Blockchain Analytics: Enabling Smart IOT

Autonomous cars are racing down the highway at speeds exceeding 100 MPH when suddenly a car a half-mile ahead blows out a tire sending dangerous debris across 3 lanes of traffic. Instead of relying upon sending this urgent, time-critical distress information to the world via the cloud, the cars on that particular section of the highway use peer-to-peer, immutable communications to inform all vehicles in the area of the danger so that they can slow down and move to unobstructed lanes (while also sending a message to the nearest highway maintenance robots to remove the debris). Real-time analytics at the edges of the Internet of Things and the real-time communications between devices of different types, models and makes are going to be critical to realizing the operational and society benefits of smart cities, smart airports, smart hospitals, smart factories and the like. While machine learning and reinforcement learning at the edges and deep learning at the core are key to driving system-wide intelligence, the ability to capture, communicate, share and build upon the system-wide "learnings and insights" at the "local level" is going to require a technology that exploits real-time, nearest neighbor, peer-to-peer, immutable communications. Hello Blockchain (see Figure 2)!