ctrlX developR André Stury: "AIoT will shape our future."

André, you are one of the brains behind ctrlX AUTOMATION. What do you do exactly?

In 2018, I tinkered with our development team on the first ctrlX AUTOMATION app, today's Device Admin. With it, we developed the basis for further web-based applications.

As a software developer and data engineer, my focus today is on data-based services and apps. These include apps that provide information about the condition of components – keyword condition monitoring – or give early warning of an impending failure in the sense of predictive maintenance. AIoT is just around the corner. It is already changing the way we live and will change the way we work.

There's a big leap toward AIoT right now. Why?

Data-based services and machine learning applications were in their infancy until not so long ago. Today, they are gaining a larger and larger share within automation. And artificial intelligence as the next big step was more vision than reality. Now artificial intelligence has definitely made it into the industry and is spreading at a higher rate than was expected.

ctrlX AUTOMATION to expand further in the field of AIoT, for example through apps, that is one of the challenges for us in the near future.

What are the key benefits of AIoT?

IoT devices in themselves have not generally been intelligent or capable of learning. If we now bring IoT and AI together, passive sensors become learning machines. Learning from experience and independent task solving can take place.

This does not only apply to industry: For example, it also applies to sectors such as agriculture. Smart farming focuses on the conservation of resources. Algorithms can, for example, evaluate satellite images of fields, create harvest forecasts and calculate specific fertilizer requirements. The Lotsize One principle also applies here, in that plants are treated individually and no longer according to the watering can principle.

The potential through automation is huge across the board. ctrlX AUTOMATION is therefore increasingly being used for application areas outside industry, such as building automation.

What makes ctrlX AUTOMATION so special from your point of view?

I'm fascinated by the design freedom that results from different technologies, paradigms, programming languages and scaling levels combined in one platform. I can quickly query data points in C, process them with Python and visualize them with HTML/JS. All applications are connected via the ctrlX Data Layer – making communication very easy. Thanks to the open operating system ctrlX OS, I am not tied to a hardware target and can deploy my applications in the field, on the edge or in the future in the cloud. The operating system is designed for real-time use and therefore also plays into the hands of machine learning and AI applications.