Tag Archives: IoT

Transforming Utilities with IoT and Analytics

Mixing Electricity and Water

Normally you should not mix water and electricity unless you want a shocking experience.

When it comes to how the use of data and analytics can transform water and electricity utilities into intelligent enterprises we can make an exception.

In this post I discuss the challenges utilities are facing over the upcoming years and lay out why Analytics and IoT is going to be increasingly important. At the end I include a link to an on-demand Webinar with an organization who has already delivered solutions in this space: Saviant Consulting.

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Transforming the Agribusiness with IoT and Analytics

Nothing New for Agribusiness

Innovation in the agribusiness is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for many years often without many people being aware of it outside that business itself. That continuous innovation has resulted in todays agribusinesses being much more productive than previous generations of agribusinesses.

Agribusiness has come a long way since 1950

Some studies put the average agribusinesses ability to produce at 262% better than it was as recently as 1950. This has been achieved with 2% fewer inputs than before where inputs are things like labor, seeds, feed and fertilizer.

To that end it is clear the agribusiness has come a long way from where it started in the 18th century. At that time it was driven by Oxen and horses for power, crude wooden plows and lots of work done by hand to sow seeds and cultivate crops.

If we fast forward through the many innovations, triggered by the industrial revolution (iron ploughs, cotton gin, tractors etc), we eventually arrive to the point where information technology started to be used extensively in the in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s quickly followed by the use of satellites to plan work in the late 1990’s.

To the outside the agribusiness looks like a slow moving industry when it fact it is clear to those closer that it is moving at an astonishing pace!

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The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Final Installment

This post is the eleventh, and final, post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 10 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I will share a video of the complete end-to-end demo and share details of the architecture which sits behind it. I will also share information on what I bought/used to bring this all together and relist all the different software, services and node packages in a single place.

Pulling It All Together

A lot of what we have been doing with this project is humanizing the way we communicate with machines/computers/things. That means talking and observing to drive intelligent interaction rather than using a mouse, keyboard or touch screen.

Our Autonomous Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone is a smart drone which showcases, albeit crudely, how interaction with services filled with intelligence is going to evolve. It highlights the importance of cognitive services to the success of organizations in the future.

So with that said take a look at the entire end to end demo in the video below.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 9

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Telemetry Data

This post is the tenth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 9 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

Up until now we have been mostly working on controlling the drone, using the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API to identify people and lastly making use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services API to convert text to speech and speech to text.

In this blog the focus will move to:

Ultimately we will have built an intelligent end-to-end IoT solution featuring analytics and visualization. The instructions here can be used to also understand how to get data in from other devices as well!

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 9

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Speech to Text

This post is the eighth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 7 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

We have come a long way from when we first started with a drone controlled from the computer. In the last post we spent time understanding how to use the Bing Speech API to convert supplied text to speech. In this post we will:

  • Show how you can use the Bing Speech API to derive text from speech.
  • Integrate that approach into our DroneWebServer.js web application and front end HTML so that we can control the drone via speech.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8