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Software Innovation Shapes the Future at IDF16

Collaborate With Peers, Software Innovators and Other Industry Experts at Intel Developer Forum 2016

Build robotics on the Intel® Edison Platform. Discover motorized wheelchairs guided by facial gestures and see the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World through virtual reality. These are just some of the projects developers will experience at IDF16 in San Francisco this week.

Software innovation takes shape at Moscone Center August 16-18 with IoT projects like intelligent vending machines, smart home products and an intelligent transportation infrastructure. Software developers bring hardware to life in the Maker Space — which includes demonstrations like wearables that detect athlete stress, IoT enabled toys and code-free IoT miniature battle-bots.

In the technology showcase, the Intel pavilion shows end-to-end solutions leveraging Intel hardware and software. The Intel® Software Developer Community hosts a Buzz Workshop for game developers, showing ISV and partner enablement stories and demonstrating Intel developer tools and resources. 

IoT Solutions Address Real World Issues

Throughout IDF, the Intel® IoT Team is demonstrating innovative solutions which will touch various parts of life from Smart Homes to Transportation solutions. Workshops from Hackster.IO and others will provide expert guidance on developer projects. See the full list of IoT offerings in the following box:

Intel® IoT Developer Program Demonstrations at IDF16

THE INTEL PAVILION

Path to Product: Transportation  A connected transportation rapid path to product edge IoT solution, this proof of concept was created using Intel® IoT Developer Kit, industrial sensors, and Intel® IoT Gateway. This solution monitors the status of a refrigerated trailer containing perishables.

IBM GOLD SPONSOR BOOTH

Path to Product: Smart Home  A smart home rapid path to product edge IoT solution using cloud data analytics, was created with the Intel® IoT Developer Kit, industrial sensors,  Intel® IoT Gateway and IBM* Bluemix* cloud services. This solution monitors the status of a home’s front door and garage door for increased security.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

Path to Product: Intelligent Vending Machine  A retail vertical rapid path to product edge IoT solution using cloud data analytics, features a proof of concept that was created using the Intel® IoT Developer Kit, industrial sensors, Intel® IoT Gateway and Microsoft* Azure* cloud services. This solution monitors the inventory, product sales, and maintenance of a vending machine.

Intel® Commercial IoT Featuring Smart HVAC Control  A temperature-controlled environment, and includes three edge devices that monitor temperature, light and loudness. The sensors provide continuous streaming data to the Intel® IoT Gateway, including indications of failure.

Intelligent Infrastructure for Autonomous Cars  An intelligent infrastructure for autonomous cars using cloud data analytics, this proof of concept was created with the Intel® IoT Gateway, Intel® IoT Developer Kit, industrial sensors and Microsoft* Azure* cloud services. Autonomous cars can take more intelligent actions to avoid accidents based on other cars on the street and their speed. Camera mounted on poles are used at the intersections and sensors connected to Intel IoT Gateway to collect contextual information.

Software Innovators Shape Technology Direction

Also present at IDF will be members of the Intel® Software Innovators. The Intel® Software Innovators Program supports innovative, independent developers who display an ability to create and demonstrate forward-looking projects by providing them with speaking and demonstration opportunities such as IDF. Innovators will demonstrate technology applications including the following: 

Wheelie: Hands free robotic wheelchair.

Helios: HELIOS employs Intel® RealSense™ technology to provide a series of accessibility features for visually impaired individuals.

Shape Song Music VR:  Create your own instruments to play along with songs in a fully reactive and immersive virtual world.

7VR Wonders of Ancient World:  Recreation of the 7 Ancient Wonders into a Virtual Reality tour.

Leave the Nest:  A virtual flying game. 

Peer Into the Future at the Maker Space

This year the Maker Space consists of two main areas: the Demo Alcove and the Maker Sessions Lab.  The Demo Alcove area spotlights a wide range of projects, prototypes and companies with commercial projects. In addition to demos and sessions, contestants from America’s Greatest Makers TV show, winners of the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT and Intel roadshows appear within the Maker Space at IDF16. The Maker Session Lab provides an opportunity to build with the latest Intel® maker products or attend instructor-led sessions.

Maker Space Sessions, Demonstrations & Panel

Instructor-Led Sessions

Industrial IoT Solution Using the Intel® IoT Developer Kit:  teaches how to use a gateway to connect and manage edge devices

Mobile Apps for Connected IoT Products in Minutes:  Learn to use Blynk* to rapid prototype projects on the Intel® IoT Developer Kit

Photo booth Using Visual Programming in Minutes:  Create a photo booth using Octoblu* IoT platform and the Intel® Arduino 101.

