Itron Idea Labs

Leaving Las Vegas @CES 2017

January 09, 2017



It is day four at CES and almost time to leave. It’s the King’s birthday, my twentieth time at CES, during CES’s 50th anniversary, and a great day to be here.  An interesting day for anyone interested in numerology.

I want to close this series with a summary of what Itron Idea Labs showed at CES. We focused on demonstrating Industrial IoT with nine live action stations on one OpenWay network. Each of them had the canonical IoT architecture: The network, cloud intelligence, sensors and controls back to the endpoints. In addition, each system demonstrated could perform actions with local computation—true Edge computing.

We showed a miniature water distribution system with leak detectors, pressure sensors and a valve to apply a leak. We had an EV charging station, a gas pipeline with a leak sensor that closes a gas gate when it detects a leak. We even has a miniature house that shakes and a gas gate that closes when a seismic detector detects an earthquake.

Let’s take the rest of the day off and start thinking what to show at CES 2018 on Monday!

By Roberto Aiello


Managing Director, Itron Idea Labs


Dr. Roberto Aiello is the managing director of the Itron Idea Labs and responsible for new business innovation at Itron, including Internet of Things. His previous experience includes managing wireless research at Interval Research, Paul Allen's technology incubator and technology transfer at Disney Research. He is an advisor to Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) and is a Lean Startup expert who serves as a mentor at the Cleantech Open and Startup Weekend. Dr. Aiello also founded two venture-funded, wireless semiconductor companies and one web/mobile startup. Dr. Aiello worked as a physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Superconducting Super Collider.