Internet of Things

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) is 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.

IoT relates strongly to '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. 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.

Suggested Topics

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:

  • Models and algorithms: activity recognition, context modeling and reasoning; context-aware computing, applied machine learning, convergence of IoT and Big Data.

  • Novel applications: pervasive technologies for healthcare, sport, smart homes and buildings, smart manufacturing, smart cities, autonomous driving.

  • Computing and communications: opportunistic networks, social networks; participatory sensing, urban/mobile crowd sensing & intelligence.

  • IoT systems and infrastructures: middleware systems and services; large-scale data management for pervasive computing; clouds, and edge computing; sensor and actuator networks.

  • Trust, privacy and security: participatory and social sensing, persuasion, blockchain and smart contracts.

  • Technological innovations: mobile and wearable computing systems and services, smart devices and intelligent environments; cognitive and reconfigurable hardware; positioning and tracking technologies.

Further reading

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.

Information

For further information on the content of this track, you may contact the track chair: Nirvana Meratnia