Dr. J.R. Reagan - Identity 4.0: Scaling for the Industrial Internet

This topic is a very personal personally interesting topic to me, as mentioned before, I was a consultant for about 25 years, primarily doing cybersecurity, and I've been teaching at Johns Hopkins university. They always say, have a plan B. Right? So when I wanted to retire from consulting, my plan B was academia was being a professor full time.

And I enjoy it eventually in, in Korea, in Asia and part in Europe, this word industry 4.0 certainly has popped up recently, not quite as known in the us, but is particularly of interest to our students, our research agenda for the things that we looked towards in the scaling of the industrial internet. And, and so that's what I wanted to talk about today, marrying that cybersecurity background that I have, and a lot around identity management to this new world of millions and trillions of things. And so what do we do with the identity when we now bump into this?

And so that's what I want to talk about today, scaling for the industrial internet industry 4.0, as I mentioned before, it's, it's see if I can get this moving forward. There we go. For those that don't know, and I do this very briefly, but for some, this is a little bit new industry, 4.0 is all about this transition, this, this revolution from the industrial revolution, which we're kind of familiar with towards the industrial revolution, 2.0 where we had electricity and we could create labor and mass production, you know, that automobiles.

And so there's these traumatic changes over time went to this industrial three point where it came into play. Some would say we spent the past 25, 30 years automating things, and now we have all the data and now what do we do with it?

You know, that's a very simple explanation, very simple question. But then in the past few years, now we have this new term industry 4.0, which IOT and cloud and technology automating complex tasks. The best way I've heard it describe is it's this collision this meeting of the cyber and the physical world. And I think that's a good way to describe it. So now we have this degree of complexity. We have IOT and cloud and technology now coming to the forefront. And so what do we do with that in terms of identity management, just to frame, because in there is a very simplified term.

We, we have technology in there. Technology means so many things, but in the, in the realm of industry 4.0, it means kind of all of this. And that's towards the, in the, in the inner circle there VR AR automated and, and virtual reality security 5g, which is huge. Now in Korea, they see that as really going to accelerate the next wave of innovation, particularly in Korea and, and Asia networks, cloud, big data, blockchain GPS, you can see all of that robotics, IOT and AI, all driving those things on the outside. And it's really interesting then to see what's happening.

I'll give you sort of some examples what's happening in Korea, but even in China, for example, smart factories this year, Samsung is converting 100 of its factories in Korea to smart factors. And so there, you know, this acceleration not, not in spans of five years, three years, but in one year is now we're seeing this right here in Singapore, FinTech, huge, really accelerating smart government, which is big in Korea. And you can kind of see the rest, all these being underpinned and driven by some basics. Certainly certainly identity being one of those. I'm a big guy on design.

I heard a lot about that yesterday, yesterday with UI and UX and things like that thought, this is a great quote. I heard with Simon who won the Nobel prize economics and 78. But it's all about saying that everyone who designs devices a course of action is changing existing situations into preferables. Some would say, unless your mother nature, you're designing something.

So when we think about design and how do we actually changing the existing situations into preferred ones that says we're not just at the whim of technology and where it goes, we, we can and will control that particularly now when we have this new space in industry 4.0 and identity. So I wanted to cover really 10, 10 quick areas, 10 areas of interest to us. As I mentioned before in our research agenda, 10 areas will hopefully be interesting to you as you think about your products, your services, the things that you do. And I'm sure there's a wide variety of that in here. Swarms.

The first one of these is it's all about this notion that it's not just individual things anymore. Now we have, we have this ability for differing devices, differing technologies, all these, anything from cars to drones, to the devices, themselves, being able now to self-describe self collaborate and stuff, organized into massive groups that can then tackle tasks in different ways than we had before coming together.

And, and then separate and introducing and collaborating on new tasks. The idea of swarms then starts to begin to challenge us when we begin to think about identity management, identity management. Not that it's a fault of any of our thinking, but as a, maybe a byproduct, we tend to think about it, singularly identity management for a thing, or maybe several things. But when we get into swarms, we're talking about massive sets of identities coming together for usually short periods of time solving things, being delegated tasks on our behalf, and then executing those and going away.

When we think about identity, then identity says, who are they? Who are they doing things on behalf of who's responsible for the outcomes of those? Those are all really interesting questions that typically we've only sort of said, it belongs to a human being, an individual. We have to think differently now about how do we manage identity in a rapidly self organizing construct like swarms. And this is one that we're looking at second to these in areas for us anyway, is this idea of APIs as the new middleman.

