The summer was marked by our milestone event, the Cyber-Physical Fabric Summit, which took place on July 19th. It was a huge success with more than 800 people registered, and close to 400 people on the live calls and a series of insightful roundtable discussions. There was a live Zoom chat running in parallel to the summit, with the comments every bit as engaging as the content. Each roundtable had a further thread on the DT Hub to ensure that others could catch up on the discussion.
The summit was not only useful in terms of pooling knowledge and ideas, but in creating movement towards the shared goal of developing an ecosystem of interconnected smart machines and digital twins. It left me feeling energized to hear from others who are equally excited about this journey and to have a cross section of academia, government and industry take part. The main takeaways for me were:
-
The need for boundary spanning leadership. Our speakers underlined the importance of taking an interconnected and collaborative approach to working across sectors, industries and organisations. I liked the analogy of an octopus – something that joins the intelligent tentacles and makes them work together.
-
Deep socio. In the same way that we have ‘deep tech’, there was a lot of discussion around ‘deep socio’ and ensuring the social side of creating our cyber physical fabric has equal weight to the tech side. There is a real need to address issues around ethics, privacy and commercial and regulatory requirements.
-
Creating and adopting in tandem. It was great to see so much consensus around the importance of adoption. We need to constantly be implementing the latest research, so we can test and refine as we go along.
-
Living labs. There was discussion around how we need to keep testing what we’ve created to really see what is working and what isn’t and what the impact is on real people. There’s a really interesting example taking place at MIT where their Living Labs programme is developing a scalable data management platform, allowing them to collect and integrate multiple types of data including: personal data or “small data” (collected by smart phones, activity tracking devices, or new wearable sensors); MIT data (wifi data, campus maps, event data etc); as well as external data types (social media data, transportation data, weather, city data etc). A further example worth following is the Smart Mobility Living Lab London where they are using smart mobility living as a test-bed for data innovation.
DT Hub
We continue to grow fast and have crossed the 2,000 member mark. We now have members from more than 1,000 individual organisations across 60 different countries. There has also been an increase in participation with many more new postings and threads being generated by our members. Do log on to add to the discussions! Also look out for our Flex 260 Standards, which opens for public consultation. Again we really value your feedback.
As we grow, so does our need for additional staff and I’m delighted to welcome two great additions to the team: @Kirsten Lamband @Catherine Condie. Both come with a wealth of experience and will be driving our communications and engagement activities across the programme.
CreDo Update
CReDo, the Climate Resilience Demonstrator, is a climate change adaptation digital twin demonstrator project to improve resilience across infrastructure systems. We launched a new DTHub page for CReDo where we will be sharing progress and the benefits of cross sectoral information sharing to improve climate resilience across infrastructure.
We are exploring examples of interdependencies map for infrastructure systems. Check out this thread and share any thoughts you might have.
An important part of our Credo programme is communicating the technology and research to a diverse audience in an inspiring way. We have tenders out to create a video and would be grateful if you could circulate the following with your network
Leave a comment