Smart Cars: Motivated by Safety or Efficiency?

The engineers at IBM are pairing up with major automotive manufacturers to produce cars that increase communication between three entities that come into contact with each other every time you go for a ride: cars, roads, and drivers (http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/19017/?mod=related).

The mathematicians and engineers behind IBM's "Smarter Planet" initiative are always looking for ways to make data useful. As people continually instrument the world, more and more data is becoming available in almost all aspects of our lives. From health care to business intelligence, in many ways we have become inundated by data. The trick is to make sense of that data and turn it into information that people can uses in ways that positively change the way we live. In this instance IBMers are crunching the data to help the driver get the right information at the right time, and they are not the only ones.

Imagine your car driving you safely to work Monday morning while you catch a few more Zs before the kick-off meeting.

IBM's smarter driving initiative could be a game changer in the everyday life of the average American businessman or woman who is results and productivity driven, but sometimes lacks the safety awareness on the road caused by the gross popularity of smart devices like the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry handheld systems. While I am sure the IBM employees are motivated to increase safety awareness and reduce the millions of people affected by car accidents every year (including myself as a victim of drunk driving), if IBM perfects an "auto-pilot" function for terrestrial vehicular travel, many American workers may get their wish to extend the workday a couple of hours, while paying for their own electronic chauffeur to afford themselves the ability to be constantly connected to the mobile, digital work environment.

It is worth while to mention that there may be serious negative side effects of a safer, more work efficient commute. As with all rules-based technology, those that know how to bend the rules and have access to your system can take control of it. Cyber threat actors may eventually look to exploit these new devices and could introduce mayhem and terror on the highways by taking control of peoples vehicles. Think about it...

Homomorphic Encryption... A Game Changer?

In his book titled, Does IT Matter, Nicholas Carr argues "information technology has increasingly become [...] a simple factor of production - a commodity input that is necessary for competitiveness but insufficient for advantage." While his argument is elegant in its simplicity and curiously attractive in it's citing of major technological advances as a "commodity" required to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace, I believe his perspective on IT as the "cost of doing business" also identifies the direct enabler of the modern day business advantage - data. 

In today's markets, the ability to generate meaning from consumer and business critical data has become the centerpiece of Fortune 500 companies because it supports rational decision making. It has almost become a requirement for companies to have a data collection and analysis capability in regards to its consumers and internal business functions in order to maintain a competitive advantage, and thus turn a profit. Companies like IBM who develop and sell business intelligence tools to search for meaning in data, Amazon and Salesforce that providing data storage, and Google that provides data collection and aggregation have become giants in their respective markets because of the ability to recognize the value of data. 

Interestingly enough, what may be just as important as the data itself is its availability and confidentiality. In order to make rational decisions in real-time, corporate executives require immediate access to that data in order to address time critical issues that may have immense impact on their business model and subsequently provide them a competitive advantage over the competition. Cloud computing has provided the corporate executive availability. However, while most executives realize that implementing cloud-computing solutions may ultimately give them access to the data when they need it, executives are also reluctant to place their data in the cloud because of security issues. In an article titled, "Homomorphic Encryption: Making Cloud Computing More Secure  (http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37197/) the writers of Technology Review at MIT have exposed what seems to be the emerging technology that will remove executives' reluctance to accept cloud computing as a holistic IT solution to information exchange - homomorphic encryption. 

IBM's Craig Gentry has come close to perfecting the ability to run mathematical calculations on encrypted data without exposing the content of the data to anyone but the data owner. This break through in data confidentiality will definitely change the level of comfortability that businesses and consumers have with placing their data in the cloud and could have massive impacts on the way executive decision makers lead their organizations and develop SaaS products. Imagine the ability for patients to place their medical data in the cloud in a secure, wireless, real-time fashion where a health provider could use it make life saving decisions remotely or dispatch first responders faster to provide medical services. I see homomorphic encryption as a technology that will quickly become a game changer for service provision in the very near future.