I know of several financial organizations in particularly New York have very notable ones that are now delegating. What has been traditionally knowledge of human beings, very smart human beings to APIs that APIs then become that new middleman to do things that we typically only expected human beings to do like risk.

One of those financial services firms I mentioned in New York is traditionally, when you call somebody on the phone, they then give you some advice and they're taking their knowledge of the institution, their knowledge of the financial products, and being able to give you sound advice based on the regulations and the rules are under and knowing the risk, your risk tolerance, and doing that. That's a very human being type of scenario.

Instead, this firm is taking that knowledge and the risk knowledge of the market at very extreme velocities and putting those into an API and having that then fed on a near realtime basis to different software products, to human beings, through a UX UI interface. But now our, our interface, our expectation of the identity of who we're interfacing with has changed. It's not the human being on the other side anymore. The interface now is the API.

So again, it challenges our notion that that we're not just dealing with a human being anymore. I don't think we've figured out the construct anymore, either of, okay, if that's sound advice, bad advice, we've seen algorithms go bad on wall street. We've seen the circuit breakers kick in at the, at the, the markets gets sideways, but we have to start thinking about the things around this, the risk, right? If this is as automated risk and automated device, what role does, what role does this API have in, in the responsibility it's giving to you?

The third of these areas that we're looking at is AI as the new UI. So again, we've talked a lot about UI user interface, how important it is, right? And designers would know this, that if the, if the product doesn't work, it doesn't work.

You know, in terms of user interface, in most cases, now many are saying that the artificial intelligence, the way that's wired and the way that that intelligence is automated and presented to the user, this is why we talk a lot about bots. For example, the bots need to almost feel like a human being when they're interfacing with somebody has to be almost transparent. We're getting so good at this in my field in academia, there's an experiment done in one of the major universities in the Midwest and in the United States, students were interacting with a bot with AI behind it.

90, 96% of the students did not know they were not interfacing with a, with a human being. They thought they were interfacing with a professor, which means I'm out of a job very quick be to, to career number three here very shortly. But this also says two for our identity management challenges. How do we construct identity management?

Not just in terms of permissions, not in terms of claimed identities, but in terms of personalities, how do we construct these in terms of being able to sufficiently put the intelligence and, and the identity management around this, where, and, and inter a, a human being can interface with that seamlessly and, and have frictionless, whatever that is, transactions, conversations, and vice giving, et cetera. So AI as the new UI, the fourth of the area that then impacts us as we think about identity management is informatics.

And I've heard it described as the new Latin, the German Latin, those basic languages that have underpinned all the other languages that have S sprouted afterwards. Now we have this new lingo franca, this new, under language that underpins business, which is informatics, that would the information and the data is essentially the language of business. It is the way we will communicate.

And so now, as we've seen before with artificial intelligence, the way we're going to describe that user interfaces, the notion that informatics then becomes a central role in the description and the success of, of identity management takes on a whole different field that now, even then we have to maybe even start having self describing data, which then takes on another role.

Another notion of identity management, Sandy Petland, who's a professor up at MIT has a really great bunch of projects around informatics privacy being one of those and whether or not it succeeds, we'll have to see, but it's important. I think a launching point into being able to start seeing can data self describe itself, you know, we all are, are pretty good at our profession. And we'll what we know about privacy and how important that is.

We know, we know that as human beings, you know, we're okay with offering identities in certain contexts and certain situations, but ask us 30 seconds later, maybe by a different person. And that, that permission changes here. You can have my identity, cause I wanna buy a car. Don't you ask me what my identity is. I want to give it to you. Why did that change all of a sudden, right?

So this whole notion that informatics and particularly data can possibly self-describe itself, the informatics and data can possibly have its own identity has a real interesting context and construct for the industry 4.0, there may be no other possible way for us to have data flying around the internet and being consumed and used by things in a permission in a permissive way, unless we have it being able to self describe and have those permissions contained within itself. That's a really farfetched kind of construct about identity that we're taken away from human beings and put it into data.

And it can describe itself. Sandy Petland, I think is one. That's being able to look at that. And I think it's a, it's a really interesting project. The fifth area. Then we look at related to identity management and industry 4.0, we know B2B. We've heard that quite a bit business to business business, to consumer.

We're now getting into H to H human, to humans, personal area networks, and being able to now we, we can see this being able to be next to each other, to have things connect to each other, even have networks around us and our bodies with pills with, with sensors, built into clothes that now the personal area networks around us and the things that we wear can also take on a life of its on the identity as well. When we have medicine, we have pills that we can swallow that can actually monitor lots of things. Glucose levels, the health of our, our bodies, etcetera.

