(bright tinkling music) (funky rock music) (upbeat music) Hi, I'm Matt Watts and we're recording an episode of our "Watts the Future?" series. Yes, you can see what we did there. This one today is about IoT, or the Internet of Things. Now, a lot of people, when you think about the Internet of Things, are probably thinking about controlling the lights in your home, your thermostats, maybe even your fridge telling you that you've run out of milk, but the IoT is a much,bigger topic. But let's ask some people on the street what they think IoT is. (upbeat music) Question, what is IoT? I have no idea. (laughs) I'm the wrong person to be asking this question. The Internet of Things. Don't ask me to go into too much more detail. Internet of Things. What is the Internet of Things? So the Internet of Things is all about this idea of all devices being connected. Okay, yeah. So your smart devices in your home, kind of the transport network in London. It's this idea- Oh, that makes sense. -of everything being connected. (upbeat music) On the 24th of May, 2022, the first excited passengers boarded the first train that was leaving on the Elizabeth line, London's 18.7 billion pound project to create the new Crossrail service to link the east side to the west side of London. But while they were excited, none of those people were probably thinking about the data, the technology that had gone into not only constructing this incredible project, but to manage, operate, and run this project on a day-to-day basis. If you think back to the past, the trains of the past emitted smoke and fumes. The diesel trains emitted diesel fumes. Today's trains are giant sensors emitting vast quantities of data, and it's that data that we use on a day-to-day basis that helps us to monitor, to manage, and to keep these giant infrastructure projects alive and running on a daily basis. (upbeat music) I'm here to see Ashley Feldman, who's head of transport and smart cities programs and policies for the UK trade association, techUK. (upbeat music) 24th of May, the Elizabeth line opened, and most people wouldn't realize it, but that for me is a fantastic example of IoT coming to life. It's playing a really fundamental role and it's it is fascinating, 'cause it's one that when you're riding on the train, you just don't realize, you just don't think about really. I think the team there have installed something like 16 million digital parts, which is huge. There is a central point where they're able to receive data around various different things to do with performance, to do with CCTV, to do with voice activation. All these different things are kind of converging in a central spot. What that allows the team to do is to visualize, to analyze and make decisions based on the data that they're receiving in real time. And actually, what they're starting to build up is a kind of digital twin of the entire system. If you take maintenance, for one example, they can conduct maintenance on an asset when the data says that it needs maintenance or it needs an intervention. So that takes away the need for planned or predictive maintenance when it might not actually be entirely necessary. There's also a role here for AI and machine learning, 'cause what an AI can do very effectively is analyze all these data sets, sometimes very disparately. Then you get to a really sophisticated way ofthinking about how you look after and how you maintain your transport. What do we think the next kind of 12, 24, 36 months is gonna look like in this area? Thinking about EVs and your charge points, we're gonna need to install hundreds of thousands of charge points. Those will be IoT-enabled. They will be able to collect data, not just on their environment, but also potentially on the vehicles themselves. As I said, wearable IoT, data about our health and how we move around will also become enriched. So we're gonna see this continuing enriching of the data we have, but as I said to you before, it's really critical that we translate that into actual benefits or that we make decisions based on that and don't just collect it. You've really got to have a strong outcome that you want to achieve from having undertaken this process in the first place, but if you get that right, then there's no limit to the amount of improvements and upgrades that we can really start to deliver. (upbeat music) So you've heard from Ashley Feldman, who's talked about smart cities, digital twins, and IoT in general, but let's get a different perspective. How has IoT evolved maybe more significantly over the last few years? It's changed in that the progress of technology is relentless, and so we're seeing the cost of sensors and the cost of smarts and connectivity fall all the time, and so the obvious consequence of that is that everything is starting to have sensors and comms and connectivity built into it. So your question was how has it evolved in the last few years? It has evolved in that it's become more mainstream, more things have sensors in them, more things are broadcasting information, and it's becoming more and more ubiquitous. Transport in general has been a massive adopter of IoT. Sure. And you know, from your experience, where have you kind of seen this before? What are kind of some of the benefits if we think about IoT when it comes to transport? I was involved in the rollout of a sensor network for Trenitalia, for example, when I worked for SAP, and basically, they put sensors on and connected all of their high-speed rail network. All of their trains, all of their carriages. And these carriages can be giving off, they're gonna five or 6,000 sensors per carriage, giving off all kinds of information. And they were using it specifically, in the case of Trenitalia, they were using it for predictive maintenance such that they were moving away from having scheduled maintenance for the trains into a world of the trains kind of putting up their hands and going, "Okay, now it's time for me to have some maintenance, please." And of course, that saves huge amounts of money and at the same time, makes the trains safer and makes sure that they're far more likely to turn up on time, which is hugely important as well. We're already talking now about hitting the yottabyte problem as we get towards 2030, a trillion terabytes worth of data being created. If we're gathering those kind of quantities of data, how on earth are we gonna be looking and what sort of systems are we gonna have to have in place that are looking for those patterns that are kind of... It's one thing, having the data, It's something else learning and getting intelligence from that data. What's your thinking around that, Tom? Yeah, it is a huge problem, absolutely. I think what we need to have is we need to have intelligent systems with AI built into them monitoring the flow of data, because a lot of data is things like sensors, like say temperature sensors, and the temperature sensor is going, "20 degrees," and you don't need to worry about that as long as it's co continuously going, "20 degrees," or unless there's a reason it should go up and it doesn't or there's a reason it should stay the same and it goes up. It's the exceptions that you wanna be monitoring for, and particularly patterns and exceptions. When did this exception happen? What was happening around it when it happened? And so what happens is you have artificial agents monitoring this and not monitoring one sensor but monitoring 1,000 sensors or 100,000 sensors and then finding the exceptions that occur in those sensors and then sending an alert to the likes of you or I going, "Listen, Matt, that sensor over there has said there's something weird going on. You might wanna go and have a look." (upbeat music) So what's the future? Well, if we look towards 2025, we know there are gonna be 42 billion devices connected to this Internet of Things and we know that they're gonna be capable of generating up to 80 zetabytes of data, and it's what we do with that data that counts. It's gonna help us manage cities. It's gonna help us manage the transportation networks across our cities. It's gonna help us monitor for environmental challenges. It's gonna help our farmers work out what crops to plant, when to plant them, what the soil conditions are like. The impact on our future lives because of IoT, digital twins, and smart cities, it's almost hard for us to comprehend, but it's all predicated on our ability to use, manage, and exploit data and bring tools to that data such that we can learn from it. We can spot patterns, spot new ways of exploiting that information to enable us to do new things. If we can do that right, the future's not only bright, the future is incredible. (upbeat music)