Daniel Young with Toshiba America

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get

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right once again, we're broadcasting from Austin, Texas. OMG is the organization and it is the collection of really smart people gathering to solve problems and putting it down on paper.

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Sounds good?

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Because it's, it's definitely way above my paygrade and you know, Industrial Talk is dedicated to you industry professionals all around the world because you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you solve problems you collaborate. You're making my life and the lives of many around the world better. Why not celebrate you because you are that good? All right in the hot seat, another smart guy from this Oh, OMG IIC Consortium thingy going on here. Dan young Toshiba's the company. We're going be talking I see. So let's get cracking. Yeah. I'm glad you do what you do, Dan.

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Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

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Yeah, it's it's, I come to the realization that I am living this, this dream this discovery channel dream, and I get to talk to the some of the smartest people in the world. And I just I just soak it up. And I don't realize how I'm not that smart.

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I think that's the next guy. You're talking. Yeah.

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Yeah, you've been? You've been with the OMG. I see sort of dealio for many years.

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So yeah. Now that's pretty cool. You actually said, Hey, here's a document. If you just go to IC, just sort of download it. And you said, and this is pretty good. I like that.

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Yeah. Yeah. Our our technical executive at the time, Hiroshi Yamamoto, he was very gung ho about about this work. So we went and he he took his digital transformation team and created a whole new reference architecture internally. So we call that Toshiba internet reference architecture or tirah. Because you know, engineers love acronyms.

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It's definitely I think, at second to doing these standards, like coming up with more. Yes, more acronyms. I can't keep up with it. But you can. That's why you can pay the big bucks. Wow. So that's pretty cool. That's a cool story. Yeah. Before we get into the conversation, tell us a little bit about you.

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So about me, so. Yeah, Daniel Young. I've been with Toshiba for 23 years now. A Yeah, different different iterations of the company. I started out in manufacturing with television, and refactoring plant moved up into television design. That's how I got into the standards work. I got into video standards, efforts. And then now I'm working with our industrial teams across the world and kind of back you know, focused on the manufacturing stuff, but from a very different angle, you know, looking at it from a standards and, and best practices type of heat.

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So I want to buy a TV. What's the best TV out there? So here's the story. We went to Best Buy we my son and I were Stein. Hey, hey, let's go look at the TVs. Clearly the technology has surpassed my expectations.

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It's crazy. Yeah. I still work with the HDMI forum which is the standard spotty HDMI and it it's it keeps going you know 4k is not the end 8k may not be the end it's

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just remember just stared at it. Those are great colors. Oh, look. Wow. Do you have a good TV?

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Still going through just tell you they got some new technology out there that I really

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liked the not plugging in any company but I love the LG OLED TVs because of the deep blacks. That's for me. That's that's the most spectacular part.

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So as we digress So when he said that I was like, Oh my

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gosh, oh, and high dynamic range can't forget that either. Yeah.

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Yeah. And you know, you go out and you buy something, and then they're going come out with another one and a week later, you're like,

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you can enjoy it for a long time.

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Yeah. Whatever. That's true. And I will because I am cheap. All right. So you're with Ric? Yeah. So what's your role? What role you're playing with? IIC? Industry? IoT Consortium?

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You stole my thunder? Yeah. The new branding,

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the new branding? The blue and white? Yes.

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Yes. So well, first off, I'm on the steering committee. So I represent a little large industry members within the IIC. So they're, you know, there's academia, research type companies, they're small industry startup companies. And then there's the large industry members. So like Toshiba, NEC, Dell, Microsoft, so the steering committee has, has representatives from all those types of, of sectors. So I'm one of the ones that represents a large industry. In addition to that, I'm the co chair on the technical working group. So they focus on, you know, different specific technology. So AI, edge computing, you know, networking and connectivity issues, the real detailed technical stuff. And then I'm also the the sole Chair of the industry working group. And we look at more of the vertical markets. So think of, you know, things like mining, or automotive or smart factory energy. So all of those vertical task groups we have, we work on specific things that are related to that industry itself.

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The only thing I can pull out of that outside of the fact that I'm trying to flow all this together in my head, which is just I'm woefully inadequate. However, when you say you represent industry represent, what is the what how do you represent

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on the steering committee? So I, you know, represent the perspective of large industries, what what we're looking at, in industry IoT areas, so we we just, you know, provide our feedback on what we were we think the IOC should be focusing on based on our perspective of things.

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And and where do you think those perspectives need to be?

