Peggy Smedley Show

Peggy shares the story of Felix Musau, who decided to combine the accessibility of mobile phones and the power of the cloud to develop Agin. Peggy explains it helps rural farmers collect data around their farms with mobile phones. She says Felix isn't just creating a solution to help solve business problems—he is creating a solution that is going to help solve hunger and poverty. She encourages ot...

Peggy says achieving an increase in food production is challenging for a number of reasons including receding water levels, climate change, and a shrinking amount of land. She explains that in general data-driven techniques can help boost agriculture productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses, and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen low adoption because of the hig...

Peggy says Microsoft has a unique focus on precision agriculture and edge intelligence solutions—and it also has a commitment to sustainability. She explains that there is a current challenge of water scarcity, with ag using 70% of the world's available fresh water. She points to the example of a farmer in New Zealand who uses an industrial IoT solution to monitor and manage his farm's irrigation...

Peggy chats with Joshua Peschel, assistant professor of agriculture and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, who says digital agriculture is the injection of tools and technologies that will optimize and advance actual on-farm production and the decision making behind that. With that, cows and corn are no longer the only commodities that come off the farm—data also comes off the farm. He...

Peggy welcomes Sam Eathington, chief science officer of Monsanto and The Climate Corp., to the show. He says today farming is all about data and how you take that data and turn it into an actionable insight. Having grown up on a farm, he says there is lots of different data, but it is hard to use that data. One of the challenges growing up on the farm is every field is different. He explains that...

Peggy says tech investment in agriculture isn't new, but there are still adoption hurdles that need to be ironed out. During the last few years in particular, discussions about climate change have really put pressure on the agriculture space to find ways to better monitor their use of resources. She talks about sensors, remote monitoring, and irrigation systems and points to an example of how sens...

Peggy chats with Phil Renaud, executive director, The Risk Institute, Ohio State University, who says 90% of drivers in the 19-24-year-old bracket agree they have sped, run a red light, or texted while driving. He adds that how roads are designed can have a significant dent here. For instance, towns in Ohio are putting more roundabouts that move traffic around and slows traffic down to make people...

Peggy interviews Kathy Lane, senior director of PR, National Safety Council, who says Distracted Driving Awareness Month started almost 10 years ago, as car crashes are one of the leading causes of accidents and distracted driving was increasingly becoming an area of focus. She says it works closely with employers because that is where a lot of fatalities happen. Another area of focus is parents b...

Peggy is joined by Joel Feldman, president, Casey Feldman Foundation, and founder of EndDD.org, who shares his story and distracted driving initiatives. He asks: What is driving? Is it a task to take us from one place to another or an opportunity to do business? He says there has got to be a way to keep each and every one of us from having to suffer a tragedy before we change our behavior. He sugg...

Peggy interviews Paul Lucier, vice president of business development, ISARA, who says there are two sides: the potential/positive disruption and the dark side of quantum computing, as it is able to break encryption. He explains there is a great concern about the amount of investment being made by the Chinese and quantum is a race that we can't afford to lose. He says there are a couple of approach...

Can quantum computing help solve the Moore's Law Problem? Peggy is joined by Helmut Katzgraber, professor, Texas A&M University, who says his main focus of research lies at the interface of physics, quantum computing, and high-performance computing. He says we aren't going to solve the issue with Moore's Law anytime soon, but there will be some instances where quantum computing will offer a huge b...

Peggy chats with Technology and Business Consultant Craig Brown, who says quantum computing looks at data and slices it into pieces and comes up with options, and when talking about autonomous cars, decisions need to be made simultaneously. He explains that quantum computing is currently being used in machine learning and to improve the quality of cyber-security, but the applications that are invo...

Peggy interviews Siraj Shaikh, professor of systems security, Coventry University, who says what is promising about autonomous vehicles is there are some great visions by industry leaders. He thinks of autonomous cars as smart companions that we work with and at different times of a journey they take over so we can be more productive. He explains in terms of safety and security we need to take tha...

Peggy says cyber-criminals are getting more and more creative. She explains the era of quantum computing could disrupt this. Quantum computers are expected to improve the way we solve certain types of problems, she says, with the key difference being the way information is stored. She continues that quantum computing could play a role in security, as messages can be encrypted in a way that can't b...

Peggy chats with Robin Raskin, founder and president, Living In Digital Times, who says 81% of car crashes are the result of human error, whether you are a sleepy, sneezing, or coughing, and hopefully computers can help. She explains by 2020 we will see some scenarios of small tests of self-driving cars. She says hopefully when computers are driving, we will have less deaths, but now we are puttin...

Peggy interviews Florian Neukart, principal scientist, Volkswagen, who says quantum computing is an approach that leverages quantum bits. He says in five to 10 years, we will see systems that can solve problems that we can't solve now. We hope that quantum computers can help us, he explains. When you consider self-driving vehicles, technology can help optimize the traffic flow, but it is also a ve...

Peggy says a too many people are losing their loved ones to motorists that are driving distracted. She quotes more distracted driving numbers and talks about this deadly epidemic. She discusses an impaired driving, and a drugged-driving suit from Ford, saying it has vision-impairment glasses that produce blurred vision, flashing lights, and cause tunnel vision. She wants to see what technology can...

Peggy welcomes back show regular Joshua Peschel, assistant professor, Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University, to discuss the alleged misuse of Facebook data to influence public opinion. He explains that Facebook got outfoxed and outsmarted because it didn't believe someone could come in and do what they did—it was just a loophole that got exploited. He says with professions...

Peggy is joined by Dan Mathers, president and CEO, eleven-x, to talk about autonomous driving and smart parking, as he explains there are a lot of different ways to do smart parking. He says with the advent of autonomous driving, it is going to be a while before things are converted over, and in a mixed mode environment, not all cars are going to have the sensors to figure out where the parking is...

Peggy says more than 1.25 million people lives are cut short every single year because of a road traffic accident. She explains there are many reasons people end up in accidents, but one of the most preventable reasons is distracted driving. She asks: What exactly can we do about this problem? The same technology that creates value for us in business isn't doing us any favors when used during a ta...

In advance of Distracted Driving Awareness Month, Peggy interviews Phil Renaud, executive director for The Risk Institute at Ohio State University, who says distracted driving is a behavioral challenge. Research shows that people believe they are good drivers, and therefore believe it is OK to look down at their phones. He says recent research shows the worst group of drivers is between 19 and 24,...

Peggy is joined by Weisong Shi, professor of Computer Science, Director of the Mobile and Internet Systems Laboratory, Cyber Physical Systems Program at Wayne State University. He says cloud computing was introduced around 2005 and is widely recognized today. However, in the last few years, because of the Internet of Things, there is a huge amount of data being generated at the edge of the network...

Peggy introduces the topic of quantum computers, as it relates to the cloud. She says quantum computers can perform complex molecular modeling that we can't perform today due to computational limitations. A quantum computer can process all possible solutions at once to come to an answer. She ties it into the cloud, saying cloud-based quantum computing is being pioneered by many large companies and...

Show regular and technology and business consultant Craig Brown returns to the show. He and Peggy talk about harnessing the power of computing to make sure all the devices and people can talk seamlessly in realtime. He points to the example of the connected car, and that there can't be any lag in latency—that all needs to be eliminated.

Peggy is joined by Glenn Lurie, CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Synchronoss Technologies, who talks about his new role. He explains his search for a company with a sound reputation and a product set was met with Synchronoss Technologies since it has been involved in digital and IoT for many years. He talks about the foundation of the company as a digital company, which includes everythin...