ERCIM News 101
April 2015
Special theme The Internet of Things and the Web of Things
Guest editors Dave Raggett (W3C) and Emmanuel Baccelli (Inria)
The Internet of Things will Change our World
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by Cees Links, Founder & CEO GreenPeak Technologies, www.greenpeak.com
Everybody talks about the Internet of Things, the IoT… but how is the IoT actually going to change our lives?
The Internet of Things is creating a new world, a quantifiable and measureable world, where people and businesses can manage their assets in better informed ways, and can make more timely and better informed decisions about what they want or need to do. This new connected world brings with it fundamental changes to society and to consumers. By sensing our surrounding environment, the IoT will create many practical improvements in our world, increasing our convenience, health and safety, while at the same time improving energy efficiency and comfort. The IoT will be a new source of wealth creation.
The Promise of the Internet of Things and the Web of Things - Introduction to the Special Theme
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by Emmanuel Baccelli and Dave Raggett
Improvements in electronics are enabling widespread deployment of connected sensors and actuators (the Internet of Things) with predictions of tens of billions of smart objects by 2020 (Cisco 2011). This raises huge challenges for security, privacy and data handling, along with great opportunities across many application domains, e.g., home and building automation, retail, healthcare, electrical grids, transport, logistics, manufacturing, and environmental monitoring (IERC 2014).
Open{WSN|Mote}: Open-Source Industrial IoT
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by Thomas Watteyne, Xavier Vilajosana, and Pere Tuset
The OpenWSN project is an open-source implementation of a fully standards-based protocol stack for capillary networks, rooted in the new IEEE802.15.4e Time Synchronized Channel Hopping standard. IEEE802.15.4e, coupled with Internet of Things standards, such as 6LoWPAN, 6TiSCH, RPL and CoAP, enables ultra-low-power and highly reliable mesh networks, which are fully integrated into the Internet. OpenMote is an open-hardware platform designed to facilitate the prototyping and technology adoption of IEEE802.15.4e TSCH networks, and is fully supported by OpenWSN.
RIOT and the Evolution of IoT Operating Systems and Applications
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by Emmanuel Baccelli, Oliver Hahm, Hauke Petersen and Kaspar Schleiser
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the next ‘big thing’. To date, however, there is no de facto standard software platform to program memory and energy-constrained IoT devices [1]. We expect an evolution of IoT software platforms that can be roughly compared to the recent evolution of software platforms powering smartphones.
FIT IoT-LAB: The Largest IoT Open Experimental Testbed
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by Eric Fleury, Nathalie Mitton, Thomas Noël and Cedric Adjih
The universal proliferation of intelligent objects is making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality; to operate on a large scale it will critically rely on new, seamless, forms of communications. But how can innovations be validated in a controlled environment, before being massively deployed into the real world? FIT IoT-LAB addresses this challenge by offering a unique open first class service to all IoT developers, researchers, integrators and developers: a large-scale experimental testbed allowing design, development, deployment and testing of innovative IoT applications, in order to test the future and make it safe.
OCARI: A Wireless Sensor Network for Industrial Environments
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by Tuan Dang, Pascale Minet and Erwan Livolant
OCARI is a wireless sensor network designed to operate in industrial environments [1]. It is easy to deploy (i.e. ‘plug-and-play’), and is energy-efficient to support battery-operated nodes. OCARI nodes use commercial off-the shelf components. OCARI provides bounded medium access delays and the energy consumption of an OCARI network is predictable. In addition, the network is scalable (up to hundreds of sensor nodes) and able to support micro-mobility of nodes.
Security and Privacy in the Internet of Things
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by Ludwig Seitz
The Internet of Things (IoT) has particular security and privacy problems. The Internet Engineering Task Force is designing authentication and authorization mechanisms for the most constrained devices which are part of the Internet of Things.
Secure and Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks
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by Corinna Schmitt and Burkhard Stiller
There exists a multitude of implemented, as well as envisioned, use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Some of these use cases would benefit from the collected data being globally accessible to: (a) authorized users only; and (b) data processing units through the Internet. Much of the data collected, such as location or personal identifiers, are of a highly sensitive nature. Even seemingly innocuous data (e.g., energy consumption) can lead to potential infringements of user privacy.
