Top 20 IOT influencers

It is often said, people do not buy product or services, but they do buy relations, stories and magic. That’s where the storytellers and influencers come in. Whenever something new, disruptive gets launched, there is always a bit of skepticism which hovers around it. Influencers are the frontrunners who lead the people’s imagination and curate their curiosity and do what they do the best – influence them.

“To be an influencer, you have to love people before you can try to lead them.” – John C. Maxwell

Stacey Higginbotham: A former writer for GigaOm and Fortune, Stacey is the founder of The Internet of Things Podcast, manages a weekly IoT newsletter and writes for The Wirecutter and PC Mag.She is one of the most prominent writers to look for irrespective of beginner or expert in the domain.

Jenny Fielding: 

Jenny leads both the FinTech and Internet of Things accelerators. She is a keen investor and has been one of the most sought-after speaker in IoT domain.

Daniel Herscovici: Daniel is a general manager and senior vice president of Xfinity Home, Comcast's highly successful Smart Home platform which provides subscribers with a simplified yet elegant user experience.

Kristine Faulkner:  

She is at the helm at leading Cox's Smart Home efforts and contributes to the growth of the growth of that business unit. She is a leader to follow as curated solutions begin to drive mass-consumer adoption. She is also one of the leading speakers in the tech conferences.

Elizabeth Mathes: She leads the IoT division of Home Depot. She's helped creating one of the most fascinating consumer offerings for smart home products and is helping raise awareness in the consumer markets.

Scott Harkins: 

Scott Harkins is Vice President of Partner Development within Honeywell's Connected Home & Building organizations. He is behind the success for Honeywell's home security channel and to make Honeywell as the security leader in IoT.

Sarah Cooper: She is one of the frontrunner to Amazon's remarkable growth and success in IoT as GM of IoT solutions at Amazon Web Services. She is also at the helm of Vice-chair of the IoT Community.

Beth Comstock:

Beth Comstock has garnered her reputation in the Tech industry. She is responsible for GE's efforts to accelerate new growth, and she will lead the IoT initiative of GE from the front.

Jim Hunter: 

Jim is the Chief Scientist and Technology Evangelist of Greenwave Systems, where he has oversight of technology, architecture, and innovation of the Axon platform. Jim has been a successful entrepreneur.

Matt Eyring: 

Matt is a one of the phenomenal speaker to follow in IoT. He has impressively helped Vivint shift as a leader in smart home security in the dealer channel. He has got his reputation for challenging the established status quo and trying to innovate.

Charlie Kindel: 

Kindel is the man behind the The Amazon Echo and Alexa voice assistant which were the first massive consumer hits in the Smart Home. By focusing on voice as the user interface, Kindel and Amazon have redefined how consumers engage their everyday lives.

Andrew Thomas: 

Andrew pegged the deal and led from the forefront the SkyBell's $600,000 Indiegogo campaign in 2013, and has helped scale SkyBell by landing significant deals with big companies in the space. Andrew is an active IoT speaker, social influencer, and advisor.

Greg Kahn: 

Greg Kahn is known for his smart and analytical mindset, his continuing and everlasting enthusiasm and activity in the IoT community. In his role as president and CEO of the Internet of Things Consortium he has been leading the growth of IoT community from the front.

Nate Williams:

He was CMO of 4Home, and was CRO at August Home. Nate is an active speaker, investor and advisor in IoT, where he advises and takes active part in investments in Roost, Matterport and Datascience.

Sridhar Solur:

He is driving innovation and product strategy for the Xfinity Home business for Comcast. He is known for his fascinating and mesmerizing speech and tremendous knowledge in IoT.

Michael Wolf:

He is the founder and chief analyst of NextMarket Insights, and host of the Smart Home Show - a top podcast in IoT.

Rob Martens: 

He is currently serving as Schlage's Futurist and Vice President of Strategy & Partnerships. Rob is known for curating interesting and relevant content on IoT and shares his vision on stages.

Marwan Fawaz:

Marwan is CEO of Nest Labs and has taken the responsibility to take the company back to its previous reputation as a top inventor and innovator of smart products and services.

Mark Spates:

Mark is the apple’s eye for IoT innovation. He is currently leading the product development part of Google. He is the founder of Iotlist.co and formerly the Head of Connected Home Platform at Logitech.

Brenna Berman: 

Chicago has made its mark in the history again for this lady. As acting Chief Information Officer of Chicago, Brenna is leading the city from the front to make it the example of IoT smart city in the world.

Artificial Intelligence: Human-Like Behavior For Theatrics Or Solving Real Business Problems?

Quick quiz: what do you visualize when you hear the word robot? Some machine in human form, behaving like a human? Or perhaps one of the massive, spiderlike machines that assemble complex products ranging from automobiles to computers?

In reality, modern robotics follows both paths. However, in spite of the progress with humanlike robots, most business applications of the technology focus on machine forms that are specific to the task at hand, whether it be a Mars Rover or a medical robot assisting a surgeon.

There are exceptions to this rule, however: companies who focus on making robots as humanlike as possible, with the eventual goal of behavior so realistic it can actually fool people into thinking the machine is fully human.