Those aren't just dumb devices anymore. Whether when we have in a different way, and if we have personal area networks with our clothes, all these things, then as I mentioned are, do things on our behalf. We're delegating things to them.

And, and again, they have, they have identities then associated with us that we then delegate our identities to them. What we don't know is for these personal area networks, how do we need to have sort of sub identities of ourselves that then we give to these personal area networks? So they are descriptive about our medical health, about our psychological health, about our feelings, our site, our, our, how we're, how we're thinking about something. Our emotions, MIT again, is doing some really interesting work about emotions.

And, and so all these sort of delegations aren't without this identity component, all these things that we delegate would actually mean nothing. If it wasn't associated with some something, somebody, and so personal area networks really stretch that for us as we get into industries and we're walking around and we're fixing things and we're interfacing with things and also that those parts and systems are doing it on our behalf. Now personal area networks take over The next to these is voice as the new platform.

This I, you know, I would be probably the biggest skeptic when it comes to new technology. I shouldn't be by now, I'm old enough, I'm wiser. But when they come out, I see them going, what in the world could that be useful for really seriously?

You know, when I saw the Alexas and stuff and going, yeah, really is somebody gonna walk around their house and say, Hey, you know, I want some more dog food. And I'm, I'm really interested by how far this is taking off. And when I sit back then and start watching things take over and watch how ambient is and how that it's actually taking, you know, again, delegating things out of our lives that we would normally, that we'd normally have to say, be explicit about, do this for me.

Well, it's kind of knowing that already voice then. And I've seen this in China quite a bit too. I didn't realize how people view that as so frictionless that they wanted to use that instead of typing, I guess it makes sense, right? That now just being able to speak in my smartphone, speak my house, speak in my car, speak in public places. My voice then becomes my identity. My voice then does things on my behalf, my voice act actions, things. And so voice as the new platform then will sort of say, okay, wait a second identity now takes on another realm, right?

The voice now, as a, as a platform can do so many different things. When I talk to my students, I also start really hitting upon. This is where we start seeing worlds collide. That's not just voice, it's not a command, right. It's voice at a certain point in time with a certain intonation actually evoking something. Right.

So if I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, those are three different things at the same, same voice actually invoking three different actions potentially on my behalf as a cold, I might even say it differently, but the voice then now gives us a whole different identity to how we interface with machines and the machines will have to understand that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and there's many more examples of this and, and the industry 4.0 will start to pick this up seven area that we're looking at is this area, this, this notion of how hyper local things are, you know, great examples that, that each, each example, I mean, it's very local to me, but we're also seeing this in industry 4.0 age where things that will happen in Germany at a particular factory, at a point in the supply chain line, matter to the output of that potentially in China or the us, you know, what's happening on a BMW line about that car impacts something down the line, potentially sales, potentially.

If you go all the way through where this then gets picked up in the supply chain to an Analyst in wall street, who actually does want to know, are these parts really, truly effective? Are they coming out? The right speed are the new parts? There's so many questions around that. There's so many questions that people want to know.

And usually it's been after the fact that we do things we have whole vocabulary is invented for them as channel checks, quality assurance all these, after the fact, things that now get built into this notion that hyperlocal information can become useful around the globe, that flat world. So hyperlocal then and aggregate of, of these different technologies in particular locations at points in time around particular products become useful. As we describe the identities of the things that are around either people or products or, or services.

And so the hyper localness, now we do want to know, we will want to know when something was happening in Germany on that supply chain, what was happening around it? What vehicle was it associated with? What robot was doing it at the time? Was there a supervisor there, you know, and what is it meeting? So now we have a whole different, I guess, different continuum of, of identity that gets associated with each of these is we call just in time. Innovation used to be very much planned innovation.

We, you know, and we still have much of this, but now because we in industry four, we have all the devices. We have all of these smart devices that can actually do things on our behalf. And this is happening. Now we have self-describing machinery that we don't have to send somebody out there anymore to see if it's breaking. It will tell us I'm going to break. These are the conditions that usually cause me to break, or I, I can see it now.

And it's, and is telling things out. And the just in time, then innovation could say, okay, now evoke this process. This identity that is, that is telling us this thing.

This is a, this is a trusted identity is doing something on behalf of a human being potentially that we've delegated to it. And now, because of that, start making some things happen, bring in the parks, replace the parks, ground, the aircraft, whatever those are, the innovation cycle then starts to change much more towards the actual event and early on, as opposed to afterwards, what can we do to change something?

