The following text is an excerpt from Educating the Internet-of-Things Generation, an article I  wrote with my colleagues Arosha Bandara, Neil Smith, Mike Richards and Marian Petre from the Open University. The article appeared in IEEE Computer, Feb. 2013 (vol. 46 no. 2), pp. 53-61. A pdf of the preprint is also available. 

"Over the last decades the world of computing has changed dramatically. The continuing relevance of Moore’s laws together with the near-­‐zero cost of processing, networking and communication is giving rise to the Internet of Things, a new global computing infrastructure of trillions of connected devices that permeate the world we live in. The emergence of the Internet of Things will have a transformative effect on our society and requires us to rethink how to educate the coming generation of engineers and computer scientists. This important issue arises at a time when higher education is facing increasing pressures to transform itself to respond to critical changes in our society:

• Emerging new jobs require new skills: it has become clear that new developments in computing, energy and transportation will play a key role in what Jeremy Rifkin calls the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ [1], the reconfiguration of industry towards renewable energies, smart grid technologies, and energy positive buildings. This revolution will create demand for engineering and science jobs, which will be strongly connected to the Internet of Things.
• More people require and demand education: over the last decades millions of people around the world have been raised from poverty to middle class and now require and demand access to higher education. Yet increasingly higher education institutions cannot accommodate the growing number of potential students.
• Consumers are becoming producers: The recent shift from consumer cultures to participatory cultures [2, 3] has reconfigured people’s expectations about technology and their own role as producer and maker. Technology design increasingly needs to focus on democratic control, openness, social production and mass collaboration as much as on functional aspects and aesthetics. 

These trends create a need for an education provision that can empower a new generation of digital citizen who can understand both the technologies that underpin the Internet of Things, as well as the societal impacts of widespread adoption of these technologies. Moreover, higher education programmes need to make sure that the next generation of engineers understand how to design and build technological systems that reflect our altered expectations of openness and participation. For computer science the challenge is to develop new forms of scalable education that are able to accommodate the large numbers of students around the world, that are attractive to potential students with various interests and that deliver an innovative curriculum that reflects the radical changes in computing technology.

In response to these challenges the Open University in the UK has embarked on a program to revamp its undergraduate computer science education and in Oct 2011 has started offering a new online course designed around Internet of Things concepts aimed at first year undergraduates. Since then close to 6000 students have signed up for this 9-­‐month course and about 4000 students have completed it. The key objective of this new course, called My Digital Life, is to place the Internet of Things at the core of the 1st year computing curriculum and to prime students from the very beginning for the coming changes in society and technology. Rather than narrowly defining the Internet of Things as a technical subject, this course is designed to help students view the Internet of Things as a tool to understand and interrogate their own world, and recognize their own role in realising the potential of the Internet of Things. This is achieved through an educational model that focuses on concrete experiences, creative experimentation, active participation and collaborative learning – all factors associated with improved engagement and learning outcomes [9]. 

Collaborative Learning for the Internet of Things

The Open University (OU) was the world's first successful distance teaching university and has been offering open education programmes and distance education for over 40 years. With more than 250,000 active students it is Britain’s largest university. There is a now growing worldwide trend towards online education, yet delivering successful online courses is a tremendous challenge. Massively open online courses (MOOC), a relatively recent form of online education, have garnered extensive attention due to initiatives of high-­‐profile institutions like Stanford and MIT, and start-­‐ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and 2tor. Yet unlike these open and free course offerings, OU students receive extensive, personalised support from tutors and – upon successful completion – get credits counting towards a BSc in Computing.

The Internet of Things is a new topic for online education, and opinions about what the Internet of Things is, should be, or will be, differ greatly. The course team identified several concepts as fundamental for the Internet of Things and essential for this new course:

• the merging of the physical and digital realms;
• physical objects that become first class entities on the Internet;
• the huge increase in the number of internet-­‐connected devices, objects, sensors and actuators;
• the huge increase in the amount and value of data;
• the emergence of novel embedded device platforms below the level of personal mobile devices;
• and novel applications in energy, transport, health, business and daily life.

