Last month, in the July issue of Automated Buildings, Ken Sinclair called for smart buildings to spearhead an improved relationship between the physical, the virtual and the emotional world. Relationships go two ways. When we consider how buildings can manipulate our emotions, we also are considering how our emotions can manipulate buildings,
The sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror explores a near-future where humanity's greatest innovations and dark side collide. Last week, Daikin and NEC announced that they have developed a system that monitors the movement of the employee's eyelids and hits dozing worked with a blast of cold air.
Read MoreDecomposition & Disint...
RoSy outlook for distributed autonomy within systems
I feel I must be one of the last people to discover the open source Robotic Operating Systems (ROS). ROS is more of a framework than an operating system. The framework could be atop any operating system. In practice, for now, it is on Linux. (There are some interesting DotNet / Mono extensions, but those appear incomplete). ROS is providing the base for open source robotics, and the effect of robotics on all our lives will expand because of it.
Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 2)—Buildings and Building Systems
In a previous post, I described how vCards are used throughout standards-based scheduling and calendaring systems. Many different vCard standards coexist in today’s organizations. I also described how directory services, especially LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), are the well-established means to enable wide secure access to the information in vCards. In this post I discuss current efforts that will expand these existing standards to support buildings and their systems.
Read MoreSlim BIM: The Middle Ground between Document and Service Part 1
Engineering information is document oriented. Large documents, even sheaths of documents, are exchanged, specifying in great detail exactly what to do, and how to do it. Modern IT (Information Technology) is based on Services. Service exchanges are minimal, as small as can specify results, and do not specify the means of execution at all. For the last 50 years, IT has moved far faster than have engineered system, the things we can touch, inhabit, or ride around in. For the next 50 years, when engineered systems will need to evolve as fast as IT has for the last 50, we will need a middle ground, between document and service call. This is the challenge of configuration, shared configuration that will enable big systems to interact as nimbly as does IT does today....
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