Demonstrations

Thunder Wake – Create music with the Intel® Arduino 101*

Hybrid Group – Toyhub enables head-to-head gaming in the real world

DFRobotics – Use robotics to automatically maintain inventory

Beacon of Hope – Showcases a discreet intervention device to combat human trafficking

Nurro – Shows wearable that monitors stress levels during and after athletic training

Octoblu – See mini battle-bots and use code-free IoT to rapidly prototype your ideas

Staten Island MakerSpace – The Educational Gravity Garden uses an Intel® Edison board to automate gardening

Panel Discussion

Hackster.Io – Open Source software created the internet, should hardware follow the same path?

The Future is Taking Shape

Let’s face it; transitioning your great innovation into a product is the most difficult part of IoT. At IDF16 Intel® will demonstrate several ongoing “path to product” projects surrounding transportation, smart houses and even autonomous cars!

Whether you want to make IoT fly, create the next hit game or automate an industry — the developer experiences at IDF16 are shaping the future of IoT and other software innovations. Visit the IDF website for a conference overview and more information on shaping the future of what you make. 

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MeshCentral2 – Alpha 2

Fresh off the latest release of MeshCommander 0.2.8, I just released MeshCentral2 Alpha 2, the very latest in super easy to setup and use cloud management solution. MeshCentral2 now has a full Intel® AMT MPS server so it can now receive and handle Client Initiated Remote Access (CIRA) connections. Better yet, it does so better than any software I have seen before. You can go from almost nothing to running your own server and managing Intel® AMT computers over the cloud in a few minutes. On top of all that, MeshCentral2 integrates the very latest version of MeshCommander so you can not only get Intel® AMT connections setup quickly, you can use these connections to immediately manage your computers and it’s all web based.

Along with this release, I recorded a YouTube tutorial video showing how to get CIRA setup. In this version, we setup CIRA manually using MeshCommander. In some ways, this is pretty amazing since you need lots of software working perfectly to perform this task manually with such ease. Future versions will automate this making the process even easier.

Feel free to give MeshCentral2 a spin: download it here, follow installation instructions and if you like, get CIRA setup. MeshCentral2 does not yet have an in-band MeshAgent, but we are working on that, right now you can only manage Intel® AMT machines.

Ylian Saint-Hilaire
http://meshcommander.com/meshcentral2

MeshCentral2 now has a full Intel AMT MPS / CIRA server so you can manage your
Intel® AMT computers over the cloud. Best of all, the server is amazingly simple to install.

In this flow, we manually setup Intel® AMT to connect to the server. In the future we will
automate this, but having all of the software to do it manually is really great.

Take a look for yourself, in this demonstration video I manually configure Intel® AMT with CIRA settings
and get Intel® AMT connected to a new server. Everything is done in a few minutes.

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Announcing: Winners of the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT

Team IoT Vaidya Takes Grand Prize with their Cognitive Healthcare System for Rural Areas

For eight weeks, Ultimate Coder teams went head to head in an effort to develop the most innovative commercial IoT solution using the new Intel® IoT Developer Kit. It was an amazing eight weeks packed with action and discovery, but only one team could come out on top. The judges have reviewed each project, and the final results are in. So without further ado, here is the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT Winner:

Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT Grand Prize Winner  

Congratulations to our “Ultimate Coder” Grand Prize winner—Team IoT Vaidya! Their project, Cognitive Healthcare System for Rural Areas, was scored as the unanimous winner by our six judges. Their project helps to bridge the gap between remote areas and doctors, connecting those in need with proper care. 

Judges rated them highly in all categories, including:

  • Posting informative blog posts that tracked their progress
  • Creating work that reflected their initial proposal
  • Using the Intel® IoT Developer Kit and other technologies
  • Their project’s ability to become a viable marketable product
  • Quality of the final submission

Team IoT Vaidya Judges’ Comments:

  • “Their hard work is evident. The team was very engaging. They ran into many hurdles and they were able to solve the problems.”
  • “Very well done demo video at the end. I felt like this team had confidence based on a clear understanding of what they wanted to achieve.”
  • Very good concept, neatly described. Project has scope to be taken to next level. More economical.”

