From Farming to Women's Safety - Part 3

This is the third part of a series of articles that focuses on how IOT, Data Science Machine Learning and associated technologies / tools come together to dramatically change life as we have known it. To read the first part, click here.

In the first part, we had looked at factors affecting farming and in the second part, we had envisaged a scenario where a "simple" mobile application, by providing timely, useful information to a farmer could help him with his needs, setting off a chain of events that could potentially change how crops are produced and marketed.

This "simple" mobile application of course is anything but simple. A case in point would be Google's search. Can the interface of Google search get any simpler? All you do to get to any information - is open a URL which has a simple text box, type in what you need and voila - there it is - the info you sought. But, behind the scenes? Forget the complex software that powers it. Just thinking of the hardware can be mind boggling. And looking at it can be.. ummm.. colorful! (more pictures here)

If you are like me, it would have been incredibly difficult to pry your eyes back from the slate.com page that has "more pictures". As difficult as it may be, it is time to look at our mobile application. We need to have food on our table, right?

In the "neatly presented architectural diagram" above, you can see our humble mobile application front and center talking via the internet with a number of gadgets / systems. While the application itself, undoubtedly would be simple to use (a few selections by the farmer and the recommendations would pop up right on the screen), what makes it powerful is what happens under the hood - completely transparent to the end user.

The application talks to some "end point" to obtain weather data. When I was doing my daughter's project, I sauntered over to www.data.gov and looked at the data available to us as we speak! A cursory search for "weather" told me I have 652 datasets available and a click on "Agriculture" in the picture above gave me information that was causing short-circuits in my brain. As you would by now have guessed, to collect, store, process and make available required data is a non-trivial task. You need enormous computing power and storage coupled with software AND all of these should be AFFORDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE for the world to take advantage of. Enter Big Data. Enter Hadoop. Enter Cloud. With these (technology/tools) in place, whether it is the bank information (best banks within a one mile radius offering attractive loans for specific crops) or supply/demand forecast for cereals across the nation that the mobile application requires, providing them - while exactly not child's play becomes easy.

If you take a look at the "hand-drawn picture" again, you will see on the left, a couple of things happening. The Mobile application GETS information about soil humidity, nutrients and the location of the trucks. It also SENDS signals to the sprinklers to turn them on or off. The app, to reiterate the point is connected to the internet and so are the sensors. Communication between our application and sensors (differing by variety, location and purpose and numbers) is primarily through the internet - which simply means, the sensors have to be "hooked up" to the Internet. Enter IOT - Internet Of Things. While till recently, we had computers (and of late, our mobile phones) connected to the internet enabling us to communicate, now, we are also connecting "things" - allowing us to receive / control these gadgets from anywhere.

The possibilities explode. Even writing this makes me a kid, peering through a kaleidoscope, turning it furiously to marvel at unfolding, colorful images. Take some time to dream.

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” – Douglas H. Everett

In Part 1, I had promised you that by the time you are done reading through the entire series, you would know what HDFS is. That and a lot more is to come. And these posts I hope would be the first baby step in your journey to "turn one into the other". Hope you are enjoying reading this as much as I am, writing it.

For those of you interested in continuing on and finding out what HDFS is, click here - to get to part 4 of this series.

Your comments are welcome.