The DevCon sit-down dinner on Wednesday night was a success, with everyone meeting fellow conference attendees from all around the world while enjoying good food and drinks, and for some, winning raffle prizes before listening to two Q and A sessions hosted by Ali Sebt and featuring panelists on the subjects of platforms and security. Josh Hartung of Harbrick and Phil Gerskovich of Zebra fielded the platform queries with Phil opening by describing his company as serving IoT businesses and enterprises with a software framework to build IoT products. He said Zebra “provided the technology to leverage and make the job faster and quicker without having to reinvent the wheel.”. Gerskovich cited the example of Fedex, which, he said wanted to deploy a hand held computer over two and a half years, one that would be used for another two and a half years. So altogether the service life is five years, minimum, which is considerably different, he pointed out, from today’s smartphone consumer who wants to change every year or two. Hartung said Harbrick’s Polysynch helps OEMs and Tier one customers develop autonomous platforms faster. Currently vehicles contain some 100million to 300 million lines of code. He noted that a fully autonomous car, would have code that “is an order of magnitude higher. That is a staggering amount of complexity handled through a platform. “ He concluded that “it will take folks with vision to fight through the opposition and get to a place that is better. This is what we think Renesas is doing.” Zebra’s Gerskovich pointed to new customers in the medical field. He said it was not just logistics but how the medical company is using a platform to gain intelligence that is important. As an example he talked about an App that tracks patients. It seems that hospitals measure how fast a heart condition patient arrives in an ambulance to the time a balloon angioplasty is inserted. This metric determines how much the hospital is paid (presumably by insurance companies). The faster they are the more money they can make, he said. One of his company’s customers was leveraging Iot design principals by using LE Bluetooth beacons in the hospital so patients can be tracked . He said there was already a teaching hospital in Europe using exactly this type of applications, Asked by an audience member whether platforms will be resisted by engineers who want to develop their own solutions rather than cut and paste someone else’s—such a something a platform might provide-- Gerskovich said “yes we are problem solvers but we also have to be productive and have to find extra value to differentiate our solution from anything someone else has done and platforms like Synergy will give us the time to do that.” Hayden Povey of Secure Thingz Unlimited and Dr. Andrea Wimerskirch of the Univerisity of Michigan next took the stage to tackle security issues. Povey said that going forward “we can’t develop the future in isolation; we have to do it together.” He said we have to develop IoT with security embedded in it from the ground up. He said that the difference between secutiry in IoT devices and smart phones was that the life cycle of the smart phone was relatively short whereas an IoT device might have to be protected for 20 years or more. Security is an important question, he said because if we get the answers wrong “consumers will just lose our trust and stop buying these products.” It is wise, he added, to assume that every device will be compromised somewhere along the line. Wimerskirch pointed out that some ways of doing things might have to change from their initial approach in order to satisfy security requirements. It was assumed, he said that to run cars autonomously on a highway they would operate in platoons, meaning cars would be a short distance from one another in a sort of convoy and communicating between themselves and with the infrastructure. But it turns out that the wireless communications might be the weak point and by operating in platoon fashion might allow hackers to control more than one car at a time. So if the cars were further apart if attacked only the one car and not the entire platoon would be vulnerable. Both panelists agreed that we do not yet know how to measure and test security as well as we should. Updating software f0r secure operation was another issue discussed. Following the hacking of a Jeep, Fiat Chrysler sent a USB stick to owners as a software patch. Others had to drive their vehicles to the dealer, at a cost to the company of $100 to $200 each. This type of fix would be prohibitively expensive if you were talking about IoT devices in the millions. Wimerskirch noted that some car brands—he cited Tesla and BMW—are able to send updates or security patches to owners of their vehicles via wireless data communications. Ali Sebt closed the session by saying he hoped that Renesas “has met or exceeded your expectations" and acknowledged that for the engineers present “we know that taking time out from your work schedule is an investment.” Next DevCon will be in 2017.
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