IoT@Deakin

This group has been renamed Distributed Systems & IoT (or DIoT, for short)!

The IoT Research Group at Deakin University aims to radically rethink life as embedded in the growing and emerging IoT, and to create innovative IoT as embedded in daily life and work. A key area of work is cooperative IoT systems, in two ways: thing-to-thing cooperation and human-to-thing cooperation.

With cooperation, issues of trust, ethics, privacy in information sharing and communications, and security become important. We aim to create and study fundamental models, architectures and techniques for future increasingly complex open networks of IoT devices to autonomously cooperate in a way which is ethical and can be trusted and which is secure and privacy-aware (application domains can range from cooperative vehicles, cooperating on-body IoT and in-body nano-IoT for health, to cooperating IoT devices in smart cities and the home); future IoT devices should be able to work out on its own when it is useful to cooperate and to share and exchange information and resources, without human intervention.

With human-to-thing cooperation, human-aware IoT systems become important. We aim to create and study thing-cognition, including IoT systems (from drones, cars, the smart home, a collection of things in the house, a city) that understand and recognize human behaviour and human states so that meaningful interaction can take place (relates to socially cognitive IoT and other endeavours); such IoT systems can also reach out and crowdsource to humans in order enhance their own capabilities. Part of achieving thing-cognition would be analytics where we would need to make sense of data arising from IoT devices. Another way to achieve thing-cognition is things performing crowdsourcing to other things or humans when making decisions or acquiring information. Also, humans will be need to have appropriate mental models of things.

IoT devices may not just be sensing devices but actuators and themselves building blocks of physical structures (with links to robotics); we aim to create and study algorithms, paradigms and models for (potentially large numbers of) IoT devices that work together to construct physical structures in the real world or self-assemble or self-organize themselves into various IoT "devices".

Application areas include IoT devices in the home, in health, smart cities, connected autonomous vehicles and drone systems.