Somebody is watching me

11

October

2022

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Rockwell said it first, “I always feel that somebody is watching me and I have no privacy.” How many times has it occurred to you to discuss that you are interested in buying a product or paying for a service, and right after you unlock your smartphone and…what a coincidence! Your feed on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media and search engines is full of ads related to the desired item. Maybe the universe is listening and displaying all the relevant ads. Maybe not. 

Let’s use an example to make it more clear. Take, for instance, the use case that you are living in Rotterdam and you are visiting a friend of yours in Amsterdam. That friend of yours is really excited about the iPhone 14 that she ordered online, and she is trying to convince you to buy it. You say that you will think about it and the conversation ends there. You return home, unlock your smartphone, and…surprise! It is literally everywhere in your online presence. How is that possible? You call your mom and start discussing conspiracy theories and how Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri are eavesdropping. They are not. But if they are not, how do our thoughts and discussions about products magically convert into ads? 
They have master’s degrees in tracking and watching our actions in the online and offline worlds as well. If you are not naive or more politically correct, if you have ever read the terms and conditions on Facebook, you would have realized by now that you have consented to surveillance in your online behavior. Every digital step that you make (aka every click) leaves a digital footprint behind, which is turned into data that is saved to your unique online customer profile. Tracking is not restricted to the online world. Back to the I-phone 14 example Facebook tracked your location and found out that you and your friend were together. And, respectively, they track her purchasing history and focus on the last purchase, the iPhone 14. To be honest, anyone who would have paid that amount of money would talk about it. Facebook takes advantage of the probability that your friend discussed that purchase with you and decided to give it a shot with you.

Besides location tracking, Facebook’s algorithm detects similarities and differences in your and your friend’s interests, demographics, places you have been, groups you are a part of, hashtags you follow, and so on (Selman, 2021). If you are influenced by the conversation, you will be tempted by the ads and click on them to find further info. Then the footprint is yours and more ads will be displayed. If you ignore the ads, eventually, after a while, they will be replaced with ads that you are more likely to engage with. 

To conclude, there are no conspiracy theories and nobody is listening to your private conversations through your smartphone. That is what Edward Snowden should have probably said in order to not live freely, but he lived many years under asylum because the NSA and CIA wanted to…make him quiet.

Sources:

Selman, H. (2021). Why We See Digital Ads After Talking About Something. [online] McNutt & Partners. Available at: https://www.mcnuttpartners.com/why-we-see-digital-ads-after-talking-about-something/ [Accessed 11 Oct. 2022].

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Digital Twins – The Fortune Tellers

23

September

2022

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Digital Twins—what a fancy and classy name for a piece of software! In a nutshell, digital twins is software that utilizes real-world data in order to generate simulations that can forecast how a process or a product will perform or behave. This is accomplished by combining the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and software analytics to improve the output and correspondingly optimize the ways a company generates value.

However, what I just described isn’t the concept of simulation? The answer is no. Even while simulations and digital twins may share common elements by both utilizing digital models to imitate a system’s operations, a digital twin is fundamentally a virtual environment. In essence, we could liken digital twins to multitaskers. A simulation is typically associated with one particular process or perhaps a part of the process, while a digital twin may itself run multiple simulations simultaneously. But the core difference goes beyond the digital twin’s capacity for multitasking. The picture now includes real-time data. Digital twins are built on a two-way flow that commences when object sensors give the system processor pertinent data and continues when the processor shares insights with the original source object.

Digital twins are able to study problems from far more vantage points than standard simulations can because they have better and constantly updated data related to a wide range of fields, combined with the added computing power that comes with a virtual environment, which has a greater potential to improve products and processes in the long run.

To summarize the benefits, companies can use digital twins to avoid wasting significant budget resources and effort developing a product only to discover that it requires refinement. Digital twins appear to be like fortune tellers who can envision the future and advise on the best courses of action. Moreover, after a new product has gone into the production phase, digital twins can aid in controlling and duplicating production systems with the main objective of maintaining excellent performance throughout the manufacturing cycle. Furthermore, digital twins promote sustainability since product manufacturers can determine which product materials can be harvested once the product reaches the end of its lifecycle. Hence, the industries that operate on large-scale products or projects , such as engineering, health care, automobile manufacturing, aircraft production, and railcar design, benefit the most from digital twins. In addition, stakeholders can participate early in the development process and check and modify the Digital Twin as needed. Fewer prototypes, lower costs, and shorter lead times will be the results of the rapid development iterations that the digital twin permits.

In 2022, there will be many technology giant companies that have developed platforms that offer digital twin software in combination with real-time agent collaboration and many more features. Indicatively, Microsoft has developed the Azure Digital Twins platform as a service (PaaS) offering that enables the construction of knowledge graphs based on digital models of whole environments. These ecosystems might include whole cities as well as structures such as buildings, industries, farms, energy networks, trains, stadiums, and more. Oracle, IMB, Siemens, and General Electric are only a few other examples of companies that have developed their own digital twin platforms. 

Sources

azure.microsoft.com. (2022). Pricing – Digital Twins | Microsoft Azure. [online] Available at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/digital-twins/ [Accessed 23 Sep. 2022].

www.ibm.com. (2021). IBM Digital Twin Exchange – Overview. [online] Available at: https://www.ibm.com/products/digital-twin-exchange [Accessed 23 Sep. 2022].

www.twi-global.com. (2022). What is Digital Twin Technology and How Does it Work? [online] Available at: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-digital-twin [Accessed 22 Sep. 2022].

van Rijmenam, M. (2022). Why Digital Twins Are One of the Building Blocks of the Metaverse. The Digital Speaker. Available at: https://www.thedigitalspeaker.com/digital-twins-building-block-metaverse/ [Accessed 23 Sep. 2022].

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