Summary

The concept of ubiquitous computing has been around for decades – at least in science fiction – where tiny and smart sensing devices that collaborate together to solve our problems are omnipresent. Along with the miniaturization and the pervasiveness of consumer electronics, the global Internet, a worldwide “Internet of Things” (IoT) that connects cars, keys, cell phones, and fridges is rapidly becoming reality.

The term “Internet of Things” refers to a certain set of technologies that enable the Internet to reach out into the real world of physical objects, and collect information about the world that surrounds us (and ourselves!!). Physical objects will play a central role in the future Internet, as objects that speak and collaborate together with no human intervention will soon outnumber the human users of the web. The era of personal computing is soon to be replaced by community computing and the sharing of information by autonomous devices, and this will require new paradigms, regulations, and standards for communicating and exchanging data.

In our globalization era, the Web Services paradigm has quickly become as the de facto standard for automated business-to-business data exchange platforms, and many companies quickly realized the potentials of such an ecosystem of services, as testified by the increasing number of firms that started offering their services and data over the Internet. Nevertheless, a huge gap is still present between information systems in physical companies (e.g., Enterprise Resource Planning software) and physical devices (e.g., sensors and manufacturing equipment in a production plant), and closing this gap is a necessary step towards the realization of the full potentials of the IoT. Additionally, obsolete business models that do not incorporate the benefits of the IoT will not be able to compete in such a dynamic and complex environment and are very likely to be left behind.

Technologies that will form the future IoT will have a major impact on our whole environment, ranging from human end-users to multinational companies and governments. Henceforth, this issue concerns engineers and managers, sociologists and anthropologists, designers and decision makers. The goal of this workshop is to gather experts from different fields who will discuss the main issues involved in the convergence of the physical and virtual worlds. We propose to take advantage of the uniquely diversified LIFT crowd to discuss, share ideas, and eventually progress towards a set of recommendations that will define the IoT, and novel business models that fully leverage the upcoming real/virtual world hybridization.

Agenda

A quick review of the current status (about 20 minutes) will be followed by proposals on how existing business processes can be adapted to fully leverage the potentials of such and IOT, and will be evaluated and discussed against requirements and insights from various disciplines. This will take the form of a very informal session based on discussions between different stakeholders will cover some of the following topics (not limited to, please propose your own!!) and will last approximately 2 hours with a 15 min break in between :

Interoperability: Different communication protocols and medium will be very likely unavoidable. Given the huge variety of information to be processed, and constraints to respect, different data formats and information representations will be required.

• Is a unique standard for interconnecting physical devices feasible or is it just a utopia?

• How useful and possible is it to use semantic web technologies to propose a fully inter-operable system that requires no human intervention to work?

• Why should companies want such a unique standard? Why not?

• How can industrial research be oriented/motivated towards the creation of more inter-operable communication and data exchange platforms?

Privacy/security/identity: Most of our online activities are currently monitored and stored, often for commercial purposes. However, in an ambient intelligence era, an unprecedented granularity upon personal behaviour will be available. When identity and location structures will overlap, anonymity will be difficult to guarantee.

• How could a realistic and user-centred legislation for digital rights be proposed and enforced internationally?

Governance: For such a heterogeneous ecosystem of physical and virtual agents, different domain experts will be needed in order to ensure a smooth and reusable set of best practices for the design of novel business models that are suited to work in such a complex, interconnected ecosystem of real and virtual agents.

• How can all these specific efforts be co-ordinated and managed to ensure full interoperability and a coherent and efficient standardization process (if any)?

• What level of specification and granularity will be required to ensure both efficient functionality, and at the same time be sufficiently generic and adaptable to be useful regardless of the discipline?

Finally, a 20 minutes wrap-up will conclude this workshop.

We want to focus on the topics that are the most interesting to you participants, and that have not yet been sufficiently addressed. Please use this page and add all your comments about what aspects of IOT you would like to hear more about and discuss, and you feel deserves more attention.