Echelon Corp. announced Tuesday its collaboration with IBM Watson IoT to bring cognitive intelligence to its adaptive streetlight control platform, helping municipalities transform into smarter, safer and more sustainable cities. Echelon will infuse Watson IoT capabilities into its next-generation, adaptive LED lighting control solution to form a pervasive, more intelligent infrastructure that can integrate IoT applications to address municipal safety, environment and energy challenges.
By combining IBM Watson IoT data with Echelon’s IoT connected streetlighting architecture, municipal leaders can gain significant insights which they can use to improve public safety. IBM Watson IoT capabilities closely align with Echelon’s promise to municipalities – to enable them to cost-effectively leverage innovations in technology that drive safety and sustainability initiatives.
IBM Watson IoT is a cognitive system that learns from and infuses intelligence into the physical world.
With its Lumewave by Echelon platform, Echelon is bringing its long-standing history in developing protocols and communication control solutions, as well as its next generation architectures for multi-application IIoT networks, to the IBM Watson IoT collaboration. The Echelon portfolio supports a variety of lighting and building communications including LON and LonTalk/IP, BACnet, Modbus, DALI and more for a range of devices that can be integrated into an open platform.
“With a mission to continually advance our adaptive streetlighting solution, we are excited at the prospect of integrating the cognitive and real-time analytics capability of IBM Watson IoT into Echelon’s platform to enhance its inherent intelligence,” said Sohrab Modi, Chief Technology Officer, Echelon. “If mayors and town selectmen can have infrastructures that adapt to the data produced by billions of interconnected sensors and devices, they can positively impact crime and weather-related accident statistics. The omniscience that IBM Watson IoT will bring to our next-generation technology will be a huge asset for local and state governments.”
In December, IBM entered into a collaboration with the BMW Group, through which the companies will work together to explore the role of Watson cognitive computing in personalizing the driving experience and creating more intuitive driver support systems for cars of the future. The BMW Group will collocate a team of researchers at IBM’s global headquarters for Watson IoT in Munich, Germany and the companies will work together explore how to improve intelligent assistant functions for drivers.
IBM recently pledged to invest US$200 million to make its new Munich center one of the world’s most advanced facilities for collaborative innovation as part of a global investment of US$3 billion to bring Watson cognitive computing to the Internet of Things.
