News : “An Internet of Things primer"

26 Novembre 2014

“An Internet of Things primer"

Title: “An Internet of Things primer"

Abstract: While still missing a clear and precise definition, there's clearly a lot of buzz around the so-called "Internet of Things". From Gartner to Cisco, from McKinsey to Ericsson to the Chinese government, there is somehow a consensus regarding the centrality of technologies for connecting objects for future internet development, and the financial and social impact that a widespread application of IoT concepts will have. Just to cite a few figures, Cisco sees a market value of IoT technologies of $14.4 trillion by 2020, while McKinsey forecasts an yearly impact on the global GDP between $2.7 and $6.2 trillion by 2025.
It is unclear, though, if this hype and these figures are justified. From a cynical point of view, one might argue that IoT is just a re-branding of existing and well-established technologies, without any real innovation. Interoperability, management, orchestration, energy scavenging and storing, packaging, reliability, price, are all issues that are not solved today, and despite widespread efforts from the research community, not likely to be solved in the very near future. New business models, while actively discussed, are slow to emerge - if they do at all.

After analyzing the current IoT status, going through the main technological challenges that IoT face, the talk will focus on the effort done by the European Community to develop a sustainable Architectural Reference Model with the Internet of Things – Architecture (IoT-A) project.

IoT-A Web site: http://www.iot-a.eu/public

Speaker: Alessandro Bassi, Alessandro Bassi Consulting, Antibes, France
Alessandro Bassi graduated in Computer Science from the University in Milan in 1994, with soft computing and software engineering as majors. He joined Amadeus in January 1997, and he moved to the University of Tennessee in 2000, where he was involved in the seminal work of the Internet Backplane Protocol. From 2002 he then held a Research Visitor position at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon, France. After working one year for RIPE NCC, in November 2004 he joined Hitachi Europe. He was the deputy project coordinator of the FP5 "6QM" project, and the project coordinator of the FP7 "Autonomic Internet" project.

In August 2010 he founded Alessandro Bassi Consulting, working on topics related to Internet of Things technologies.Since 2005, his research interests are focused on the integration of autonomic properties into ad-hoc networks, RFID technologies and, more broadly, the Internet of Things. Since 2007 he is the chair of the Internet of Things WG of the European Technology Platform "EPoSS", focused on Smart Systems Integration. In this function, he co-organized, together with the European Commission, a number of events including the workshop "Beyond RFID - The Internet of Things", held in Brussels in 2008. He is an expert for ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, on possible threats coming from the adoption of IoT technologies, and he was part of the group that wrote the Strategic Research Agenda on Future Internet. He is a member of the European IoT Expert Group and IoT EU-China Advisory Group. He was the Technical Coordinator of the lighthouse project regarding the Internet of Things in the Framework Program 7, 'Internet of Things - Architecture" (IoT-A).