Teaching Internet of Things concepts to first year students is a challenge, let alone teaching them online. Few students at home have access to embedded networked devices and very few solutions exist for teaching internet-­‐scale programming of sensor applications. Most embedded device technologies require an understanding of hardware that cannot be expected of 1st year undergraduates – nor can we expect that large numbers of first-­‐year students are willing to engage with hardware before moving on to other topics. Most importantly however, the significance of the Internet of Things lies not in its technology alone but in its implications for society – and in its impact on the computing discipline itself: we believe that the Internet of Things represents an ideal basis for a wide-­‐ranging and rigorous introduction to computing, from algorithms to networks, from hardware architectures to big data. Using the Internet of Things as a foundation for teaching computer science also encourages a participative and collaborative pedagogic approach. The Internet of Things is an inherently democratic phenomenon, with many small parts, loosely coupled, each contributing as they can to a greater whole. By working with this structure, we can encourage students to learn with IOT technology, rather than merely learning about the IOT. This is reflected in the topics and educational goals of the My Digital Life course:

• Algorithms: students should acquire the ability to develop algorithms that operate on sensor data and create an output in the real world.
• Programming skill: students should develop an understanding of the principles of programming, and demonstrate the ability to program networked systems embedded in the real world, including sensing and actuation.
• Distribution and collaboration: students should develop an understanding of the importance of distributed and collaborative system architectures in computing, and demonstrate the ability to develop networked sensing applications.
• Creative design: the course should enable students to become creative and apply the Do-­‐it-­‐Yourself philosophy to the Internet of Things, as suggested for example by [4,5,6]. This involves creating ideas for applications that manifest themselves in the physical world and transform these ideas into working prototypes
• Collaborative design: students should develop the ability to work with other students to collaborate in the design of applications.
• Ethical issues: students should develop an understanding of issues relating to privacy and security in the IoT, as well as the need for public involvement in the debate on the role of technology in society.
• Computing in Society: students should understand how computing technology and the IoT underpin society and contribute to business and daily life, including historical context of the technological and intellectual developments that led to the Internet of Things.

Teaching an online course has significant challenges, for example related to student engagement and student evaluation. In order to ensure an exceptional student experience and avoid high dropout rates, our pedagogic approach is informed by experiential learning [7] and collaborative learning theories [8]. Experiential learning emphasises concrete experience and active experimentation while collaborative learning highlights a learning process where students capitalize on one another’s skills and understandings, and actively support each other’s learning. The course design has also been strongly influenced by the tradition of constructionism, which postulates that people are most likely to become engaged in an activity and learn things from it when they are active and creative participants [9]. Overall, the course is designed to support collective open engagement and experimentation by students.

[1] Jeremy Rifkin. Third Industrial Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

[2] Miller, Vincent. Understanding Digital Culture. "Convergence and the Contemporary Media Experience." Sage. 2011.

[3] Tapscott, Don. Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin USA: New York, 2006

[4] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles. The Toolkit Approach for End-­‐User Participation in the Internet of Things. In: Dieter Uckelmann, Mark Harrison, Florian Michahelles (eds.) Architecting the Internet of Things, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011.

[5] Gerd Kortuem and Fahim Kawsar. Market-­‐based User Innovation for the Internet of Things. Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT-­‐2010) Nov 29 -­‐ Dec 1, Tokyo, Japan.

[6] Marc Roelands, Marc Godon, Mohamed Ali Feki and Lieven Trappeniers. Orientation towards Do-­‐it-­‐ Yourself Internet-­‐of-­‐Things Mass Creativity. Workshop on Pervasive Workshop :What can the Internet of Things do for the citizen?. Pervasive Computing Conference 2010.

[7] Bergin, J.; Marquardt, K.; Sharp, H.; Manns, M. L.; Wallingford, E. & Eckstein, J. (2004), 'Patterns for Experiential Learning', Technical report, The Pedagogical Patterns Project , The Pedagogical Patterns Project.