To learn more about Team IoT Vaidya and their solution, visit: Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge 2016 – Team Update: IoT Vaidya

Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT Runner Up

Congratulations to our second place winner, Team Whirlwind, with their project, TransitIQ. The team worked to develop a way to automate cars with a cost-effective solution featuring high tech hardware and firmware with cloud solutions. 

To learn more about Team Whirlwind and their solution, visit: Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge 2016 – Team Update: Whirlwind

 

Final Thoughts

We commend all of the teams for their tremendous progress and accomplishments, and want to thank all those who have followed along over the past eight weeks. Five total teams competed in the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge for IoT, and all did amazing work in eight short weeks.

Their pioneering projects using the Intel® IoT Developer Kit are truly inspiring. We look forward to seeing how our teams will continue to make an impact in the space, and hearing about future projects inspired by our Challenge participants. 

For more information on the Intel® IoT Developer Kit, visit: Intel® IoT Developer Kit.

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PresentMonLauncher – DX12/Vulkan Benchmarking

A quick introduction to me; I’m Andrew from TechteamGB. I run a technology-based Youtube channel that covers the gaming end of PC hardware and have reviewed some fantastic bits of kit including Intel’s Skylake and Broadwell-E CPUs. If you are interested in hardware, come take a look.

Onto the application. Intel published a great program called PresentMon, which allows for ETW based FPS and Frame time monitoring, especially for benchmarking DX12/UWP/Vulkan games, that applications like FRAPS don’t support. It’s a command line interface so can be tricky for less technically inclined people to handle, especially as you need to CD to the right directory, then type out the right arguments including either the full name or process ID of the game you wanted to capture. As I said, a bit of a pain for some.

Because of this and my own troubles with certain settings when trying to benchmark and RX 480 and GTX 1060 in DOOM with Vulkan, I decided to write a relatively simple application to help this. The program is written in C# and acts as a launcher for PresentMon, allowing you to install one application (to C:PresentMonLauncher) and easily select the application you want to capture from a list, add a timer and delay in seconds as opposed to milliseconds, have a checkbox for Simple mode and No CSV mode, plus an area to add any other arguments you need – like changing where the CSV output file goes and is called.

I initially sent this program to Jim from AdoredTV who suggested a few improvements, then was driven to learn Python in a day to write the included bencher program! This program, that’s built into the launcher, allows you to load your results file in and shows the minimum, maximum and average FPS, as well as allows you to output another CSV file which includes a single column of easily graphable frame times. We’ve now changed quite a few things already, including normalising the results in the .csv file, adding new features to the launcher like a better auto-naming system, and reworking the bencher application so it’s part of the C# launcher too and working as a Windows form application, not command line. There are a lot of updates happening, so make sure to keep an eye on the Github for the latest version!

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, it’s a launcher for Intel’s PresentMon application that makes using it easier, and extracting useful/usable information from the results easy too.

If you are interested and want to take a look at the application, or it’s source files, please head to my Github repository here: https://github.com/andymanic/PresentMonLauncher

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Time-Sensitive Networking to Fundamentally Change the Way Real-Time Industrial Systems Are Designed

Our world communicates over Ethernet, with incredibly fast 10G and 40G networks leading the way. But this isn’t the case in industrial environments, like manufacturing and electrical power grids, that require deterministic communications for distributed control and measurement. Until recently, … Read more >

The post Time-Sensitive Networking to Fundamentally Change the Way Real-Time Industrial Systems Are Designed appeared first on IoT@Intel.

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Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge 2016 – Team Update: Geras

Team Geras Makes Independent Living a Reality for the Aged

Editor note: This is the fourth in a series of interviews with leaders of the five international teams competing in the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge 2016.

Selected from among 180 worldwide entries, five global teams are competing in the Intel® Ultimate Coder Challenge 2016, with a common goal — to use IoT to help solve real problems. Tackling challenges from transportation to healthcare, coders are using unique approaches with Intel® edge and gateway devices and common sensors, motors and switches that you would find within our standard Grove Sensor Kit. Whichever team’s solution is judged to best address the problem in their vertical will be named winner of the challenge.

Team Geras –  Smarthomes for Aging in Place 

When Team Geras began contemplating projects for this competition, smart home products seemed like a natural adaptation. While there are many offerings in the marketplace, there are few that are aimed at the aged. Using IoT to help those that would like to live independently seemed like a great adaptation of the technology.

