It seems clear at this point that the future will involve large numbers of drones buzzing around. They will be taking video of the inside of a burning house to assess the situation here, delivering a package there. The priority, of course, is to perform all these tasks safely and efficiently.
Recently, the regulatory structure that was thought well on the way to creation was disrupted when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) cannot regulate drones. At the same time, the Senate took steps to create a regulatory regime. And, by the way, a drone crashed into a set during a Padres game at Petco Park in San Diego.
sUSA reported that the Nevada UAS Test Site and NASA trialed five traffic control systems at the Reno-Stead Test Range this week. Operational parameters, including parachute, initiated emergency supply deliveries and aerial survey operations were tested. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (the technical name for drones) were also flown outside the pilot’s line of sight using strategically placed visual observers and sophisticated command and control (VO and C2) communication, detect and avoid technologies.
Telcos Eat Their Own AI Cooking
Telecommunications companies have made moves to offer artificial intelligence (AI) to their subscribers. They are using AI internally as well, according to a survey from Infosys Technologies.
The firm queried 932 enterprises from 138 telecom service providers. The companies, according to Light Reading, are using AI in a number of ways: for machine learning (86 percent of respondents), to build applications to amplify and improve products and services (80 percent), to automate decision making (71 percent), to build chatbots (66 percent), for “completing cognitive AI-led process for tasks” (65 percent), and to automate predictive analytics (62 percent).
Several Skills Will Be Hot in the IIoT
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as the name implies, is the use of IoT techniques and technologies on factory floors and in other industrial settings. In many ways, this use has even more of an upside than the consumer version because factories and similar venues use so much power and other resources that reducing utilization by even a small percentage leads to huge savings.
The good news for the work force – which is under pressure from the growing use of robots – is that a good deal of expertise will be needed to run the IIoT, according to Network World:
A good way to envision all the skills that could be required to bring about an Industry 4.0 transformation is to think about IoT in the context of a highly-autonomous assembly line. It could include 3D printers and other additive manufacturing techniques running alongside computer numerical controlled (CNC) lathes and newer machines capable of executing highly variable, multi-step processes using robotic vision and artificial intelligence.
Writer Allen Bernard added collaborative robots (cobots) into the mix. The areas expected to generate the most jobs are related to cybersecurity, data science, networking, software engineering, application development and programming and IT architects.
Blending Risk Management into Strategic Planning
It’s obvious that risk management is an important and growing priority for organizations. The world is simply getting more dangerous. Alexei Sidoreko from the Institute for Strategic Risk Analysis in Decision Making, details four key steps in integrating risk management into strategic planning.
It is important, he writes, to translate high-level objectives into tactical and operational key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets. The second step is to identify factors linked to uncertainty. The third is the performance of a risk analysis and, finally, the essence of that risk analysis must be translated into action.
The piece goes into some depth about each of these steps. It is clearly a very complex undertaking that is growing increasingly important.
FCC to Look at MDU Broadband Contracts
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released a notice of inquiry (NOI) aimed at determining if exclusive arrangements entered into by owners of multiple dwelling units (MDUs) are anticompetitive. FierceTelecom says that the NOI will cover all types of broadband-delivered services.
MDU sales are considered very important for broadband providers simply because a single sale to a building owner can generate great amounts of revenue. In some cases, a realty company can award multiple buildings to a provider, which ups the ante even further.
Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at cweinsch@optonline.net and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.
