While humans gear up for the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the world’s plants, animals and ecosystems are the Earth’s natural data sensors.
When fish die by the thousands in a Chinese river, the great Pacific Garbage Patch grows by the year and humans are increasingly vulnerable to a wide range of diseases, immune deficiencies and superbugs, humans ought to be paying closer attention. And of course we are paying closer attention these days, but we need ever more data to convince politicians and the public to take action.
Sensory Information to Usable Data
Thanks to new and improved data mining sensors and logging techniques efforts to understand our world will bear fruit, benefiting both new and existing programs. Argo, created in 1999 by the Pulse of the Global Ocean aka the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) was a worldwide deployments of 20,000 autonomous probes to gather information on ocean temperatures, salinity and current velocity. As Argo updates its network, it will produce better and more accurate information.
At the same time, new data mining sensors and logging techniques will lead to expanding opportunities for sensor manufacturers, sensor data services and analytics, data management systems and information distribution services.
A few of the newer sensor technologies and fields of growth are:
- mobile phones, sensors and life logging
- optofluidics, sensors and actuators in micro-structured optical fibers
- surface plasmon resonance sensors
- backup parking radar sensors systems
- electrochemical sensors, biosensors in biomedical applications
- CMOS image sensors
- measurement systems and sensors
- motion sensors for lighting
- speed and cadence sensors for smart phones
- weather, thermometer and humidity sensors
- wireless data logging
- temperature and external thermistor sensors
- measurement, data analysis and sensors for engineering and science measurement
In the following video, Professor Stephan P Kudyba from the NJIT School of Management provides an overview of data mining.