Creating Internet of Things Applications from Building Blocks
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by Frank Alexander Kraemer and Peter Herrmann
Reactive Blocks is a toolkit to create, analyse and implement reactive applications. It helps developers to get concurrency issues right, reuse existing solutions, and brings model checking to the common programmer.
Interfaces to the Internet of Things with XForms
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by Steven Pemberton
XForms is a language for describing interfaces to data, designed at W3C by researchers from industry and academia. It is a declarative language, meaning it describes what has to be done, but largely not how. The interface it describes does not have to run locally on the machine producing the data, but can be run remotely over the network. Since Internet of Things (IoT) computers typically have little memory and are low-powered, this makes XForms ideally suited for the task.
Home Automation Devices Belong to the IoT World
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by Vittorio Miori and Dario Russo
We present a practical and scalable solution that aims to achieve the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in complex contexts, such as the home automation market, in which problems are caused by the presence of proprietary and closed systems with no compatibility with Internet protocols.
Dioptase: Data Streaming Middleware for the Internet of Things
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by Benjamin Billet and Valérie Issarny
The Dioptase middleware provides developers with new methods for writing distributed applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). Dioptase leverages data streams as data model and continuous in-network processing as computation model, in order to deal with the challenging volume of data being continuously produced by the ‘Things’.
Programming Actors for the Internet of Things
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by Raphael Hiesgen, Dominik Charousset, Thomas C. Schmidt and Matthias Wählisch
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a large number of devices to cooperate to achieve a common task. Each individual device is small and executes a confined software core. Collective intelligence is gained from distributed collaboration and Internet communication. Corresponding IoT solutions form large distributed software systems that pose professional requirements: scalability, reliability, security, portability and maintainability. The C++ Actor Framework CAF [1] contributes such a professional open source software layer for the IoT. Based on the actor model of Hewitt et al. [2], it aids programmers at a good level of abstraction without sacrificing performance.
A Mobile End-User Development Environment for IoT Applications Exploiting the Puzzle Metaphor
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by Josè Danado and Fabio Paternò
‘Puzzle’, a mobile end user development framework, allows the end user to opportunistically create, modify and execute applications for interacting with smart things, phone functions and web services. The framework simplifies development of such applications through an intuitive jigsaw metaphor that allows easy composition on touch-based devices. Users immediately identified the utility of this feature, and found it easy to envisage using the framework in various scenarios in their daily lives.
3D Web Visualization for Real-Time Maintenance of Smart Buildings
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by Daniel Gaston, Christophe Joubert and Miguel Montesinos
Modern buildings are equipped with a variety of building automation technologies and sensors which are controlled, monitored and managed through heterogeneous information systems. To date, these systems show limited interoperability and tend to operate in isolation. The future will require a more comprehensive and efficient operation of buildings facilitated by way of integrated and smart cooperative management and automation systems. Web-based open-source technologies can create 3D virtual representations of the real-time geolocated activities within a building. Such a system can simplify both the maintenance and operation by facility managers and application services to building occupants.
COMPOSE: An Open Source Cloud-Based Scalable IoT Services Platform
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by Dave Raggett
Advances in electronics and communication technologies are stimulating the growth of low cost connected sensors and actuators. There are many potential application areas, for instance: home automation, security, healthcare, smart grids, integrated transport systems, and next generation manufacturing. To date, research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) has largely focused on the sensors, actuators and the communication technologies needed for long battery life and efficient use of spectrum etc. rather than on what’s needed to encourage applications and services. Current IoT products exist in isolated silos. To fully realise the benefits, we will need scalable solutions for managing the vast of amounts of data, and open standards that enable open markets of connected services.
An Integration Gateway for Sensing Devices in Smart Environments
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by Michele Girolami, Francesco Furfari and Stefano Chessa
Smart Environments, and in particular Smart Homes, have recently attracted the attention of many researchers and industrial vendors. The proliferation of low-power sensing devices requires integration gateways hiding the complexity of heterogeneous technologies. We propose a ZigBee integration gateway to access and integrate low-power ZigBee devices.
