Guest lectures
To stimulate learning activity, each month I invite an industry speaker to lecture in my class. Students are always eager to learn from someone with experiences and expertise, whether they are managers from a company, specialists in a technical area, or someone who just graduated few years ago but can share their experience.
Some people asked me: “Why bring someone who are not teacher to lecture in your class?” I answered: “We are not experts on everything, by inviting speakers with special expertise in a technical area will help students to broaden their knowledge. These people can share their experience and provide practical advices to students. Students can learn new things, new perspectives where they may be able to apply in their future career.” Having guest lecturers also helps me to learn new things and improve my training too. I often work with the guest speakers to develop new materials for my students to learn and keep my training up to date.
For example, a guest speaker specializes in music streaming shared his view about the current music business trends: “Many years ago, people listened to music on records, then on cassette tapes, then CDs, and today people download music from websites. Each time something new emerges, it destroys the old and creates new market, new business value, and lot of money for people who know how to seize the opportunity. Today we are at the transition time of music streaming services. Although Apple operates the largest online music store in the world, but Apple’s iTunes is old now and the new trend is in music streaming service. Today, you can listen to anything that you want by order it on demand without saving the file to a hard disk. For example, Spotify a new startup on streaming music have over 40 million paid users. Pandora, the Internet radio service also has 90 million users and currently dominates the streaming music industry. The question is why buying music when you can subscribe and listen to millions of songs whenever you like? Soon everything will be available for streaming, from video to music and eventually any digital things. In the near future, download will be gone and you can listen, read, and watch everything streaming to your PC, smartphone or tablets.
Few weeks ago I invited an “Internet of Things” expert to lecture about these emerging trends. He told the class: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of several smart devices within the Internet infrastructure. These devices can be accessed remotely and they can send information to others and begin a new age of “machine-to-machine” communication. This trend will change the way people live as well as societies very quickly. If you think personal computer and smartphone have changed people’s lives then you will be surprised of what the next things will do. When all devices are getting smarter and communicate with each other, everything will change. If you think Apple and Google are big, then you should think about future companies that could be ten times to fifty times bigger. If you think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg are rich, then you should think about who will be the next billionaire and trillionaires. The ability to network smart devices in a certain way will change everything and creates more devices where they transmits data into the cloud over the internet and coordinate activities to support our lives
Internet-based smart home is already here with smart devices such as smart lighting, smart TV, smart kitchen, smart appliances etc. These smart devices are all connected and managed efficiently by mobile apps. Home owners can lock or unlock doors; turn on or turn off kitchen appliances or TV using smartphone. Imagine that you are at work and forget to lock your front door, you can access your smart phone to check whether the door is locked or not and lock it by your smartphone. What will happen if you forget to turn off your kitchen when cooking something? It can cause a fire but with smart appliance the kitchen will turn off itself when it knows that you have left home and send message to remind you that do not worry, smart kitchen has solved the problem for you. Your refrigerator can send a request to your smartphone remind you that you forget to buy certain things when they runs out in the refrigerator. If you allow it to do the order, it will send signal to the market and request they send certain food to your house automatically. Your thermostat can learn when you are home and adjust the temperature accordingly and turn off when you leave home to save energy etc. All of these activities can be controlled through mobile app, making it convenient for the user. Today “Smart home” is still a new concept but it needs a lot of software so there are opportunities for startups to focus on this trend. Last year, Google brought Nest, a startup company that created the thermostat device that controls the temperature of the house for $3.2 Billion dollars. Who know what will happen to you if you start company specialize in the Internet of Things?
In smart city, there are smart lights to managing traffic flow based on video camera to monitor traffic and adjust the frequency of lighting (red, yellow or green) based on the number of cars. There are smart parking meters that can automatically change the pricing according to demand; more people want to park their cars, price will increase and less demand, prices will decrease. This system is now being tested in Los Angeles with very good results and will be deployed in many cities in the next few years.
In smart airport, the internet of things are being used to improve people’s travel by optimize the arrivals process where sensors will detect the traffic flow of people in the airport, their arrival time, how long they pick up baggage and leave the airport and adjust the work flows efficiently. Everything is fully automatic as smart sensors send data to others and prioritize activities without people to interfere. Smart sensors also track airplane maintenance to ensure that airlines can turn an aircraft in 30 minutes by having all the right equipment at the right place and track baggage for customers.
The “Internet of things” is still new and currently most of the works are being done by startups. Today most hardware for machine-to-machine communication are built by large electronic companies but there are few software that can collect, analyses data from them to do smart things and it opens a huge opportunities for all students who want to start their own company. Today smart devices that can make decision quickly are being used in self-driving cars, medical diagnosis and many more. If you are software engineer, you should think ahead about these opportunities because this is where the next trend will be and it will change everything.
After his presentation, students are no longer complain about the number of quizzes and exams that I have in my mobile programming courses. They knew that by having these skills, they can do many things as they all looking forward to the future. Some even suggested that I create a new course called the “Internet of things” for next year.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
