Internet of Things, Real-Time Decision Making, and Artificial Intelligence

In several earlier papers, the author defined and detailed the concept of a servgood, which can be thought of as a physical good or product enveloped by a services-oriented layer that makes the good smarter or more adaptable and customizable for a particular use. Adding another layer of physical sensors could then enhance its smartness and intelligence, especially if it were to be connected with other servgoods—thus, constituting an Internet of Things (IoT) or servgoods. More importantly, real-time decision making is central to the Internet of Things; it is about decision informatics and embraces the advanced technologies of sensing (i.e., Big Data), processing (i.e., real-time analytics), reacting (i.e., real-time decision-making), and learning (i.e., deep learning). Indeed, real-time decision making (RTDM) is becoming an integral aspect of IoT and artificial intelligence (AI), including its improving abilities at voice and video recognition, speech and predictive synthesis, and language and social-media understanding. These three key and mutually supportive technologies—IoT, RTDM, and AI—are considered herein, including their progress to date.