Ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things are about networked and smart embedded systems being invisible and unobtrusive, integrated with everyday environments to support people in their activities, to facilitate and enrich their daily life, and to increase productivity at work through creation of smart surroundings.
Embedding and networking millions of intelligent objects into an environment creates a digital skin or wireless network of smart objects. Each object is capable of capturing physical information about its immediate space, cooperate with its neighbors, reason about its impact, and summarize the immense amounts of low-level information to produce data representative of the overall environment, and even actuate if needed. Pervasive data will change how these intelligent objects dynamically pool information, cooperate under severe constraints and reliably interact and control the physical world.
'Ubiquitous computing', a phrase, which the late Mark Weiser (1952-1999) described in 1988 as "the calm technology, that recedes into the background of our lives", has led to increasing mobility and interaction of services and applications in a large variety of aspects of daily life. That has also given rise to the new technology called the “Internet of Things”. Recently, we have seen major progress in developing the new personal and machine-to-machine computing paradigms that move towards the notion of pervasive, wearable, unobtrusive, disappearing, or invisible computers.
Most important enabling technologies that have emerged to make the ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things vision a reality are: wireless networking, localization, distributed systems, mobile computing, smart networked sensors, embedded platforms, sensor data analytics and reasoning, etc. They have to deal with ever-changing user requirements, environmental situations and system resources. They have to be privacy aware and secure to encourage wide use and to provide the most optimal services. Example topics of interest are, but not limited to, the following areas:
Context awareness & personalization
Localization of people and goods through WiFi and Bluetooth
Internet of Things security and blockchain
Privacy in a connected world
Participatory sensing
Activity recognition using on- and around- human/animal body sensors
Under ground and underwater sensor networks
Convergence of IoT and Big Data
A conference that is addressing similar topics is the IEEE International conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication. A relevant journal in this domain is IEEE Pervasive Computing. You may also look at the Pervasive Systems website for more inspiration.
For further information on the content of this track, you may contact the track chair, Nirvana Meratnia.