Litbit
Turning an Internet of Things into Mindful Machines

The term “Internet of Things” is meaningless. Without the experience to empower collaboration between these many “things,” the definition suggests little more than inanimate clutter. Litbit believes the true value of IoT will be realized through the convergence of cognitive computing, machine learning, and “self-driving" operational technologies, which will empower all “things” to work together intelligently, autonomously and collaboratively as one mindful machine.

“The cornerstone of Litbit’s ‘mindful machine’ was laid on the grounds of enabling all people in an enterprise with an interface to machine learning, using their own human language,” evinces Scott Noteboom, Founder and CEO of Litbit. “The mindful machine can then combine that collective subject matter expertise, with data gathered from all things, in order to form deep insights that are used to drive continuously more productive autonomous operations.”

The company uses both cognitive computing and natural language technologies to connect the dots between the highly intuitive apps that people demand and the highly complex technology stack that powers the back-end. “This approach allows smart people and smart machines to collaborate together as a team, while still allowing people to think like people and computers to think like computers,” explains Noteboom.

Litbit's most powerful app, Intellect, provides users an intuitive human interface to machine learning, without requirements for data scientists or algorithms. Using Intellect, every teammate in an enterprise has the ability to teach Litbit's machine learning engine, based on his/her individual subject matter expertise (each lesson is called an “intellect.”) As a result, the mindful machine is able to autonomously form deep insights based on the consolidated expertise of the entire enterprise. These insights can then be made actionable by Litbit's second app, Maestro. Maestro provides users access to the power of autonomous orchestration and operations, without the need for programmers or an understanding of “code”. Using insights formed in Intellect or via point data analytics, Maestro users can define operational actions that the mindful machine can execute upon autonomously.

The cornerstone of Litbit’s ‘mindful machine’ was laid on the grounds of enabling all people in an enterprise with an interface to machine learning, using their own human language

“Maestro enables the mindful machine to self-drive operations towards continuously improving reliability and productivity,” said Noteboom.

In a recent pharmaceutical laboratory use case, the combination of various IoT sensors and Litbit apps empower the mindful machine with “virtual senses” that allow real-time detection of specific “fingerprints” related to unique combinations of sight, sound, touch, and smell patterns. “Intellect learns the normal behavioral patterns of every machine in the lab, and is then taught to precisely identify every abnormal situation as it occurs in real-time,” illustrates Noteboom. “Maestro is then there to automatically react to the situation, with the expertise driven not by computer programmers, but by the actual scientists that run the lab.”

Likewise, Litbit’s applied use of the mindful machine yields benefits for other IoT environments such as manufacturing, smart buildings, retail, government, and data centers. Having previously headed the data center division at Apple and Yahoo, Noteboom and his team have a deep understanding of the benefits of effective collaboration between many machines and many people. “When you have hundreds of thousands of machines, serving millions of people, you learn to be mindful of running it all as one machine or cloud. Otherwise you'll end up drowning in too many underutilized things,” concludes Noteboom.