The future of innovation

Originally posted October 22, 2018

The ANSI Committee on Education met last week in Washington D.C. during World Standards Week and posted an update on its activity:

ANSI WSW 2018 CoE Update October 2018

One of the highlights of the CoE’s work is determination of the student paper winner, this year given to Julia Suozzi of the University of Virginia for her paper, linked below:

When Mundane Objects Become Smart: Challenges of Standardizing the Internet of Things

Abstract.  The purpose of this essay is to address the need for standards in modern communication, explain the challenges in creating these standards, and propose various solutions to these challenges. With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects have transformed into connected devices that are vulnerable to a host of attacks. In order to protect users, standards must be put into place. Although necessary, standards are extremely complex to develop due to their sociotechnical nature. Challenges in this process include market definition, determining what and when to standardize, organizational responsibility, and international competition. First, market definition must be considered due to the nature of standards compliance. Businesses comply with standards when there is a market associated with them and that market is well-defined. Since the IoT does not have such a monolithic market, how should standards be created? The next major challenge is knowing what to standardize and when it is appropriate to do so. This paper will explore approaches as described by members of the government, industry, and academia. 

Responsibility is also a major challenge of standardizing the IoT. With so many organizations holding stake in the process, who is truly responsible for taking the lead? This question brings up issues of organizational politics, as each group has their own agenda and mechanism for reaching consensus. Lastly is a discussion of international competition. Many organizations involved in IoT standardization have international participation. Each of these nations has a fundamentally different view on issues such as “safety,” “privacy,” and “security,” making it difficult to reach global consensus. This issue is explored using the recent US-China trade war. In order to better understand these challenges and discuss potential discourse, a case study based on interviews with key IoT stakeholders is presented, focusing on the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology

One of the best ways to teach standards is to do standards.  Standards Michigan now has a footprint in all fifty United States and, as the first mover and catalyst for user-interest standards advocacy by the education facilities industry (see ABOUT), we are happy to walk anyone through the regulatory landscape where the technical and business specifics of planning, designing, building, operating, maintaining and managing these “cities-within-cities” that we call the emergent #SmartCampus.

Information about how to get started on entering the 2019 competition is available in the link below:

ANSI Announces 2019 Student Paper Competition: “How Do Standards Help Mitigate Disaster?”

We welcome faculty, students and subject matter experts to our livecasts (11 AM Eastern time every day) to participate in “code-writing and vote getting” — i.e the essential substance of our approach to lowering the #TotalCostofOwnership of education in the United States and elsewhere.  We do less standards administration and conformity and more “getting into the weeds” of leading practice discovery and promulgation.  Getting into the weeds is the most effective way to understand and master the methods of becoming effective in standards advocacy; especially in the standards suites that are incorporated by reference into public safety and sustainability legislation.

ANSI Announces Winner of 2018 Student Paper Competition https://t.co/60VrZYtObR Congratulations to Julia Suozzi of @UVA, who was recently recognized at #WorldStandardsWeek #IoT pic.twitter.com/70hAAw4wAT

— ANSI (@ansidotorg) October 23, 2018

Issue: [12-78]

Category: Academics, Public Policy

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Christine Fischer, Paul Green,  Julia Suozzi

LEARN MORE:

ANSI Essential Requirements: Due process requirements for American National Standards.  (In effect, this is the equivalent of the US Constitution in the private standards development)

https://www.standardslearn.org/