A case for improved digital safety – Malaysia Flight 370

I saw this recent article in CNN.com describing the technology that is available today that could have tracked and found the aircraft and the poor 12 crew and 227 passengers from 15 nations, the relatives and wider communities. Its title : Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could spur air safety changes provides a summary of key real time and remote tracking and telemetry systems. In this day and age of higher volumes of technology moving through the air, on the ground and pervading into everyday lives there is a pressing need to have balancing control systems that provide better contextualization and sense making of their use and their users. This is complex in terms of net-neutrality, cyber security and privacy invasion but also offers the trade-off and better control to enable improved quality of life, sustainability and real time safety from augmentation and responsive systems that support people, their activities and environment.

The official BEA French Investigators final report recommendations from the Air France Flight 447 crash in 2009 relating to telecommunications and specifically flight recorders had not been followed. Whether these systems would have prevented deliberate sabotage or not is a question in defining what level of tracking and intervention needed in modern technology systems. I see this can be in three broad categories of what I calldigital ecosystem maturity. These are additive, scalable, modular, recursive and fractal in nature.(a topic for a later blog perhaps.)

• Systems that monitor and communicate context of objects, fixed and moving. The definition of objects can be anything in the physical or virtual world. I read recently for example an average Human has 1500 objects they own or interact with, not including perishables, commodities (A great book by Irene Ng, Value & Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy)

• Passive systems that communicate, recommend actions and possible outcomes to users and controllers. Examples of this are emergency alert systems to warn users, or contextual search and augmented reality systems to improve feedback, analytics and decision making. (perhaps also called Bigdata Analytics in the large)

• Active systems that intervene, correct and potentially override human controls to protect individuals or groups or locations from incorrect actions.

The first and second options are technically feasible today and I see emerging in TheInternet of Things, digitization and automation in many new areas from smart cars, smart retail, Telehealth, Online Education , automated supply chain, robotics to nano technology. The third option is a bigger step on taking contextualization to the next level where by artificial intelligence can not only augment and advise humans but can take the step of correcting and preventing errors. We already see these types of systems in self-driving cars that operate within parameters that are fast approaching fully 360 degree awareness of their operating environmental parameters. This is still early days but the argument for these three levels of digital ecosystems being developed has compelling evidence everywhere.

I recalled a diagram I drew while on a flight to a conference in San Diego a few years ago in describing ideas on digital ecosystems. The technical barriers versus the needs and benefits of such digitization is not just a technology issue but does include ethical, commercial, political, geographical and spheres of spatial monitoring. Computationally the ability to track and react to real-time events is a combination of local on-board/embedded systems, events and local communications and the wider set of connectivity and response systems in region and globally. This is a new pattern for connected systems that represent a wider definition I develop in digital ecosystems thinking. This incorporates extending the cloud into multi-networked systems as well as developments in embedded and smart objects. I see this as an urgent challenge and opportunity to define effective digital ecosystem level thinking and system services that can respond in an integrated way with human events and resources. There is much to do but much can already be done to rapidly grow the use of technology for the better.

#Regulation #Digital #DigitalStrategy #Transport