The JavaOne 2013 Java Community Keynote
By Janice J. Heiss on Sep 26, 2013
by Timothy Beneke
Geoff Lees, Senior Vice President and General Manager,
Microcontrollers, at Freescale Semiconductor, got things rolling
Thursday morning at the Java Community Keynote to a packed,
standing-room-only crowd. Lees presented a precise and thoughtful vision
of how the coming Internet of Things (IoT) might become a reality.
“The microcontroller community is rapidly moving to adopt Java and
we need your help,” said Lees. He described a picture of the IoT that,
for him, changes daily with ever-increasing speed. Current network
developers often have a conception of edge node devices that consist of
X86 processors with large scale OS, or multicore mobile processors with
mobile OS. He spoke of an alternative picture in which edge node devices
are everywhere in our environment, monitoring local climate conditions,
monitoring mechanical factors like stress loading, and traffic data,
and making smart roads happen. He sees node devices dealing with our
busiest highways, offering road tolling and other measures to even out
traffic flow. Or in agriculture, the IoT might monitor climate,
humidity, weather conditions, and local microclimates. He spoke of smart
homes where existing home networks are coming together to conjoin
future personal networks and even body networks. He spoke of the IoT in
aiding fitness and health tracking.
Lees elaborated a vision in which local autonomous data
intelligence is gathered through local command control, and data sets
are passed onto the cloud for higher level analytics. He explained that
the IoT is changing the way the semiconductor industry is thinking about
technology, in terms of processing node transitions, greater
utilization of advanced sensor technologies, integration of those
technologies, ever rapid adoption of low power technologies both from
processing as well as design techniques. Advances in signal analog
integration and the IoT are bringing these things closer.
“Instead of the next few years, we’re thinking about how to do all of this in the next few months,” said Lees.
In addition, a new class of products is arriving where
connectivity underpins all product development. “Over the last decade,”
commented Lees, “the microcontroller industry has shipped 150 billion
devices into the market, the vast majority of which were not
interconnected -- they were single, local points of intelligence. Today,
the plans for those products are becoming ubiquitously part of another
network. Networking technology needs to be built in with the capability
to run advanced communication stacks present.” All of this will require
more memory, more technology, and higher gate density.
He spoke of software becoming the big differentiator in the
microcontroller community. “Today,” he explained, “in the embedded
microcontroller community, our customers spend approximately 60% of
their R&D on software as compared with hardware development. In the
next 3 years that is forecast to become 70%. We need to see the software
enablers as underpinning these system solution products. All of this
comes together with a wide range of networking protocols, low-power
communication protocols, and stacks. And the Holy Grail would be to have
IPV 6 readily available from the cloud to networking, all the way to
the edge node. Until that becomes enabled by cost, by process
technology, by miniaturization and power reduction, we will have a wide
range of sub-net protocols.”
He spoke of a move towards universal MEMS devices and technology
for sensors, followed by the integration of universal MEMS within
microcontrollers and embedded processors. “All of this,” he insisted
“will come together as part of the ecosystem with all of these smart
services. And these smart services depend on available local service
providers and service models that we, the consumer, want to pay for, or
that health insurers want to pay for. Providing this service and
platform for secured services is a key for the adoption of the IoT.”
He expanded on his vision of a landscape for IoT, which would
extend all the way from the cloud, down through processing nodes, local
connectivity networks, and on to edge or sensor nodes, where the sensor,
the MCU, and local connectivity come together. The challenge today,
according to Lees, is that this diversity uses a huge range of
technologies, different developmental environments, different software
ecosystems, and different partner networks. There exist different
security classes and considerations -- even down to the current edge
node devices which offer no appreciable security. This clearly is not a
landscape that will provide the kind of secured service delivery that
the IoT needs.
The key to creating this secure IoT lies with Java developers. Edge
nodes offered through Java and Java ME offer the potential to have
secure encryption and authentication services throughout the network.
Developing those in other environments will be locally difficult, will
not be global, and will not reach the tipping point required for the IoT
to develop. “Edge nodes is a category encompassing thousands and
thousands of applications -- it’s billions of devices, most of which
will include some form of MCU or embedded MPU technology,” Lees
explained. “Sensors and actuators, integrated connectivity and an energy
source, whether that’s energy harvesting or ultra low power battery
technology and long life power generation – these nodes will need to be
installed in remote places with battery life spans of 10 years or more –
clearly out of the range of today’s processor technologies. And many
will need to be industrial or automotive grade technologies.”