We also, we've seen this too with, particularly in industry 4.0, where, because we're giving, we're delegating to these different devices, the ability to say, you can morph, you can change. You can. I mentioned before those swarms, you can, you can collaborate without having to have a human being there. So now we can have innovation actually exist without a human being, directing it.

And, and for example, swarms being able to create different products depending on what's needed at the time, just in time innovation that we're seeing, this is really happening quite a bit, particularly in automation, ninth of these is new organizations, the gig economy, which you've heard a lot about cetera.

But as we think about swarms of things and IOT, now we can also think about this much more about human beings too, that we can actually the identities than associated with that change because not just a singular person or smaller groups of people actually doing certain tasks, but we have entire new organizations then that come together to, to activate and execute on certain tasks, without a human being, oftentimes directing them.

And we, we can think of a lot of times around political types of things, but now we also see that as, as people want to create their own products, as people want to collaborate on new ways of in invention, particularly down in China, when we look at hardware innovation down, Shingen we see a lot of this kind of new organizations, people kind of popping in, popping out, creating something, validating it and, and, and exporting it quickly, even if they're not actually in SHN China. Right? So we have this idea then that identities don't have to be again with just a person.

We don't even have to have identities with with known entities and organizations. We can have, self-describing almost pop-up organizations occurring quite frequently around the globe executing on tasks. And it really challenges the notion of identities, not just really associated with the human beings, but associated with the organizations.

Can it, can it go together? Can it come together, invent something, get it out to the market and then go away and, and deconstruct. And another one pop up tomorrow. How do we manage those sort of transient identities associated with organizations? And lastly is the four PS. We've heard this a lot with marketing and price and, and position and those sorts of things, but this is much more related to the, the, the data, right.

You know, I used to hear it a lot when I was working with the innovation centers that I ran around data and, and data velocity and things, but we better look at it from what can be actionable from moving from reactive to proactive, to predictive, to prescriptive, to preemptive. And those four PS then start to describe, okay, identities taking on really new tasks on our behalf. That might challenge how we've seen identities before to have an identity, actually be prescriptive to swallow a pill and actually say, you need some insulin.

And by the way, you don't, you should not be waiting to go to the hospital tomorrow to get it where Kenny pill an identity, then actually be prescriptive and start preempting things on your behalf. Who's delegating that whose identity is that, and same thing with aircraft parts, grounding, airplanes, stopping, stopping supply chains, because things are happening.

So identity is hopefully what I've been able to do is, is, you know, having a little bit of a journey through what we're thinking about in the industry 4.0 space, and hopefully challenging our notion that it's not just a human being anymore. It's just not just singular thing anymore, but there's a lot of different concepts are gonna challenge. How do we view identity as we, so hopefully that was useful. Thank you very much. Any questions? What were the four BS again, being going from reactive as a proactive, preemptive, prescriptive, predictive, thanks. Sorry. We have a little bit of report.

Any other questions? I'm very interested about this personal level, right? Smart classes. Smart. Right. So what behind, for, for this personal Level where the ologies did you say technologies? Yeah.

You know, there's lots of sensors now. I I've seen the, for example, particularly with smart clothes that now we can embed the sensors. A lot of the athlete performance has been around analyzing the, the sweat, for example, how much salt is in the sweat, how much, how much is being sweated at one particular time, from different parts of the body, et cetera. So there's, there's just kind of a simple saline type of sensor.

Sorry, talking about the network. Oh, the network. So Bluetooth or Yeah.

You know, well, Bluetooth right now is the simple, the simplest way that that's coming into play with the smartphones. I would say that over time though, that we'll see something else pop up and I, I'm not smart enough to know what that is right now. And I think we're gonna see in two ways, one is both the communication locally through, through Bluetooth, but also are there faster ways of getting the information through, you know, wireless or, or those sorts of things That was also quite fascinat about this HH idea that this is mainly concentrate on the self on myself?

Or is it also related to communicating with your next person? So some, some kind of loosely coupled systems meeting each other and then partying again, this also part of this H to H concept. Yes. It's really both, you know, age to H the human to human interface.

You know, it's really, when we're thinking about this now for 3m actually did this recently, they were, they were actually curious about who has innovation in the entire 3m organization. They knew that you as a scientist were particularly innovative, but why are you as a scientist not particularly innovative? And what they found is you would inter interact with more people than, than you would. And so this H to H instead of always handing out business cards, we can start to see that there's a length of time that we're talking at a certain place. And why aren't you involved?

And can we start then having people aggregate in different places more to share that information, they call it the water cooler moment where, you know, going back here, hi, how are you doing? Let's we've been working on that sort of stuff. So the age to age can, can go off like that, too. Thank you. We're good. Thank you.