[8] Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Advances in Learning and Instruction Series. New York, NY: Elsevier Science, Inc.

[9] Papert, S. Mindstorms (1980). Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1980.

There are (at least) two Internet-of-Things Accelerator Programs you might consider:

SpringboardIoT is an accelerator program for IoT startups that combines investment capital with an intensive 13 week mentor-led accelerator programme (disclosure: I am one of the mentors). The Springboard program is based at Google Campus in London and ideaSpace in Cambridge, and is aimed at ambitious and scalable early stage businesses from both UK and overseas.  

Applications are open to 6 January 2013 with the program starting in March 2013, the application form is here can be found at http://www.f6s.com/springboardiot2013#programs/ajax-application.

Bolt is another unique start-up program focused on helping start-ups with hardware development:

Bolt is the toolkit for hardware startups. Our program takes the best young hardware teams from across the globe and rockets their product into the right factories and onto store shelves. We provide everything from cash to shop tools to manufacturing know-how to buyer introductions. ...

Any small team of hardware entrepreneurs can apply. Bolt is looking for exceptional teams that want to change the world through a physical product. We're looking particularly closely at connected devices: relatively simple mechanical hardware with a PCB and a WiFi/BT/GSM/CDMA connection to another device or the cloud. Products can be in any stage of development (even just a sketch on a cocktail napkin).

We'll accept 10 teams for the Winter 2013 class. Teams must relocate to our facility in Boston and spend a majority of their time here for the duration of the 6 month program. The Bolt team will work with you every step of the way to help you get to market faster and cheaper.

More details at www.buildatbolt.com.

The paper reports findings from an empirical study involving over 70 households in the UK where we investigated how people understand, perceive and think about domestic energy microgeneration. The title "When Looking out of the Window is not Enough" refers to one of the observations we made during the study: some users of solar panels firmly believe they understand when and how much electricity their solar panels generate - by simply looking out of the window they see the weather and form in intuitive idea about current electricity production. However, as we discuss in the paper, these intuitive ideas are often wrong and in fact people have incorrect mental models about their energy production.

The paper's ultimate goal is to highlight future design directions for digital technologies that help people make better sense of microgeneration in their home.

Futurelearn will be independent but majority-owned by the OU. It will:

• Bring together a range of free, open, online courses from leading UK universities, that will be clear, simple to use and accessible;
• Draw on the OU’s expertise in delivering distance learning and pioneering open education resources to underpin a unified, coherent offer from all of its partners;
• Increase accessibility to higher education (HE) for students across the UK and in the rest of the world.

As professor at the Open University I am excited about this new development. We are pushing hard to develop new innovative long-distance education programmes and so it's great to have a new education platform with global reach.

Also just last month the OU announced that we will be repackaging our course materials to work as apps – and presumably it’s that sort of technology expertise it will be bringing to the table at FutureLearn.

The official press release is here.

1. Postdoc in Mobile HCI: the postdoc will conduct research on mobile user interfaces for public transport systems, with a particular focus on proactive services that predict user movement and information needs. Applicants should have a strong background in experimental HCI. The postdoc will apply human-centered design methods to create engaging mobile user experiences, and use empirical research methods to conduct user studies and field trials. The official ad for this post is here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEL512/research-associate-in-mobile-human-computer-interaction/
2. Postdoc in Context and Behavior Prediction: the postdoc will conduct research in algorithms and systems for context and behaviour prediction. Applicants should have a solid background in experimental systems research with a focus on algorithms. The postdoc will develop and evaluate location and behaviour prediction algorithms, and build system infrastructures for collection and processing of movement and behaviour data. The official ad for this post is here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEL513/research-associate-in-context-and-behaviour-prediction/

Both postdocs will be expected to develop proposals for own or joint research and to contribute to writing bids for research funding. The posts are available in the EU-funded GAMBAS project. The main objective of GAMBAS is to develop fundamental technologies for context-aware, behaviour-driven services for innovative public transportation applications.

