Connected Workers and the Evolution of the Industrial Workforce | SensorUp's Steve Liang

IoT For All Podcast · 18 Oct 2021 · 27m

What this episode covers

Steve Liang, Founder and CTO of SensorUp, explains how his company evolved from academic research on IoT interoperability to building a platform that connects siloed industrial systems for better data visibility and prediction. He details SensorUp's pivot into the 'connected worker' space, driven by the need to empower frontline employees in dangerous environments like methane leak detection, and discusses the critical importance of standardizing data exchange for climate tech applications. Liang also shares his 'AI and IoT Canvas' framework, advising companies to prioritize prediction tasks that offer competitive advantage over simple monitoring.

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • Over the Air · 33m

    Managing 250 Million Messages Per Day

    Eric Simone, Founder and CEO of ClearBlade, discusses the company's evolution from a services firm to a product-led Industrial IoT platform. He details the painful transition in 2013, including retooling staff and handling employee departures, and explains their strategic bet on edge computing before it was mainstream. Simone highlights ClearBlade's 'intelligent assets' platform, which allows non-technical operators to manage connected devices via no-code tools while remaining flexible for developers, and outlines their future focus on deploying AI models at the edge.

  • Over the Air · 30m

    Implementing a Winning IoT Strategy at the Enterprise Level with Josh Becker of SAS

    Josh Becker, Senior Global Director and Head of IoT Commercial at SAS, discusses the evolution of analytics from batch processing to real-time AI-driven insights. He shares his background in reliability engineering at Sub-Zero Wolf, where he built one of the earliest IoT devices to monitor refrigerators remotely. Becker explains how SAS leverages event stream processing and computer vision to solve enterprise problems, from defect detection in manufacturing to predicting utility asset failures through partnerships like the one with Exactor.

  • Over the Air · 37m

    Making Industrial IoT Work: Lessons from 30 Years in Automation with Grace Technologies

    Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies, discusses the company's 30-year evolution from automation components to industrial IoT solutions, including Graceport interface connectors, electrical safety devices, and wireless vibration monitoring. He explains the technical complexity of vibration analysis using Fast Fourier Transforms and the strategic importance of integrating sensors directly with Rockwell Automation PLCs via Ethernet/IP to serve plant floor operators. Allen highlights a critical failure mode where lack of real-time integration led to an $800,000 transformer arc flash event, emphasizing the need for robust connectivity strategies like LTE and Zigbee in harsh industrial environments.

  • Over the Air · 30m

    The OG of IoT: A Chat w/ Rob Tiffany (Part 1)

    Rob Tiffany, VP & IoT Intrapreneur at Ericsson and former executive at Microsoft and Hitachi, discusses the evolution of IoT from the 1990s to the present. He details his early work at Real Time Data monitoring vending machines, the strategic failures of Windows Mobile against Apple and Android, and the economic realities of consumer IoT. Tiffany argues that industrial IoT's true value lies in moving operations from 'guessing' to 'knowing' through predictive maintenance and automation, while warning of the workforce disruption caused by accelerating technological change.

  • Hardware to Save a Planet · 54m

    The Forgotten 25%: How Project Canary Is Detecting Climate's Methane Impact

    William Foiles, co-founder and CEO of Project Canary, explains how his company evolved from building custom methane sensors to providing a hardware-agnostic AI software platform for detecting industrial emissions. He details the physics of methane, noting it accounts for 25-33% of human-induced climate change, and describes how their software quantifies emissions by integrating data from point sensors, satellites, and operational metrics. Foiles emphasizes that the primary driver for adoption is operational efficiency and safety, not just ESG, using analogies like blood pressure monitoring to explain the shift from raw data to actionable intelligence. The discussion covers the technical challenges of detecting low-concentration leaks in complex environments, such as neighborhoods with wind interference and biogenic sources, and the strategic pivot to leveraging specialized hardware partners while focusing on software insights.

The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by IoT For All Podcast. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.