Summer School on Internet of Things 2016

(joint course with Gerd Kortuem and Claire Rowland)

Gerd Kortuem, Prof. of Computing | Open University, United Kingdom

Claire Rowland, Independent UX consultant, UK

Connected products and services—such as networked thermostats, fitness monitors, home energy systems, and connected cars—are at the heart of the Internet of Things (IoT). The design of such IoT products and services raises new challenges which—despite a growing body of research on the Internet of Things—are still poorly understood.

This course is devoted to the exploration of how to design connected products and services, and how to create meaningful user experiences in a connected world. By using case studies of commercial products and research prototypes, this course will cover topics such as experience prototyping for the IoT, conceptual models for IoT products and services, usability challenges, design of data-driven products, and designing with IoT data.

This course is divided into two parts. Part 1 will cover theoretical aspects of designing connected products and services for the IoT. Part 2 will be devoted to practical exercises, which will provide participants the chance to apply learned concepts in practical design.

Luca Mottola and Mikhail Afanasov, Politecnico di Milano | SICS Swedish ICT

The vision of an “Internet of Things” is slowly materialising. Networked embedded sensors and actuators offer new ways of making use of existing assets and resources, backed by the availability of near real-time information from the environment and persons. These devices bridge the gap between the “machine” and the “world” around it: they dissolve the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world where the computing machine lives.

In this context, the course explores the design, implementation, and validation of the software powering networked embedded devices at the core of the Internet of Things. We will discuss the challenges in creating software artefacts that operate at the interface between the digital machine and the physical world, the state of the art in developing such a specific breed of software, and the issues in implementing complex functionality within limited resources. To complement the discussion, we will directly experiment with modern IoT programming platforms to gain initial hands-on experience, hopefully instrumental to foster the students’ creativity.

Thomas Ploetz, Newcastle University, UK

Wearable and ubiquitous computing form one of the building blocks of the dawning age of the Internet of Things. Through massive and continuous miniaturisation of electronics it is now possible to integrate sensing and computing facilities into quite literally the  fabrics of everyday life. With the widespread adoption and integration of sensing and computing facilities comes the need for sophisticated sensor data analysis, which typically requires machine learning and pattern recognition methods.

In this course I will give an overview of the field of ubiquitous and wearable computing with specific focus on the Internet of Things, as well as on the basics of relevant sensing modalities. With this foundation the course will then specifically address sensor data analysis using machine learning techniques. I will provide a comprehensive introduction into relevant machine learning methods, most notably time series analysis procedures as they are being used for activity recognition applications. The course will conclude with practical consideration on how to evaluate sensor data analysis methods and what comes beyond activity recognition.

The practical part of the course will focus on projects based on the Microsoft Band 2 wearable sensing platform (paired with Android phones).

Carlo Alberto Boano, Graz University of Technology

The Internet of Things will be the backbone of modern society and will embrace a system of wireless networks delivering end-users a plethora of attractive services and applications such as smart cities, smart grids, and smart healthcare. The latter heavily rely on the dependable operation of embedded wireless sensors and actuators, i.e., they expect a reliable data delivery within specific time boundaries as well as a high energy-efficiency. The environment in which wireless sensors and actuators are embedded, however, often negatively affects the performance of their wireless communications, making it hard to fulfill application-specific dependability requirements and sometimes compromising the functionality of the whole system.

In this context, the course illustrates state-of-the-art low-power wireless communication protocols and gives an overview of the influence of the environment on their performance. We will discuss the challenges in understanding and predicting the environmental impact, examples of environment-aware communication protocols, as well as the common issues in implementing complex functionalities on resource-constrained smart objects. The participants will also have the chance to gain hands-on experience and apply learned concepts through practical exercises.

Atul Prakash, University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, USA

Nilanjan Banerjee, University of Maryland | Baltimore County, USA

Smart Home Automation is an important paradigm in today’s sensor-driven world. Homes and buildings are being continuously instrumented with sensors like Kinect, energy meters, cameras, occupancy sensors, digital televisions, and smart switches. Home automation systems form an interesting confluence of sensors systems, operating systems, and cloud-driven data analytics. This hands on course will study the challenges in smart home automation systems from a hands-on and systems perspective. We will use an innovative and emerging platform, Lab of Things, from Microsoft Research to build software systems for smart home automation, including writing drivers and applications using Lab of Things. Knowledge of an object oriented language is a must. Knowledge of C# is a plus, however, there will be a review of C# at the start of the course.

Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Microsoft Research, USA

Location is a fundamental service for mobile devices and the exploding Internet-of-Things (IoT) space. The mobile and sensing research communities have made remarkable progress in location sensing in the recent years with contributions ranging from low-power outdoor location sensing, all the way to an explosion of indoor location technologies aiming to recreate the outdoor GPS experience indoors.

This talk will provide an in-depth presentation of the principles and practices of location sensing in mobile devices. The goal is to give students and researchers a broad sense of the state of the art, and to help them get hands on experience with some of the most accurate location technologies today.

Denis Makrushin, Kaspersky Lab | Moscow, Russia

Have you ever thought about how secure the emerging ‘smart’ world around us is?

Scare stories surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) conjure up images of bad guys in hoodies who live for hacking and making the lives of folks harder – inventing millions of ways to infiltrate your life through your gadgets. Probably no one cares about their smart-home security, but what about smart-city threats? A huge number of public IoT devices affecting millions of people are vulnerable to abuse, potentially endangering users’ data and the networks of the companies they work for, or both.

The talk will be devoted to global security issues with regard to the growing Internet of Things, and how they might influence our lives.