Fighting Networking Heterogeneity in the Internet of Things
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by Elias Z. Tragos, Vangelis Angelakis and Stefanos Papadakis
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect large numbers of heterogeneous devices to provide advanced applications that can improve our quality of life. The efficient interconnectivity of IoT devices can be achieved with a hybrid Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) and Software Defined Radio (SDR) framework that can overcome the heterogeneity of devices by seamlessly adapting to their communication technology.
Tectons: Towards a Generalised Approach to Programming Systems of Systems
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by Geoff Coulson, Andreas Mauthe and Markus Tauber
The world’s computing infrastructure is becoming increasingly differentiated into autonomous sub-systems (e.g., IoT installations, clouds, VANETs), and these are often composed to generate value-added functionality (systems of systems). But today, system composition is carried out in an ad-hoc, system-specific, manner, with many associated disadvantages. We need a generalized system-of-systems-oriented programming model that allows systems to be composed by application-domain ex-perts, not just systems programmers. Furthermore, composition should occur in a principled way that generates well-understood compositional semantics and behaviour.
BETaaS: Building the Future Platform for Development and Execution of Machine-to-Machine Applications
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by Carlo Vallati, Enzo Mingozzi and Giacomo Tanganelli
Recently proposed IoT platforms are typically based on centralized and cloud-centric infrastructures. The BETaaS project aims at designing a platform for the execution of M2M applications in a distributed runtime environment running close to the physical environment where sensors and actuators are deployed. The main goal is to move the intelligence to the edge in order to allow localized, content-centric, and timely processing of smart objects data. The platform facilitates the integration of existing IoT systems, while providing software developers with a high-level, content-centric abstraction to access smart objects’ resources.
Pro-IoT: Improving the Productivity of Companies by Using the IoT
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by Heikki Ailisto, Nadine Pesonen, Pertti Raatikainen and Jonathan Ouoba
Internet of things (IoT) and the related Industrial Internet are recognized as one of the most significant technology-driven disruptions of the coming ten years. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has chosen IoT as a strategic area for research, development and innovation projects.
MusicBricks: Connecting Digital Creators to the Internet of Music Things
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by Thomas Lidy, Alexander Schindler and Michela Magas
A new Horizon 2020 Innovation Action project fosters the uptake of music technology research and acts as an accelerator for bringing creative music tech ideas to market, while providing a mesh of technological ‘bricks’ to create an ‘Internet of Music Things’.
Deploying an NFC-based Inventory System: A Case Study
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by Patrick Poullie, Thomas Bocek and Burkhard Stiller
NFC tags and transceivers are ubiquitous and well supported. Like many academic research groups, the Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zürich owns many physical devices, which are required for research and teaching. Traditionally, a printed, human-readable inventory and attached labels have been used to keep track of these devices. A new inventory approach was developed with the aim of simplifying the data acquisition using an NFC tag-based system supported by an Android application. This approach was implemented, tested, and used productively. However, due to technical difficulties - namely, a poor response of NFC tags on metallic material - the NFC-based inventory system did not simplify data acquisition and consequently, the NFC-based inventory system was changed back to the label-based system.
TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things
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TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things
by Miguel L. Pardal and José Alves Marques
The TrakChain assessment tools take a description of a physical supply chain – relevant locations, how many goods are received, how often, etc. – and estimate the performance of track and trace queries in a modelled traceability system, providing predictions of how much processing and storage will be required for the working system. The tools were developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and were evaluated using a Pharmaceuticals supply chain case study.
W3C Europe@20 Anniversary Event
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- Category: Joint ERCIM Actions
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W3C Europe will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a symposium on Tuesday, 5 May in the Paris town hall.
The Web was born in Europe and W3C is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the European branch of W3C in Paris. Europe has played a fundamental role for the success of the Web. First of all, the founding of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 became possible with the support by CERN, DARPA and the European Commission. Since 1995, when Inria hosted the European branch of W3C, the European Commission funded W3C activities in Europe, as for example the development of Web accessibility rules, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web. Since 2003, W3C Europe is hosted by ERCIM EEIG.
W3C will celebrate 20 years of work accomplished by European stakeholders for the benefit of the Web with a symposium on 5 May. Speakers will include, among others, representatives from Paris city council, the European Commission and the French government. The closing talk will be given by Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and W3C Director. About 250 invited guests - global strategists, business leaders and developers - are expected to attend.