Application deadline is 7 June 2012. Salary is as usual for postdoc in the UK, in the £30,122 - £31,948 range. Both posts are available immediately, until 31 January 2015.

If you are interested contact me at g.kortuem@open.ac.uk.

To apply go to http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6256

For detailed information, an electronic copy of an application form and how to apply go to http://www.open.ac.uk/employment, or call the Staffing Assistant on +44 (0)1908 654161 or email mct-staffing@open.ac.uk.

The network grant, made possible by the EPSRC Digital Economy Program and managed by Catherine Mulligan, is designed to bring together the best and brightest in the UK and across the world to help solve some of the world’s toughest sustainability problems – from reducing environmental impact to creating jobs, reducing poverty and developing new industries.  Specifically, this network aims to create connections between those who have not discussed with one another previously and also to help define the policy and research grand challenges in this area. 

The Network+ (who came up with the + suffix?) is not only for academics, but also includes industry and third sector organisations that help define the research agenda.

Read more aboyt the network at the community blog. 

A recent study of consumer innovation in the UK by von Hippel et al [1] indicates that consumer or user-led innovation dwarfs traditional company-driven innovation in that consumers spend twice as much as companies in their own product development and adaptation efforts. Similarly, Bergman et al [2] suggest that bottom-up, social innovation - defined as behaviour and lifestyle changes, energy saving through new forms of business and governance, and users employing new technical solutions - is a powerful yet under-utilised tool for addressing climate change. 

Catalyst ("Citizens Transforming Society: Tools for Change") is a £1.9M project funded by the EPSRC which brings together academics from social science, computing, design and management science to carry out research on the theme of citizen-led social innovation. Catalyst explores how citizens can use a bottom-up process to create community-driven solutions to major societal problems such as climate change, environmental degradation and energy poverty. (I am one of the co-investigators of Catalyst.)

Change-hungry citizens have turned to mobile digital communications during key world events from the London riots and the subsequent ‘clean up the streets’ campaign to the so called ‘Twitter revolutions’ in Tunisia and Egypt. But do social networking technologies really make it easier for communities to change the world? Or do they merely promote weak links between people rather than the strong links that are needed for real social revolution? And how should we design future digital technologies – technologies with built in grassroots democracy?

Catalyst uses an unique bottom-up community-driven research methodology to investigate citizen-led innovation. Rather than letting academic researchers alone drive the research agenda, Catalyst is using a Launchpad mechanisms to engage in collaborative research with communities. Launchpads are community-led activities aimed at helping community groups find out how the sorts of problems they are facing might be helped through digital technology.

There are currently two Launched projects in Catalyst: 

• 'Local Trade' aims to create a loyalty trading system which records trades and tracks the trading patterns within the system to reward sustainable and locally beneficial trading behaviour in Lancaster. Following the global economic decline, Local Trade aims to ‘re-boot’ collaborative endeavours through stimulating altruistic behaviours and rewarding local creativity and innovation. 
• 'Activism and Social Media' aims to provide an online platform to bring together existing research on social media use in activism, and the experiences and views of activists themselves. This will involve both a collaborative online environment (e.g. a wiki) and real-time analysis of activist social media use. 

As a community group or community member, you have a unique opportunity to drive the research. Catalyst is actively looking for community groups to collaborate on problems that could be developed into a Catalyst sub-project. The idea does not need to be fully formed; we are looking for a committed group of people, a context of genuine citizen engagement, a problem or challenge which can be clearly identified, in short a setting where Catalyst can make a positive and useful contribution. For more details see http://www.catalystproject.org.uk/content/participate. 

On his web site he states: 

"One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career."

"Now that I have seen the true power of education, there is no turning back. It's like a drug. I've just peeked through a window into an entire new world, and I am determined to help bring education to everyone out there." 