“Gregg and Kyle” is Gregg Reynolds and Kyle Stufflebam, who work for NORC at the University of Chicago, where they are investigating the use of IoT technologies in the service of Social Science research.  Gregg is the technical lead, who will do all the coding; Kyle will assist with research and technical writing.  NORC is supporting their participation in the Ultimate Coder Challenge as a “skunkworks” project.

Gregg Reynolds’ first programming job was in the early 90s at at big iron shop, where he landed after spending several years of student penury in Cairo studying Arabic following a classic Liberal Arts undergrad education.  After 5 years of BAL, JCL and COBOL(!) he moved on and has since programmed in a variety of languages on platforms ranging from microcontrollers to Windows to Unices and even the AS400.  His favorite languages are Clojure, Lua and Idris.  He has a soft spot for XSL, having been a member of the W3C Working Group that defined version 1.0.  he’s crazy about coinduction and coalgebras. He joined NORC as a translator on a project in the Middle East and has since served in a variety of roles, most recently researching and prototyping IoT technologies in the service of social science research.

Q: What does this project mean to you and your team?

A:  This project has served as a catalyst at work where we expect to continue the work we have begun here. It has stimulated a lot of discussion about IoT and its role in social research. Personally, I (Gregg) have benefited enormously from working on this.  I learned a huge amount about Intel technologies and the IoT in general, and had great fun.

Q: Describe the sensors you’re using and any challenges with them?

A:  So far we’ve gone with the usual suspects: accelerometer, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, illuminance, PIR motion, hall effect. We also have some tiny digital microphones but did not have time to do much with them.

Q: What software, programming languages, and cloud services are you using and why?

A:  Primarily Clojure, but also some Java, C, and C++.  With Clojure we used the following libraries:

  *  https://github.com/clojure/core.async makes concurrency simple and easy

  *  aleph (http://aleph.io/) is a library for building protocol services, based on netty.

  * https://github.com/weavejester/compojure makes it easy to build websites

  * http://boot-clj.com/ is an extraordinarily innovative build tool

We also relied on the following Java libraries:

  *  https://github.com/intel-iot-devkit/mraa

  *  https://github.com/intel-iot-devkit/tinyb

And of course the Iotivity library is at the center of our project.

Q: Share any challenges, funny stories and solutions that you’ve encountered so far.

A:  We decided to play on the bleeding edge, pushing the envelope with https://www.iotivity.org/ .  This meant getting a proper Java SDK running (it is still not officially supported) and porting the whole thing to the four platforms we worked on: OS X, Linux, Wind River Linux on the Gateway, and Yocto on the Edison. That’s a *lot* of work – I think I pulled more all-nighters over the last eight weeks than I did in eight years of college.

On the other hand, we did discover some solutions that we never would have thought of had we not gone in this direction.  For example, the combination of Clojure with the nREPL and Iotivity opens up the possibility of large-scale simulations of IoT systems.

Finding Bugs
Here’s a truly hilarious story: we discovered a major bug in week eight, and will not be able to get it fixed before the deadline. Is that a knee-slapper or what? – Gregg Reynolds

Q: What data are you feeding to the cloud, and how are you using it in your solution?

A:  Our focus has been entirely on the sensors and system side of things – we’ve worked with some cloud data services in the past and the problem of designing, configuring, monitoring, managing, etc. complex IoT systems strikes us as much more pressing at the moment.  There’s only so much one guy can do, anyway.

Challenge Winners Announced in August

The teams have been steadily coding, wiring and assembling their projects. In the final phase, teams will make final presentations, demonstration videos and display the prototypes that were produced. Follow the Ultimate Coder site showing current progress, pictures of their products, and comments from fans and judges.  Judging begins in August with the winners announced soon after.

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Ascending Technologies Soars Ahead of the Curve with Intel RealSense and you’re Invited to Join!

Science Fiction is full of examples of machines that can scan an object or an area and provide information about what they are looking at to an operator. Now that technology may be closer than ever thanks to new innovations … Read more >

The post Ascending Technologies Soars Ahead of the Curve with Intel RealSense and you’re Invited to Join! appeared first on Jobs@Intel Blog.

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Intel contributes to US leadership in High Performance Computing

by Alan Gara, exascale chief architect High Performance Computing, the science of aggregating computing power to solve complex science and engineering problems, is a powerful set of emerging technologies with tremendous economic and strategic implications for companies and entire nations. … Read more >

The post Intel contributes to US leadership in High Performance Computing appeared first on Policy@Intel.

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