SENSOR DATA

IN BUSINESS

NIKO VUOKKO – SHARPER SHAPE

BIG DATA – IS IT JUST LARGE DATA?

• Data is gathered from multiple sources of varying quality

• Operational use of data is often awkward

• ”Data to knowledge” is a necessary intermediate step, but it’s

nothing more than intermediate

WHO GENERATES DATA?

Human-generated data:

• 5K tweets / s

• 25K events / s from a mobile game (about 200 GB / day)

• 40K Google searches / s

Machine-generated data:

• 5M bids / s at US options market

• 120 MB / s of diagnostics from a single gas turbine

• 1 PB / s at collision time from CERN LHC accelerator

SENSOR DATA

• Generated by machines

• May monitor a controlled subject: the myriad of sensors in a nuclear plant

• May observe the natural environment: ESA Copernicus satellites

• The Big Data upheaval has raised expectations about possibilities

OBSERVING THE ENVIRONMENT WITH SENSORS

• In data solutions often ”the real world comes and botches everything”

• Machine-generated data can usually avoid this problem

• Observing the environment with sensors, however, is an exception

WHAT ENVIRONMENT COULD WE OBSERVE?

• Space

• Natural phenomenons

• Human activity in large scale

• Infrastructure

MONITORING INFRASTRUCTURE

• We place high expectations for our public infrastructure

• Disruptions and breakdowns are very expensive

• The amount of infrastructure is colossal

• Typical infrastructure permits only external monitoring

WHY IS MONITORING INFRASTRUCTURE SO

EXPENSIVE?

• Monitoring needs to be extensive, continuous and diverse

• Many important observations are vague and cryptic even for a human

• Mistakes are very costly

HOW COULD WE SAVE ON THIS?

• Separate the data collection and evaluation phases

• Automate both!

• Machines can reliably run large and complex evaluations

• The data will have many unexpected use cases once it exists

DATA COLLECTION WITH UAVS

• UAVs minimize the data collection costs

• Access to hard-to-reach places

• Technology advances rapidly --> prices will drop further

• Europe has a single company with legal permits for BVLOS flights

AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF THE DATA

• Machine is by far faster and more reliable evaluator than a human

• Proper use and complexity of data has been the historical problem

• Digitization of information allows for wholly new solutions

THE FUTURE OF SENSOR DATA

• Sensor size and cost will drop while quality and capabilities grow

• The last obstacle: Efficient distributed data gathering is only now

becoming feasible

• Massive potential of totally uprooting old business models