Prof. Martin Maier

Title: The Internet of No Things: From “Connected Things” to “Connected Human Intelligence”

Abstract:

The emerging Tactile Internet, which is widely viewed as the next leap in the evolution of today’s Internet of Things (IoT), envisions the real-time transmission of multisensory haptic information (i.e., touch and actuation) to add a new dimension to the human-to-machine interaction via the Internet. Importantly, the Tactile Internet involves the inherent human-in- the-loop (HITL) nature of human-to-machine interaction, as opposed to the IoT without any human involvement in its underlying machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. While M2M communication is useful for the automation of industrial and other machine-centric processes, the Tactile Internet allows for a more human-centric design approach towards extending the capabilities of the human through the Internet, i.e., augmentation rather than automation of the human. This keynote aims at shedding light on the so-called Internet of No Things, which offers all kinds of human-intended services that appear from the surrounding environment when needed and disappear when not needed, while paying particular attention to the importance of crowdsourcing of human skills to solve problems that machines (e.g., AI software agents and robots) alone cannot solve well.

Biography:

Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In the summer of 2003 he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, from October 2006 through March 2007. Further, he was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. He was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from March 2014 through February 2015. In March 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi enhanced networks. In May 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category "Contribution to a better society" of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. He is the founder and creative director of the Optical Zeitgeist Laboratory (www.zeitgeistlab.ca).