability if there are 900 different platforms. Interoperability—and security—are big challenges that face the industry. He believes quantum computing is a threat to IoT (Internet of Things) security, but the arms race is going to be won by the good guys. At the same time, having one player in the market is an impossible task, as no one can do everything, he explains. When discussing bringing companies into the OpenFog Consortium, he says the big Web-scale companies have been invited to join, but politely refuse. Byers speculates that it is because the companies believe they have the power to influence the industry all by themselves and they are smart because they know where the share owners want them to go, but it might not be best for the industry.

The sensor market is growing rapidly in part because sensor technology has advanced to the point where sensors consume less power and battery life is significantly longer. For these reasons and others, sensors are playing an important role in advancing smart cities. Peggy discusses how sensors that are built in to all kinds of devices and structures have the ability to improve lives and businesses, enhance safety and security, and make processes more efficient.

Technology and business consultant Craig Brown chats with Peggy about inter-operability and the need for data to be shared in the places where it is authorized to be shared. He says there are a lot of buzzwords around the technology, but there are no standards. It is coming, but it is not here yet. Eventually, all of these capabilities will come together and ultimately they will work, as all of our past technological advances have done, he explains.

Harald Haas, professor, chair of mobile communications, University of Edinburgh, joins Peggy to talk about Li-Fi. His says we are moving into the fourth industrial revolution, and we will see environments that are enriched with hundreds of thousands of sensors, and we need a transmission system to send the data to a central processor and into a brain, which would be the cloud that would get all the information. In his view, we need to build a nervous system between the sensors and the brain. With Li-Fi, we have a very strong solution to enable a huge data pipe that is free and unregulated in order to build that nervous system, he explains.

Peggy introduces Li-Fi to listeners, explaining the technology. She says PureLiFi has already come to market with a couple of products that leverage Li-Fi technology and can be installed alongside existing lighting infrastructures. With the market expected to reach $75.5 billion by 2023, there are a number of opportunities from industrial settings to public places in smart cities. She continues that if we give innovators a way, they will innovate beyond our expectations every time, but cautions that these devices have to talk to each other.

Robin Raskin, founder and president, Living In Digital Times, joins Peggy Smedley to talk about the smart home. She says door locks, cameras, and thermostats work well, but what doesn't work well is the inter-operability. She continues that if technology companies make it too difficult no one is going to buy it. What we are missing is the infrastructure to make all of this easier, she explains.

Science is the foundation for inter-operability and smart communities. Peggy Smedley chats with Ken Calvert, division director for the computer and information science division of the computer and network systems, and Erwin Gianchandani, deputy assistant director for computer and information science and engineering, National Science Foundation, about smart communities. Calvert says it provides 83% of the federal funding that goes to academic research for life science, and it encourages researchers to connect with and collaborate with communities so they can get input of stakeholders of the communities. Gianchandani adds that the National Science Foundation is very intentional and it understands the cities and communities are on the front lines and trying to address challenges.

Peggy Smedley identifies hurdles and milestones for EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), explaining we still have a ways to go in what compliance really means—and the May deadline is just around the corner. She says uncertainty can be very costly and too many businesses remain unprepared and they will pay big time for it.

Joshua Peschel, assistant professor of agriculture and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, says interoperability has been a problem for a while, and we have started addressing with standards, but as systems grow complex, it is still going to be a persistent, lingering issue. He says we all have a better job to do with interoperability. More specifically, there is a smart-cities paradox because of security silos that exist today, and this doesn't currently exist in agriculture, according to Peschel.

Peggy Smedley continues the interoperability and smart cities discussion and welcomes guest Mahesh Veerina, president and CEO, Cloudleaf. They discuss how bad guys are trying to hack the infrastructure and how interoperability is critical to help this. Veerina says by the time you collect data and process data, there is already historical data—and interoperability is important to help with this. The cloud plays a big role in helping enable this interoperability. Veerina explains that one of the things that is helping is the convergence of sensors becoming so cheap and the cloud coming at the right time, along with machine learning and big data.