Saving the Bees with Big Data Analytics and AI
If bees die out, humans have only four years to live. This statement has been widely quoted and is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although there seems to be no evidence that he actually said it.
But whoever said it, and whether or not the “four years” figure is correct, the sentence points to an incredibly important truth: over three-quarters of food production around the world depends on the actions of natural pollinators (mainly bees); but also, that pollinators are dying out at an alarming rate, around 30% per year. This is jeopardizing our food supply (that’s $600 billion worth of agricultural activity) and 1.4 billion agriculture-dependent livelihoods.
And, no one actually knows why this decline is happening.
There are several plausible hypotheses, including pesticide over-use, global deforestation, the increase in mono-agro practices (farming a single product) and even the actions of individual beekeepers in encouraging the wrong sort of bees (non-indigenous ones) in their hives. It’s probably a combination of these. But no one actually knows.
Evidence is badly, and urgently, needed.
A non-profit organization, The World Bee Project (WBP), has been launched to try to address this problem, backed by scientists from the University of Reading in the UK. Oracle, through its Tech for Good initiative, forms the third leg of the project, supporting the WBP by giving it free consulting, some money for kit (e.g., sensors) and, perhaps most important, use of its cloud storage and analytics tools.
I was lucky enough to visit some of the smart beehives set up as part of the project, near Oracle’s offices in Reading, in the UK (photographed above), and to be briefed on this important and fascinating project.
The smart beehives are wired up to monitor the hives’ weight, temperature, humidity, sound (of the bees) and ambient weather. In some cases there is video recording of bee behaviour, too. The senor controller feeds its data back into the Oracle cloud where the Reading University scientists can access and analyse it to understand more about the bees’ behaviour.
From that quite simple sensor data, a lot can be deduced, thanks to advanced analytics and machine learning — for instance, where the bees are feeding — and that information can be correlated with other data, like what’s growing round about the hive, how the weather has been changing and so on. For example, something that will no doubt appeal to other beekeepers: AI algorithms can deduce when the bees are about to “swarm” — this is predictive maintenance on beehives, in effect.
But of course two beehives can be easily observed. The ambitious goal of this project is global analysis of many hives. The aim of the WBP is to create a “world hive network” of remotely monitored honeybee hives and bumble bee nests. This will generate significant new data on the impact of different factors on the health of bees, such as land use, agricultural practices and forage quality. The aim is to gain a deeper understanding of disease, parasites, predator species, and control measures, in part by comparing what’s going on in different parts of the world, where different factors and outcomes can be observed.
This is where the cloud storage and analytics will really come into its own, enabling global storage, access and analysis of the information gathered — and sufficient computing power to really make something of that data, using AI on the Big Data generated by the world hive network sensors.
So, for the global economy, for the bees themselves, for food producers and food consumers (that’s all of us), it’s great to see this collaboration between a non-profit group, academia and the tech industry to address this issue. It’s also pleasing to see Big Data analytics proving its worth in this way.
If you want to know more about the impact of Big Data Analytics and AI, please go to https://www.idc.com/eu/research/key-trends/artificial-intelligence.
Plan and Dream All You Like - But if You Haven't Got the Skills...
We’re in an exciting era, with technology transforming the way we live, work, play, and do business in a more significant way than ever before. According to IDC’s Global DX Leaders Survey, 95% of European organizations have already embarked on their digital transformation or have plans to do so — though with hugely varying ambitions.
For some organizations, the focus is on transforming the business through data center transformation or migrating to cloud; for others, it could be automating business processes or creating new technology (enabled products and services). Here, the skills of the IT professionals, their managers, IT leaders, and even the IT acumen of the business stakeholders will influence both the project timeliness and ultimately the business value of the most important IT initiatives.
Consequences of the Lack of Skills
All exciting stuff, but… there is a but! IDC estimates that the lack of available IT skills will result in over $90 billion in lost revenue annually in Europe in 2020. There is a “war” or at least a “grab” to attract the emerging skillsets needed to excel in digital transformation.
