Jonathan Fürst
Research Scientist, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH
The Internet of Things in Europe has the potential to create a complete new generation of business similar to what has happened with the proliferation of mobile and cloud computing. IoT not only improves various aspects of our lives but also increases the competitiveness of the EU economies by transforming a large set of domains, such as cities, industry or health. An important application of IoT will be the Green Transitioning of Europe towards CO2 neutrality over the next years. IoT allows us to control our buildings more efficiently and enables smarter transportation and smart energy networks that can handle an increasing amount of decentrally placed renewable energy sources.
A key priority will be a closer collaboration of IoT, domain, and AI experts in order to unwrap the true potential of an ever increasing IoT density. What are the key issues in a specific domain? How can they be addressed with IoT and AI solutions in a scalable, transferable way? I.e., not only for a constrained deployment, but throughout a domain across multiple countries. Such scalable solutions will enable the creation of new businesses that then can provide solutions around the world, creating high-qualified jobs in Europe.
The twin transition requires the creation and maintenance of digitalized physical assets. We are working on reducing the effort of creating and maintaining such assets by automating the data enrichment process with AI from raw, heterogeneous and often silo-ed data to standardized digital twins with the same data model. Another challenge that we are working on is how non data scientists can then create new insights based on the digital assets using AI. Specifically, we are working on techniques that mitigate the labeling bottleneck by providing an accessible and interactive weak-supervision interface for domain experts.
