Page 24 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

Introduction 11

Chapter 9, titled “Valuable Information and the Internet of Things,” was
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written by Ira S. Moskowitz of the Information Management and Decision
Architectures Branch, Code 5580 at the Naval Research Laboratory in
Washington, DC; and Stephen Russell of the Battlefield Information Proces-
sing Branch of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD. Mos-
kowitz is a mathematician at NRL and Russell is the Chief of the
Battlefield Information Processing Branch at ARL. The authors investigated
atheoryforthevalueofinformationwithrespecttoIoTandAIthatisbecom-
ing innate to IoT. In an environment increasingly composed of ubiquitous
computing and information, information’s value has taken on a new and
unexpected dimension. Moreover, when the system in which such informa-
tion exists is itself becoming intelligent, the ability to elicit value, in context,
will be more complicated but, from their perspective, more manageable with
AI. Classical economic theory describes the relationship between value and
information which, though moderated by demand, is highly correlated.
According to the authors, in an environment where there is a wealth of
information, such as is becoming reality with the IoT, the intelligence innate
to the system will become a dominant moderator of demand (e.g., a self-
adapting, self-operating, and self-protecting system; as an example, the
system’s ability to control access entry and exit at its portals). The authors
begin their chapter with the perspective of Howard’s value of information
theory to illustrate mathematically that Howard’s focus on maximizing value
hid another important dimension: the guarantee of the value of information.
Their insight is that IoT changes the perspective of how the value of infor-
mation is obtained. Thisinsight of theirsis basedonthe notion that Shannon’s
information theory is limited, forming an issue for a quantitative theory of the
applicationofinformationtodecisionmakinginIoT.TheyreworkHoward’s
contribution and extended it by asking about the value of information
that they uncover at each step by ranking their results. They conclude that
IoT provides a rich environment for almost all aspects of human behavior.
With AI the fundamental notion of information will change as it is managed
by AI. The authors construct a mathematical model of the value of informa-
tion that will be very useful for themselves and for other AI researchers to
help quantitatively in the management of future IoT systems. The authors
offer a path forward for mathematical research as well as considerations
that mathematicians must keep in mind as they go forward in their study of
the IoT.

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Corresponding author: Ira.moskowitz@nrl.navy.mil.