Businesses can’t just “hire” their way out of this one, however. They also need to look at how they can best reskill or upskill their existing tech employees. But to what?
IDC has just published its first forecasts on demand for 39 technology roles out to 2023 for the major worldwide regions plus country forecasts for Europe. Data scientists and machine learning experts will be in highest demand — perhaps not unexpectedly. This research will help organizations to plan training (and hiring) programs for tech employees, and there’s more to come: later this year we will add industry dimensions to the forecast, as well as more details around 2nd and 3rd Platforms and innovation accelerators.
If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact Marianne Kolding or head over to https://www.idc.com/eu and drop your details in the form on the top right.
Smartphones Converge Across the European Market, PCs Do Not
Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular everywhere across Europe, and the markets of the East are converging with the West.
Compare in the chart shown here, which breaks the continent down into four subregions, Nordic Europe; the ‘heart of the continent’, grouped around France, Germany and the UK; Southern Europe; Central Europe; and Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. There is an unmistakable convergence: smartphone volumes in the more advanced countries are dipping, as consumers tend to keep their devices longer, and are spending more on them too.
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the transition in communications is basically over In Central Europe. The smartphone market is now largely mature, with ownership and usage levels close to those in Western Europe. Further East, Russia, the region’s biggest market, has recovered after the 2014 ruble crisis and levels of smartphone ownership are also closing in on those in Western Europe.
Within a couple of years, if the trends do not change, the ratios of sales against population across these subregions will be almost the same, with the exception probably of the Nordic grouping, which will remain slightly higher in volumes per capita.
Smartphone Purchases Converge, PC Shipments Do Not
As European smartphone markets converge, PC markets, however, remain resolutely different across the continent, with widely different sales ratios.
Look at the second chart here. Nordic Europe remains way ahead of the other subregions, with the France/Germany/UK/Others group, not far behind.
Much lower down is Southern Europe, along with Central and Eastern Europe and Russia/Ukraine/Kazakhstan.
Moreover, the subregions are diverging not getting closer.
If we take the number of PCs sold every year in Southern Europe – Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, compared with the population, as the chart shows, the relationship is now almost identical with the line for Central Europe, as is the trend over time. Sales are slightly lower per capita in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, but they are rising slowly to also merge with Central Europe and Southern Europe.
Compare these two subregions with PC sales in the Nordic countries, which not only are nearly four times as high but are increasing in relation to population.
There is no sign of convergence.
If anything, the opposite. In Central and Eastern Europe PC sales have been fading despite these countries’ strong recent economic performance. The same is true in Russia. A few years ago, there was a boom in consumer laptops in Russia, with the wider provision of WiFi for instance in cafes making them more popular among younger people, but this has not been sustained.
More PCs Than People in Denmark
The highest concentration of PCs across Europe as a whole is in Denmark, where, in terms of the installed base rather than sales, there are as many PCs as people and more PCs than smartphones, which is a standout result in Europe.
On the PC front, the other Nordic countries are not far behind. Looking again at the installed base rather than sales (not illustrated in the charts here), the northern part of the continent — the U.K., Germany, France, and the Netherlands — shows pronounced levels of reliance on the PC, of around one PC for every one and a half residents.
In Southern Europe, the number of PCs is about half this, one for every three or so residents, but the number of smartphones per capita is similar to that in Nordic Europe.
In both these comparisons, we have taken total markets. With smartphones, nearly all are used as consumer devices, while in the PC world a lot of sales are to businesses and the devices have very different usage patterns.
If we focus just on the purchase of PCs by businesses, the differences are even starker. Nordic Europe buys four times as many PCs per head of population than does southern Europe and Central Europe (the figures are again similar between these two groupings). With Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, the difference is more than 10 times as great. Moreover, this gap is widening — there is a slow increase in business PC purchases in the Nordic world, whereas in the other four subregions delineated here those purchases are falling.
The average lifespan of a PC has lengthened in the less affluent East and South of Europe in the past couple of years, and IDC believes that PCs are replaced more frequently in the richer North. Nevertheless, there will be a significant gap in computer usage between these different parts of Europe.