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I think right now, the the perspective should be on deployments, you know, it is it is one thing to talk about IoT, and talk about connectivity standards, and AI and all that stuff. But you really have to put the boots on the ground, you really have to have deployments to show that it has value. So, you know, if you look at the IRA, which it's it's kind of a long document, but it's fairly easy to read, I think, in sections, but the very first perspective is the business viewpoint. Because without that, none of the rest of it matters, right. So I think that's where we're, we're trying to drive on on real deployments, how these, how they work out, you know, is it proof of concept and its debt? Or is it proof of concept, and then everybody wants it, and we need to, we need to scale it up.

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Yeah, there's been a lot of buzz around, you know, a lot of conversation that says, hey, let's, let's, let's go down this road, listen, let's deploy some sort of a digital solution to that asset or whatever it might be. But then there's a lot of angst and for lack of a better term, and some failures associated with it. And then once that takes place, once that takes root, then you find companies saying, No, that's not for me, that's, that's all hype. That's like, I don't want to do it, and then they, they back off for such a long time, but they, it's going have to, you're going have to do it. Yeah. Yeah, let's succeed.

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It's that fail, fail, burst, fail fast. And then pick yourself up and do it. And

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then again, you're going have to have that mindset that says, Okay, we're going fail. Yeah, well, and but we got to do this, because the, the overall reason is far greater than just our failure

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to do it. And so that's where, you know, the IIC can come in and help because we have these programs called testbeds. Where they can be collaborative efforts with companies and with with people who aren't even a member of ISC that you know, they work together and we can collectively try something out and test it and see what worked, what didn't work. And so that, you know, it lowers the cost, it lowers the cost of that risk, right? Yeah, right. So you can try it out. You can talk about it. People can get together and work together, companies can get together and talk about it and, and work work through those issues.

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These test pits can be located on site of whatever the business would.

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Yeah, they can be located. I mean, there's some that are the one of the mining test beds is in I think South Africa. Yeah, they could be located anywhere or the one that here NEC is, is looking at is it's in the cloud. It's not located anywhere. It's it's in servers had the commerce cloud somewhere. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Interesting. It's cloud, you can't even you can't really touch it.

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Right. But you got to have that you got to, you got to have a key to have access to. Yeah, that is

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so cool. Now, with all that. So you're, you're saying, hey, we want to see some sort of deployment. Now you're defining and you're providing guidance, free downloadable guidance on maybe some of the things there, but I like to test that solution. And they can just go out to IIC. I Consortium.org. I

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think that's correct. Yes, I Consortium, look at look at the initiatives tab. And you'll see the testbeds test drives, patterns and all the other stuff, all the other initiatives that we're looking at.

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So you're here, Austin, Texas, eating brisket, and, and listening

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to lots of

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live music and listening to lots of live moves. That's right here. Now.

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Say I'm from Nashville. So we were the, you know, Music City, USA were recorded music. But absolutely. Austin is the live music capital of the country. Okay, hands down. And it's great.

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See, I like management, too. You got some good speakeasies there?

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Yeah. Yeah. We've got better barbecue. Whoa. I'll be controversial, I guess. Now the brisket, you know, that's in league of its own here in Texas.

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It is. Yeah. And I was going say, the brisket here is next level, whatever. So here you're with. I see. And what is your role or activity happened in here? Because there's just people are meeting there? I don't know. They're already disappears into these holes, and then they come on out for food. Coffee, and then they disappear again? And then then things happen? I guess.

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Any opinion on the sustainability one? Sure. What does that look like? What is that? Is that? What does it look like? I mean, it everybody's? I mean, clearly, it's important, but

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yeah, you know, and Toshiba specifically has the kind of aligned with the, you know, the five main sustainability goals. But what I'm particularly trying to get focused on is in the energy domain, so looking at tying renewable energies to get in renewable energy together. We've actually Toshiba and Japan we've been working with energy, renewable energy providers, they're looking at the very small ones. And we've we, we have a system called the virtual power plant, which basically aggregates a lot of very small, you know, solar farms, wind turbines. Quite quasi microgrid Yeah, it can be my purpose, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so they can work independently, which is good because if one goes down The other one doesn't go down, right? So you don't get, that's the thing that California is facing, you know, if they had more micro grids than one cell could go down, but the other state, but in this case, we're looking at Japan's gone from their tariff system, kind of following what Germany and the EU is doing. But now the renewable energy providers are incentivized to, to pay to get on the, on the energy grid market, run by that by Japan's government, but there's an incentive ation to, you know, sell electricity on that market. But at the same time, there's regulatory requirements on, they have to report what they're going to generate before they can sell it. So the Toshiba virtual power plant ideas to aggregate the smaller providers together, and give them better power over that energy market, so that they can get better prices, and also do better reporting for regulatory bodies.

