A Cognitive

approach to
Internet of Things.
S U S H A N T H PAT WA R I - S X P 0 0 6 3
L E T S C O N N E C T E V E RY T H I N G
W H E N W I R E L E SS I S P E R F E C T LY A P P L I E D T H E W H O L E E A R T H W I L L B E C O N V E R T E D I N T O
A H U G E B R A I N , W H I C H I N FA C T I T I S , A L L T H I N G S B E I N G PA R T I C L E S O F A R E A L A N D
RHYTHMIC WHOLE...AND THE INSTRUMENTS THROUGH WHICH WE SHALL BE ABLE TO
D O T H I S W I L L B E A M A Z I N G LY S I M P L E C O M PA R E D W I T H O U R P R E S E N T T E L E P H O N E . A
M A N W I L L B E A B L E T O C A R R Y O N E I N H I S V E S T P O C K E T. N I KO L A T E S L A

Before we begin
During one of the classes professor mentioned how when he was a visiting computer
scientist at the computer laboratory in Cambridge, England, he would go visit Kings College
Chapel almost every afternoon to view Peter Paul RubenssAdoration of the Magion display
at the altar. And each timehe never failed to experience a strong emotion of some kind.
I felt the same kind of strong emotion when I first heard what IoT was all about. This emotion
influenced me to take it up as a prospective career choice ( sure have a long way to go
though).
Professor also shared his experience of how Herbert Simons TheSciences of the Artificial
offered his first glimpse of a possible resolution to his long-standing conundrum of difference
between sciences and engineering. The exact lines are creation of artifacts entails a kind of
reasoning and thinking that goes well beyond the thinking in the natural sciences that the
artificial world contains its own distinctive logic was a revelation. These lines perfectly
describe what engineering is, we engineers touch life and I will say that as our creative super
need. To touch life.

Producer-artifact-consumer
Applying this triad to internet of things can be quite complex as IoT can be
considered as a hybrid artifact.
Kevin Ashton is credited for inventing the term the internet of things to
describe a system where the internet is connected to the physical world via
sensors.
Ashton was born inBirmingham, UK. He was working as an assistant brand
manager atProcter & Gamble(P&G) in 1997 when he became interested in
using RFID to help manage P&G'ssupply chain. This work led him to MIT,
where he helped start an RFID research consortium called the Auto-ID Center
with professorsSanjay Sarmaand Sunny Siu and researcher David Brock. The
center opened in 1999 as an industry sponsored research project with the
goal of creating a global open standard system to put RFID everywhere.
This is what I like to call the cognitive domino effect and this can be seen
most prominently in consumer driven industry.

Producer-artifact-consumer
The artifact here is the Idea. The Idea that everything can be connected. The
areas of life IoT is touching is just growing day by day.
I mentioned IoT as a hybrid artifact in the previous slide what I meant was
when you look at IoT you can see that there are so many technologies
involved, so many protocols and on top of that there are so many
manufacturers constantly trying to get the consumers attention.

Cognitive identity
Any idea comes down to one thing, its acceptance by the end user. The
consumer decides if the idea was really worth.
This thing is what made IoT so popular and widely accepted. The consumers
were able to identify the idea as something which would make their lives
more easier and highly efficient. Many consumers dont even care the effort
taken up to develop the idea all they look for is if it is doing something which
has never been done before, a uniqueness.
The consumers were introduced to a combination of products and
technologies which they never thought could exist together and this
fascinated them. We can say that the there was a strong emotional and
aesthetic response as IoT touched every part of their life.

Creative encounter
If the response effects a significant change to the consumers cognitive
identity then we will say that a creative encounter has occurred between the
producer and consumer- lines from the text.
As early as in 1982 a coke machine at Carnegie Mellon university became
the first internet-connected appliance. It was able to report its inventory and
whether newly loaded drinks were cool or not. There were several papers and
discussions after that mainly on using wireless internet for connecting
devices. The significant development happened when Kevin Ashton
established his Auto-ID lab at MIT and started working on RFID.
This is where the consumers and producers had a creative encounter. If all
equipment in daily life would be equipped with identifiers, computers could
manage and inventory them. There was a change in consumers creative
identity, earlier they would see inventory as a time taking painful job but now
it was cool, just stick a RFID and just scan it voila you have the a entry into
the inventory.

Cognitive style
As IoT was developed by using a bunch of existing technologies we cannot attach a
particular unique style to it. The idea is being utilized by a number of companies trying to
fascinate a consumer with their own unique style. This may be considered as that
companies cognitive style.
Let us compare two existing home automation systems.
1) Belkin WeMo Protocols supported Wifi, zigbee, no web based control console, no
voicecontrol, no touch screen, in app push notification for alerts, price- $40- $130
2) Honeywell Total connect remote services- Z wave, Honeywell 5800, web based control
console available, optional voice control, Email and sms alert system, touch screen
available, price- $300 - $550.
)Each product is appealing to same set of consumers but they have different cognitive
styles. By cognitive style here I mean the balance they had to achieve between different
technologies to implement the product. This also explains originality.

Aesthetics
Aesthetics play a major role in acceptance of a product by consumers. Most
of the consumers responsive sensibility is limited to appearance.
Design and appearance has become a major part of manufacturing these
days and this is no different IoT products.

Paradigm shift
A creative process is a historical phenomenon.
It is always a work in progress, there is always room for something more.
IoT was built on existing technologies. The existing technologies made it
possible for the producers to use that knowledge space and build something
original, something unique out of them. It just proves that you always need
that one creative spark to look at a different way of utilizing the existing thing
and you will have a new idea which was possible only because those things
had a historical existence.
IoT established a new paradigm, the area of connected devices was like a
empty canvas and the idea was like a art masterpiece appreciated and
accepted by the masses.
While researching about this topic I stumbled upon a new concept which I
would like can act as a paradigm shift in IoT

Continued..
The new paradigm I am talking is cognitive internet of things* .
Current research on IoT mainly focuses on how to enable objects to sense the
environment around them for themselves and make them connected to share the
observations.
How about general objects have the capability of learn, think, and understand physical
and social worlds by themselves? How about each appliance has its own brain?
This would a new paradigm in the world of IoT
Application scenario: This is really cool.

*Cognitive Internet of Things: A New Paradigm beyond Connection Qihui Wu, Senior Member, IEEE, Guoru Ding, Student Member, IEEE, Yuhua Xu, Student Member,
IEEE, Shuo Feng, Zhiyong Du, Jinlong Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Keping Long, Senior Member, IEEE

Questions, queries, suggestions,

critical comments, expert
judgment.
All the above mentioned things are welcome.