This gap has clear implications both for multimedia consumption and for the future of work.
In Southern and Central and Eastern Europe the computer experience is more and more a mobile one, while it currently looks as if northern Europe will remain more “traditional” both at work and at home, in higher levels of PC use.
The new dividing line across Europe in use of computing devices is North versus South and East, rather than just West versus East.
Nordic Europe: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland
Southern Europe: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Central Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia
Other Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.
If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact Simon Baker or Nikolina Jurisic, or head over to https://www.idc.com/eu and drop your details in the form on the top right.
Everything is Edge and Edge is Everywhere
Edge computing is the latest buzzword and every vendor, from infrastructure to security, from telco to cloud, is building a narrative around it. At the same time, end users need to understand the differences — and ultimately the benefits — of a distributed approach to their IT environment.
What is Edge Computing?
Recognizing the increasing impact of edge computing, IDC Europe recently set out to analyze it from a number of standpoints. The initial effort has been to define “the edge.”
IDC defines the edge as the multiform space between physical endpoints (a sensor, an industrial machine, a vehicle, for example) and the “core” (the backend sitting in cloud locations or traditional datacenters, usually seen as the physical or virtual space in which to compute and store data). This intermediate tier may have no continuous coordination with the “core” systems. IDC also mapped different layers of the edge. In simple terms, the four levels of the edge, each requiring a different compute and software approach and greater power, are:
- Packaged endpoints — edge computing capabilities embedded in the endpoint; excludes “capture and actuation” endpoints
- Light edge — low-power computing platforms (typically PC-grade and below) operating specific functions (control, data transfer, for example) and lightweight analytics
- Heavy edge — integrated, mostly enterprise-grade systems, deployed onsite outside a datacenter (on a shop floor, for example), running heavy computation and data storage
- Distributed core — geographically distributed datacenter facilities (containerized DC or point of presence locations, for example) that run on traditional “core” hardware and software
From a technology domain perspective, the edge can be seen where the three key domains of IT (information technology, usually linked to the core), OT (operational technology, usually linked to machines and endpoints), and CT (communication technologies, intra- and inter-domain connections) are combined.
Why Edge Computing Now?
One of the main drivers is the Internet of Things. The link between IoT and edge computing is clear: large amounts of data must be collected, processed, analyzed, and actuated, increasingly in real time. This can become an issue when dealing with the time it takes for a signal to travel from point A to point B. In network terms this is not linked to the bandwidth of your communication channel, but to the latency. Latency is becoming crucial in many IoT use cases, but other factors drive the need to move at least part of the computing capabilities toward the edge — how data intensive is the use case, the lack of connectivity or the cost of transmitting data, how numerous are the endpoints, and where they are distributed geographically, for example. There are also security and privacy concerns, when maybe you don’t want your data to travel from your local branch or you have to store it in a given region. The mix of these variables leads to what IDC calls the “edge propensity” — a measure of how beneficial the edge approach could be to developing the use case.
It’s important to stress that IDC doesn’t believe that the edge will eat the core. Rather, the edge will complement it, with huge potential to rework the way enterprise hardware, software, and networks are architected and balanced between core and edge, with long-term implications for IT buyers.
What Are the Technology Impacts of Edge Computing in Europe?
Edge computing is already having an impact on many technologies: infrastructure (storage, server, networking), IoT, security, and cloud have been hit in the first instance, and other areas, such as data management, workload balancing, and artificial intelligence are now assessing edge computing strategies and the impact on these technologies could be very high in the next few years. Telecommunications will also be significantly impacted by the edge paradigm in the coming years, with 5G being a driver of further change. Telecom players are already starting to see both internal and external implications of edge computing on their business strategies.
From a vertical perspective, the manufacturing industry in Europe is in prime position to move forward with edge technologies, given the effort already put into Industry 4.0.
If you have any questions, please contact Gabriele Roberti, or head over to https://www.idc.com/eu.