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So I was talking to somebody and I, it's in line with generation and Japan, and with Fukushima, went down. All that capacity has to be replaced. It's not, it's gone. Right? Right. That's, that's no small task. Right? Because they're going have to replace in some way, shape or form. And they're going just continue to have challenges. And

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so with the with following with those sustainability goals there, the government there is incentivizing the smaller, renewable energy for distributed energy resources, to, you know, to play in this in this larger market. But, you know, you don't want to be a small fish in a big pond. So the virtual power plant ideas is to make all these small fishes, a bigger fish.

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Oh, sounds cool. I'm sold. Why not? Right? Because the sustainability is interesting. And I know that we talked, you talked about digital transformation, I think it has to be real think. I mean, if you're saying, hey, let's do this, machine learning or whatever, I just, there's so much I, personally, I just my head starts swirling to figure out, where do I go? What Avenue do I take? Because there are just countless avenues? Yeah. And then, you know, hey, I'm heading down this road. I made a mistake. It should have been done now on that. I don't why? How do you how do you how do you sort of help people sort of navigate those?

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Well, yeah, I again, I'm going go back to the IRA. Because the way it frames these, it breaks things up into view. So you have the Business View, you know, what is it you're trying to accomplish? Then you have a usage view, which is, okay, who's going to be using it? What are they going to be doing with it? Is it going be a human user? Is it going to be a non human user, which is new, and the inversion, one dot 10. And then you have the functional view? So what are the functional components needed to create the business value going back to your main business requirements, and then once you have all that, then you have the implementation side. And that's where the, you know, the really smart people get together and plug up the hardware and program stuff.

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I just think that I don't know how anybody, and I'm serious. I don't know how anybody, if you know that you need to sort of go down that digital transformation Juggernaut, because I have a company and the internet says, I need to do that. And you recognize the value. You need organizations like IIC

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Yeah, I think so. You do. It's a collective mind. Yeah.

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And the way you guys structured and who gets to vote and all of that stuff on I just think it's, it's so important. So you don't have to create this stuff out of

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thin air. You get lots of smart people to help people like us, right?

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You, not me. I'm just Mr. chirpy chair with a six pack of beer. How do they get a holding the Dan,

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I think it's five on stolen.

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There it is. thievery. Dan, how did he get ahold of you?

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You can reach me, well, you can look up Toshiba, spine X on the web and find all of our version of the reference architecture. And yeah, there's, there's links to find out more context there.

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And they can find you there too.

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I think so. Yes. You can find several of the articles that are written. That's a definite maybe the websites changing

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to connect. I'm

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on LinkedIn. Yeah. Daniel Young.

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I'll have his LinkedIn stat card easily accessible. Alright listeners. That's Dan Toshiba's company. That was a great guy. conversation. We're going wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

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Once again, thank you very much for joining us Industrial Talk and thank you very much for your continued to support this. This platform, you know, is a platform that is dedicated to you industrial professionals all around the world. We want you to collaborate. We want you to continue to educate, and definitely innovate because we need you there. Daniel young Toshiba's company call him, Dan, because I call him Dan. But as his LinkedIn stack card is, of course, Daniel young, but you're going to have all the contact information for him. You need to reach out to him, you need to reach out to what they're doing in Toshiba. And figuring this whole industry for Dotto, this IoT, the standards around that and we want you to succeed. Of course, we want you to succeed because it's important that you succeed, right? Because we need you around. So reach out to Dan and Toshiba follow them because well, you need to, you need to continue. All right. I'm going to point out another company and it is just a company that I'm pretty passionate about and that's mercy chef's mercy chef is a organization that delivers incredible food to areas that have been impacted by mother nature or other disasters, but they bring in food that is truly chef worthy quality, so that you put a smile on the face and it is a big, big deal. That's mercy ship, go out to Industrial Talk. And just look around. They were great. So anyway, Mercy chefs. All right. We're also going to be doing some webinars, a couple of webinars one is going to be on supply chain. The other one is going to be on a. That's right, augmented reality, as well as metaverse. So be on the lookout for those couple of webinars. And, you know, learn more about it because it's happening whether we like it or not all right, be bold, be brave, daring, greatly hanging out with Daniel, aka Dan, and you will change the world. We're going have another great conversation coming from Phil. I'm jean shorts