Transforming Work and Life with a Dynamic Blend of Big Ideas

This article by Marie Hattar, Chief Marketing Officer, Keysight Technologies focuses on three of today’s most visible and fascinating technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and fifth-generation wireless (5G). Individually, each can add incremental value to work and life. When blended together across a network, the combination becomes truly transformative.

Many innovations are a clever combination of proven ideas. Consider the wheel, the lever and the box. Individually, each represents the solution to many problems. When bolted together, they become the workhorse wheelbarrow. With this elegant machine, one person can more easily move large amounts of sand, dirt, plants, and so on, from point A to point B.

And so it is with three of today’s most visible and fascinating technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and fifth-generation wireless (5G). Individually, each can add incremental value to work and life. When blended together across a network, the combination becomes truly transformative.

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Harnessing the enabling technologies

In Big Data and beyond, AI and ML will eventually permeate all we do, spanning finance, manufacturing, transportation, service, security, health care, and even education. The benefit: AI plus ML equals new levels of analysis, interpretation, prediction, and automation that will improve productivity, efficiency, and safety.

That power becomes more meaningful when people can easily access it and interact with it. Gradually, 5G is emerging as the decisive entry point. With wide bandwidth and low latency, it brings powerful links to the edges of mobile and stationary networks.

However, maximizing the impact of 5G requires substantial and costly re-architecting of data networks and the cloud. Fortunately, those investments have the potential to yield substantial returns by enabling new applications and services, many of which will harness internet of things (IoT) technologies.

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Achieving transformative outcomes

Analysts have proposed many possible uses for AI, ML, and 5G. One combines all three as a path to real benefits: digital twins. Rendered in software, these are dynamic digital representations of physical systems and processes. Such models enable manufacturers and service providers to monitor, understand, optimize, and predict the performance of their products or processes.

Accurate modeling depends on reliable connectivity between the edge, the cloud, and regional data centers. At the edge, IoT sensors will gather and send a robust stream of real-time information to the digital twin. In turn, AI, ML, data analytics, and more, integrate together to create an electronic avatar that updates and changes along with their physical counterpart.

Digital twins can also drive software-based simulations that predict future changes in performance. For example, extrapolating the trends in real-time data and modeling possible outcomes makes it easier to manage downtime and avoid catastrophic failures. This produces major benefits in high-value applications: planes, trains, and automobiles can be more efficient; power generation and water distribution can be more reliable; medical treatment can be more effective; and on and on.

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Addressing real-world concerns

There is a caveat: the operational model for digital twins has raised concerns around not just system cost but also data security and privacy. As with any major investment, a sufficiently detailed cost/benefit analysis is essential. A robust model for return-on-investment (ROI) provides a benchmark for individual projects and will be a consistent yardstick for comparison of competing projects.

Ensuring the veracity of sensor data transmitted to a mission-critical digital twin requires airtight security that extends to the extreme edges of the network. Protecting privacy in consumer applications, especially health care, demands absolute safeguarding of captured, transmitted, and stored data.

Leveraging innovation into transformation

Wheelbarrows and digital twins are much more than the sum of their parts. Dynamic avatars built from AI, ML, and 5G will prove their value when they consistently enhance our products, processes and lives in ways we haven’t yet imagined.