NDTp August 2021 Editorial

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.