He spoke of a challenge to bring performance and cost requirements
so as to harness and secure larger memory stacks which will require more
software in the next 2-3 years.
After offering considerably more technical detail, he spoke of how
IoT could benefit humans, focusing on home tele-health and the home
health hub, something Freescale has invested in recently. The
availability of a wide range of personal biometrics and health analytics
in the home health hub could benefit our health enormously, according
to Lees. Until now, the technology has been limited by the absence of
open standard secured service across the network to complete the link
onto the health provider, and medical insurance providers. The new model
offers a huge adoption of preventive health as opposed to diagnostic
clinical health. Consumers, health insurers and the medical industry all
favor it.
“Measuring heart rate, blood pressure, and blood glucose
continually every day through changing conditions offers an immense
picture of our personal health with diagnostic insights into the
development of progressive disease and chronic disease management,”
observed Lees. “At the local hub level the installation of analytics
will offer feedback and guidance on lifestyle, on the management of
conditions and offer the personal feedback needed for us to all manage
our own health. The data can also be sent in datasets for further
analysis in the network and cloud so the next time you visit your health
practitioner, all of that data is available.”
He reported that Freescale and Oracle have announced a new
agreement collaborating on engineering to develop a platform for
software and hardware models for both edge nodes and a wide variety of
gateway solutions. “We’re working on optimizing Java together and
bringing Java functionality further into the network. We’re even
envisaging what Java might look like on a transmit-only Bluetooth
low-energy node in the field for 25 years, a concept today that is
unthinkable for a Java model. The key is to provide a secure service
delivery for our customers and for service providers across the
industry.”
The rest of the keynote consisted of a variety of informative and entertaining presentations.
Donald Smith, Senior Director, Product Management, at Oracle’s Java
Platform Group, took the stage and commented on recent developments in
recent JavaOnes. JavaOne 2011 was about moving Java forward and
rebooting the infrastructure after the Java SE 7 launch. Last year, the
theme was innovation and showing Java’s role in major tech segments like
the cloud, big data, IoT and open source.
“This year,” he said, “we take one step beyond all that, and
celebrate the 'End User' and 'Application Developers'. We want to go
beyond the typical ‘ISV’ that appears at JavaOne keynotes and show some
inspiring applications being built thanks to the hard work of the Java
ecosystem.”
After some rousing appreciation of the Raspberry Pi Challenge, the
Codegarten and other JavaOne matters by Tori Wieldt of the Oracle
Technology Network, a series of creative contributors to Java took the
stage, hosted by Henrik Stahl, Vice President, Product Management, Java
Platform Group at Oracle.
-- Java Champion Stephan Janssen, founder of BeJUG, Devoxx(4kids),
Parleys & playpass.be talked about “Devoxx for Kids,” a one-day
event he organized in response to his 11-year-old son’s desire to learn
to program.
-- Oracle Academy Vice President, Alison Derbenwick Miller,
described the Academy’s important work impacting 2.5 million students in
102 countries.
-- Aditya Gupta, an impressive 10-year-old Minecraft hacker,
entertained the audience with his hacking demo where he showed off some
video explosions.
-- Two Duke Segway robots appeared on stage and strutted around under the guidance of Java Champion, Stephen Chin.
-- A video was shown of Java Champion Paul Perrone’s Java-powered cars.
-- Drew Hylbert, VP, Technology and Infrastructure at Opower, came
onstage and shared how Java technology is used to enable consumers to
save energy.
-- Mike Marzo, a Technology Fellow at Goldman Sachs, discussed the
value of the 100 million lines of Java code that Goldman’s developers
have written over the years.
-- Finally “father of Java” and Chief Software Architect at Liquid
Robotics, James Gosling appeared and remarked that Aditya Gupta made him
feel that he too should be a Minecraft hacker. He showed the view from
the water looking at Hawaii from one of the Liquid Robotics nodes and
explained in detail how it all worked.
The Community Keynote offered a strong sense of renewal and pride at what Java has accomplished and where it may be headed.
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