To achieve such levels of verisimilitude, such robots must have sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) built in. For example, take Sophia, the creation of Hanson Robotics that Saudi Arabia recently granted citizenship to, in a lavish publicity stunt.

Sophia has the ability to carry on limited conversations, requiring AI-driven natural language processing. ‘She’ can also recognize faces and respond to interactions emotionally, both via tone of voice as well as through a complex set of facial expressions – all technologies that depend upon AI.

In many ways, however, Sophia is less about AI and more about theatrics. ‘Her’ creators have combined AI, robotics, and elements of show business to prove that a fake person can be sufficiently realistic to be appealing rather than repulsive.
Not In Our Digital House

What they have not accomplished – and in fact, aren’t attempting to accomplish – is to create AI that can simulate human behavior in a way that solves true business problems.





Sophia the Robot at Web Summit 2017STEPHEN MCCARTHY/WEB SUMMIT.

What Do We Really Want from Human-Like AI?

In spite of decades of Hollywood influence, the real money in robotics today is in the massive armlike devices from industry. No witty banter, no subtle smiles here – instead, these machines focus on the tasks at hand.

When we talk about AI, however, we’re on shakier ground, as most of today’s applications of AI in business are not particularly humanlike. True, we have voice interactions like Siri, image recognition, and machine learning-driven predictions based upon crunching massive quantities of data – but if you think about it, these capabilities are only vaguely humanlike at best.

On the other hand, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – that is, true humanlike reasoning ability – is still well out of reach today. In the absence of AGI, then, what are the most advanced AI capabilities we can currently bring to bear to solve real business problems?

I recently spoke with Donald Thompson, Founder and CTO of AI-driven knowledge platform vendor Maana, to get his take on this question. “Maana supports decision making, reasoning, and answering questions,” Thompson explained. “We construct models that represent human expertise and combine them with data models in the context of optimizing a decision flow or equipment like an oil well.”

Where Sophia is able to mimic human expressions and conversations, Maana’s ability to mimic – or perhaps duplicate – human expertise provides the business value context that Sophia’s theatrics cannot.

The essence of Maana’s technology is what Thompson calls ‘digital knowledge.’ “Digital knowledge consists of models of the domain of business artifacts with the business goal in mind. These models digitize decision flows, and provide recommendations that help experts in the organization make better and faster decisions,” he explained.

The business artifacts in question could represent a wide variety of different types of information, from PDF documents to spreadsheets to emails to sensor data to information bottled up in various applications. From these artifacts, Maana is able to create data models, as well as computational models that mathematically model the human knowledge of a specific business process.

Given the rather philosophical questions about the nature of human knowledge, Maana puts a fine point on this conundrum. “We phrase every knowledge model as an answer to a business question,” Thompson said. “These are higher order questions, for example, ‘given the pump failure in a particular oil well, what are other oil wells with similar pumps?’”

The choice of oil wells in this example is no accident: Maana has found traction in the petroleum industry, listing companies such as Chevron CVX +0.66% Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell , and Saudi Aramco as customers as well as investors.

The reason that the oil business has taken to Maana’s AI-driven decision-making capability is due to the combination of the industry’s massive big data sets with its ability to distil its business goals into easily digested statements.

Thompson clarified the types of goals Maana’s technology targets. “The goals include minimization (for example, risks or costs) or maximization (for example, profits),” he said. “For example, given this list of constraints, what risks should we mitigate?”

In fact, Maana’s ability to interpret constraints gives the technology a leg up on modeling human expertise, as such expertise often boils down to dealing with constraints on a day-to-day basis.

For example, a person may know how to accomplish a goal, but also must know about all the various exceptions that might occur and how to deal with them. Such exceptions are a type of constraint.

Knowledge modeling in order to achieve certain goals can be thought of as decision support. “By decision support we mean that the technology can observe a particular domain, reason about the domain, justify and explain its reasoning, and then allow the user to hypothesize about different courses of action.”

The latter point is especially important: the technology does not generally make business decisions itself, but rather supports human decision making – in part by empowering people to simulate the results of different actions they may take.

Such decision support requires a mix of technical capabilities. “It’s a combination of natural language processing, constraint satisfaction, and simulation,” Thompson explained. “Maana adds constraint satisfaction and Bayesian probabilistic inference.”

The result is human-like reasoning, as different from simpler forms of AI like machine learning as the auto assembly robot is from Sophia. “Contrast Maana’s approach with machine learning, which is how to train machines to learn from data,” Thompson said. “Reasoning is the ability to answer a question.”

As with every vendor in the emerging AI marketplace, Maana’s technology will continue to improve over time. However, its ability to model human expertise to answer business questions in order to support mission-critical decisions gives the technology human-like characteristics that provide business value that other technologies cannot, the gimmicks and other theatrics of Sophia notwithstanding.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Maana is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit.

Jason Bloomberg is president of industry analyst firm Intellyx.

Jason Bloomberg is a leading IT industry analyst, Forbes contributor, keynote speaker, and globally recognized expert on multiple disruptive trends in enterprise technology and digital transformation. He is founder and president of Agile Digital Transformation analy...