More information:
http://www.w3.org/20/Europe/
The Role of ERCIM EEIG
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- Category: Joint ERCIM Actions
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by Antoine Petit
Over the last 25 years, ERCIM has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s leading expert groups in the areas of ICT and Applied Mathematics. In 2012, the ERCIM community was restructured and is now supported by two organizations, the ERCIM Association (AISBL) and the ERCIM European Economic Interest Group (EEIG). While the Association is carrying out and supervising all of ERCIM’s scientific activities, the EEIG, composed of a subset of the Association's members, is responsible for managing the ERCIM Office and the European branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Mesh Joinery: A Method for Building Fabricable Structures
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Paolo Cignoni, Nico Pietroni, Luigi Malomo and Roberto Scopigno
Mesh joinery is an innovative method to produce illustrative shape approximations suitable for fabrication. Mesh joinery is capable of producing complex fabricable structures in an efficient and visually pleasing manner. We represent an input geometry as a set of planar pieces arranged to compose a rigid structure by exploiting an efficient slit mechanism. Since slices are planar, a standard 2D cutting system is sufficient to fabricate them.
Icing Detection and Protection for Small Unmanned Aircrafts
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Andrea Cristofaro and Tor Arne Johansen
In unmanned aerial vehicles, it is vital to be able to detect and accommodate ice adhesion on wings, control surfaces and airspeed sensors, since ice accretion modifies the shape of the aircraft and alters its measurements, thus changing the aerodynamic forces and reducing manoeuvring capability.
LEARNMINER – Advanced Analytics for eLearning
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Christian Bauckhage, Markus Ketterl and Ulrich Nütten
LEARNMINER is an interactive social eLearning platform that integrates advanced analytics and linked data processing to assist users in structuring course material. Tools for analyzing crowd behaviour allow instructors to identify overly simple or difficult material and provide means for planning deadlines or tests. LEARNMINER allows for mobile access and provides interactive visualization of learning material and progress.
Online Semantic Analysis over Big Network Data
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Chengchen Hu and Yuming Jiang
Mobile applications, web services and social media generate huge data traffic from many sources. This is described as ‘big network data’ with the ‘4V-characteristics’ - that is, variety, velocity, volume and veracity. Analysis on such big network data can discover problems, reveal opportunities and provide advice for the service and network providers for fine-grained traffic engineering with close to real-time adjustment or application acceleration [1].
From Cooling Integrated Circuits to Efficient Electrical Power Generation
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Stephan Paredes, Brian Burg, Patrick Ruch, Ingmar Meijer and Bruno Michel
An earlier article in ERCIM News described a system for cooling integrated circuits with re-usable hot water. The result is a sharp increase in energy efficiency and a sharp reduction in the carbon footprint of data centers. The same technique is being applied to photovoltaic electrical energy production, again with a huge gain in system efficiency due to the parallel recovery of waste heat. In hot climates heat from datacenters as well as solar systems is converted into cooling by means of adsorption heat pumps.
VAVID– Handling Big Data
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Jochen Garcke, Fraunhofer SCAI
The German VAVID project develops improved techniques for data compression as well as new methods of data analysis, data management and interactive data visualization.25 Years of Python at CWI
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- Category: In Brief
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Announcement
In February an interview with Guido van Rossum was published on the ACM website, celebrating 25 years of Python. This popular programming language originates from CWI in Amsterdam, where Van Rossum designed Python in December 1989 and finished the first working version in the first months of 1990. He named the language after his favourite British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Guido van Rossum
Java Bug Fixed with Formal Methods
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- Category: In Brief
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Announcement
Researchers from the Formal Methods group at CWI fixed a bug in programming language Java in February 2015. They found an error in a broadly applied sorting algorithm, TimSort, which could crash programs and threaten security. The bug had already been known from 2013 but was never correctly resolved. When researcher Stijn de Gouw attempted to prove the correctness of TimSort, he encountered the bug. His bug report with an improved version has now been accepted. This version of TimSort is used by Android.
MOOC on “Binaural Hearing for Robots”
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- Category: In Brief
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Announcement
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Binaural Hearing for Robots” will be available on the platform France Université Numérique from 11 May to 12 June 2015. It will be taught by Radu Horaud, research director at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes.