October wasn’t just productive. This month our work got a ton of attention across different projects—which is great as it leads to great conversations and is indicative of larger impact. Speaking of impact, over on ThingsCon we realized a long-held dream by announcing the ThingsCon Fellowship program. This and more below. Enjoy!
If you’d like to explore working together, please get in touch.
Lots of conversations & media attention
It’s always great to see own work get attention. After all, this is how impact starts.
There was some excellent Twitter action when in one day, Mozilla‘s main account tweeted our trustmark report, and Medium‘s featured my thoughts on Google’s push to AI-powered services which had already been going somewhat viral. This started a number of fantastic conversations. Then VentureBeat asked to cross-post my recent article on Germany’s need to get ready for AI. A nice hat-trick indeed.
As if this wasn’t enough, in an op-ed on CNN.com on the future of IoT, Mozilla CEO Mark Surman and Michelle Thorne kindly gave not one but two shout-outs to ThingsCon, too!
Also, remember when back in July, the smart & ever-lovely Markus Andrezak interviewed me for his podcast Stories Connecting Dots? The second part of our interview just went live and I’m honored to be opening the second season of SDC discussing Shenzhen’s IoT ecosystem.
ThingsCon Fellowship Program
I could not be more happy to announce the ThingsCon Fellowship Program. It’s been a long-held dream of mine to start this, and I can hardly believe it’s finally happening.
The ThingsCon Fellowship recognizes achievements and commitment that advance the ThingsCon mission of fostering the creation of a responsible and human-centric IoT generally, and support for the ThingsCon community specifically. With the program, we aim to amplify the fellows’ work in this area and to promote knowledge transfer and networking between fellows and the larger ThingsCon network.
The first round of fellows for 2017/2018 consists of a small cohort of ThingsCon allies. These individuals have over the past years put tremendous effort into advancing and promoting the ThingsCon mission. We are both humbled and proud to welcome these six outstanding individuals as the inaugural ThingsCon Fellows:
ThingsCon Fellows 2017-18
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino Ame Elliott Dries de Roeck Iohanna Nicenboim Michelle Thorne Ricardo Brito
Thinking, writing, speaking
- My thoughts on Google’s new push to AI-powered services seem to have struck a nerve, particularly on Medium, where the article went (a little) viral.
- Getting our policies ready for AI futures
At the invitation of Prof. Sven Engesser at Technical University Dresden, I had the pleasure of presenting to the master students of applied media studies. Here are my slides (in German):
It’s great to see that communication science/media studies tackle IoT and human-computer interfaces as a field of research. I was impressed with the level of thinking and questions from the group. The discussion was lively, on point, and there were none of the obvious questions. Instead, the students probed the pretty complex issues surrounding IoT, AI, and algorithmic decision making in the context of communications and communication science. It’s part of the master program, and of Prof. Engesser’s new role as professor there, to also set up a lab to study how smart home assistants and other voice-enabled connected devices impact the way we communicate at home—both with other people and with machines. It’ll be interesting to watch the lab’s progress and findings, and I hope we’ll find ways to collaborate on some of these questions.
What else?
I was more than a little pleased to learn that our recent work on a trustmark for IoT that we’ve been doing with Mozilla (see thewavingcat.com/iot-trustmark) is continuing to unfold its impact: I had heard whispers before, and now heard confirmation, that some core recommendations from our report found their way into a large country’s national IoT policy. It’s not yet published, but will be soon.
What’s next?
A project with our office neighbors, the lovely Syspons team, is kicking off. It’s about increasing the impact of health education in South Africa, which I’m quite excited about.
In the next few weeks we’ll also decide what the next steps are for our IoT Trustmark efforts.
On 9 November, I’ll be at SimplySecure‘s conference Underexposed (program). My talk there is called The Internet of Sneaky Things. I’ll be exploring how IoT is at a crossroads, and we can either let it become the Internet of Sneaky Things or we can make it better, more human-centric, and more responsible.
Later this month I’ll be also speaking at Good School, a Hamburg-based executive leadership program, where I’ll be giving a glimpse or two at China and its digital landscape.
And last but not least, a personal note (which is rare on this blog): We’re expecting a baby within the next few weeks, which of course makes me very happy. My tweets and monthnotes might temporarily become a little more irregular (or not), and or time-shifted to odd late night postings (or not). Who knows? We’ll see! Next year I’ll likely take a few months off to stay home with the little one. But until then, everything else here will continue as normal for now.
In the meantime, please get in touch if you’d like to discuss new projects.
