Steven Gustafson, R&D Manager of Knowledge Discovery Lab with GE Research Lab, sat down with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly during the BigData SV Conference in Santa Clara to share with theCUBE audience the GE vision of the industrial internet.

“GE is a big company doing a lot of small data,” Furrier joked. “In reality, GE is about all kinds of data, but in massive amounts of it. Talk about your research,” invited Furrier.

“I lead the research team and we are focused on research that enables the company to extract insights from data and to do that faster and with more accuracy. In some way, we like to think that we are doing research to help the data scientists,” said Gustafson.

“If we think about what the consumer internet did for the world 10 years ago – things like Amazon putting book stores out of business, or Neflix doing amazing things with streaming, we started looking into ways of taking those amazing technologies and successes and transformative things from the consumer space, and bringing them into the industrial space,” explained Gustafson.

“GE has always been doing a lot of very advanced services, like remote monitoring diagnostics on this very complex equipment and, as we were watching the consumer internet, and things like the internet of things trend, it became very apparent that the future in all those advanced services that we do would be in the industrial internet, bringing together all the devices and connecting people,” added Gustafson.

GE’s transformational moment

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Kelly’s impression is that, in the future, GE will be competing less in the machines they are creating and more in the management and analytics of the data coming out of those machines. “It’s a transformational moment,” and Kelly prompted Gustafson to talk more about it. “How do you see this changing the way GE operates and their whole business?”

Gustafson nominated the aviation, a great user of data analytics, who now is changing the way it’s collecting information, using it to build prognostics. They are now collecting all the data they can, figuring out the ways to use that best for their customers. “It changes the way people think about building and doing design.”

“I have a great team, and the particular areas we are focusing on are called the Big Data system research and the knowledge representation research. The latter is about helping GE capture its domain knowledge using contemporary knowledge representations – things like semantic web and linked data,” explained Gustafson. “We’ve been doing some really interesting projects around making it easier for people to analyze data, to query data and to build analytics faster. That is a very important work for us: looking at a medium to gather and host all that knowledge and make it digital and executable.”

Talking about his presentation for the Conference, Gustafson disclosed that one of the cool things they do around Bay area is bringing the concept of platform to the company. That’s very important for research, because “typically industrial research centers around working with the industrial partners and around helping them develop new technologies for customers.”

How the Industrial Internet affects GE customers

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“How is the industrial internet going to affect your customers?” inquired Kelly.

“One of the things we talk about is giving the customers zero down time. If we deliver on what we want to do, it would give the customers the trust that the solution will be running all the time,” said Gustafson.

Kelly wanted Gustafson to talk about the biggest challenges, so he obliged:

“One of the biggest challenges, especially in our industry, is that the data isn’t simple. It could be data from a pressure sensor inside an aircraft engine and, as a modeler (someone who needs to build analytics to give the customers the lean time), I need to use that data to build a model. That is not easy to do. You really need to be a mechanical engineer to understand what that temperature measurement means or how to leverage it.”

Watch the entire segment below to find out what Gustafson admitted to being the coolest thing they were working on at the moment and what different segments they are focusing on.