WECNET 2017 Keynote

The internet of things refers to collection of internet connected computational devices embedded into the objects of the physical world. It is expected that some of these devices perform sensing and actuation functionality. Visions of the internet of things often refer to a world were many (or all) the physical objects we interact with are part of the internet of things. In recent years the IoT paradigm had experienced significant hype, but also faced some stinging criticisms outlining challenges to its implementation. Some of these challenges were known and expected. Other ones are the type that would have been difficult to foresee ten years ago. Yet another ones are the kind which we could have definitely foresee, but we did not. For instance, we were relatively good at predicting the technical challenges associated with the IoT. The security and privacy issues were known and expected, yet certain attacks against IoT systems took us by surprise. At this moment it is clear that the business cases and economic models associated with different IoT applications were not clearly thought through. And essentially nobody anticipated "day two" issues - how are we going to operate, maintain and update an IoT environment once it is deployed? In this talk we discuss some challenges faced by the IoT world in 2017, identify research objectives and try to draw some lessons from them.