Most of the time I consider myself to have the best job at Ericsson, meeting people in the Ericsson Studio and talking about our Networked Society vision. But sometimes, like today, I have my doubts. Today we hosted Ericsson Research Open Day in the Ericsson Studio, showcasing our research in the Industry and Society area and inviting stakeholders to exchange ideas on it.
Some of the ideas I recognized, and we have them already implemented in the studio, such as the Knowledge Management and Automation Framework demo or the capillary networks and the digger demo. But many are new too, and one of the coolest of them is the demo in which Knowledge Management is used to predict traffic jams and improve pollution control. In this scenario, your hybrid car will switch from gasoline to electric not based on the power level of the battery but rather on the traffic situation around you.
And as the geek I am, the best part of it all was that by using the same reasoning engine and analytics engine as in the hybrid car demo, we built a position-based, face-recognizing Lego Segway to help tell the story.
I was also impressed by the Mobile Cloud Robotics demo developed by Ericsson in Italy, using the power of the cloud to run robots in a warehouse. Traditionally you would put virtual rails (painted lines, pull wires or any other available technology) in the floor to guide the robot but that makes it difficult to change the workflow if needed. Or you can give each robot enough computing power to be more autonomous but that makes them expensive. With our demo, which combines the power of the cloud, the resilience of the mobile network and cheap robots, many of today’s challenges are met.
I also have to mention the Automated Network Transport demo, where intelligent transport systems get connected to each other to find new and more efficient logistics solutions for people as well as goods.
Talking about the Networked Society is one thing. Having a job where you build solutions to test it for real is another. It sure looks like a job any techy person would like. But when I think of it, my job is to take all these ideas and put them into a context for our visitors to understand. I still get to play with the demos, so maybe I do have the best job, after all?
[IWNS]