Incidentally, one of the first courses offered by Udacity uses exactly the approach I have long been pushing at the Universities I have worked, teaching computer science and software development holistically and building courses around ambitious real world challenges: 

Udacity's CS 101 course is described as follows:

"CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE: Learn programming in seven weeks. We'll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!"  

"Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. [...] And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford. Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material. And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based."

 (P.S. Thrun remains a non-tenured research professor at Stanford and appears to keep his job at Google)

This from Joel Spolsky's blog: 

"New York City gets a Software Engineering High School
by Joel Spolsky
Friday, January 13, 2012
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money."

More here. See also Fred Wilson's blog. 

Finally, as suggested by Fred Wilson check out Mayor Bloomberg's State of The City Address.

"On January 12, Mayor Bloomberg delivered the 2012 State of the City Address at the Morris High School Campus in the Bronx. In 2012, New York City will lead the way by pushing progress in city schools to the next level, making the economy a global capital of innovation, and making the government the most innovative of any in the world:

• Citywide economic growth will be facilitated by expanding industries, creating jobs, connecting New Yorkers to job opportunities, and increasing the minimum wage.
• Innovative solutions to government will be implemented across all city agencies in order to streamline operations and better serve New Yorkers."
• New York City will improve schools by attracting, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers with programs that include loan forgiveness, increased salaries, and new methods for teacher evaluation. Successful charter systems will be expanded, students will be better prepared for college and careers, and the City will help students claim federal financial aid for college.

Here is a short excerpt from the course description:

"The Software Entrepreneurship course focuses on the intersection of software and business, and investigates the theory and practice of creating and growing successful software firms. The class combines topics from innovation, entrepreneurship, business planning, finance, business management, design, software technology and engineering to provide students with a holistic understanding of software business in general and the software start-up process in particular.

The course is designed for students interested in understanding and practicing innovation in the fast-changing software landscape. Lessons from this course will not only be valuable to budding software entrepreneurs but to everyone who wants to understand and influence how software transforms business and society. The course will in equal parts explore business and technology aspects of software - this is in realisation that successful software firms are often characterized by a close alignment of technology and business innovation."

The Oxford Software Entrepreneurship course is based on previous courses that Jyoti and I have taught independently at various occasions, but this is the first time that we will be teaching a course together. 

Course details are not yet available online so please contact me if you want to know more.

"The overall objective of the GAMBAS project is the development of an innovative and adaptive middleware to enable the privacy-preserving and automated utilization of behavior-driven services that adapt autonomously to the context of users. "

"Michael Gove admits schools should teach computer science."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/06/michael-gove-computer-science

"On Monday 28 November UKIE announced the launch of the Next Gen Skills campaign to call for fundamental changes to the education system to drive hi-tech growth."

http://ukie.info/content/next-gen-skills-campaign-launched

"New Gen Skills is a major new campaign formed from an alliance between the biggest names from the UK digital, creative and hi-tech industries and the UK’s leading skills and educational bodies to improve the computer programming skills needed for the future growth of the UK’s economy."

http://www.nextgenskills.com/

"This landmark report sets out how the UK can be transformed into the world’s leading talent hub for video games and visual effects."

http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/assets/features/next_gen

What is ACI? A quote from the abstract:

"Although we have involved animals in machine and computer interactions for a long time, their perspective has seldom driven the design of interactive technology meant for them and animal-computer interaction is yet to enter mainstream user-computer interaction research. This lack of animal perspective can have negative effects on animal users and on the purposes for which animal technology is developed. Not only could an Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) agenda mitigate those effects, it could also yield multiple benefits, by enhancing our inter-species relationships with the animals we live or work with, leading to further insights into animal cognition, rendering conservation efforts more effective, improving the economical and ethical sustainability of food production, expanding the horizon of user-computer interaction research altogether and benefiting different groups of human users too." Advances in both our understanding of animal cognition and computing technology make the development of ACI as a discipline both possible and timely, while pressing environmental, economic and cultural changes make it desirable. But what exactly is ACI about and how could we develop such a discipline? This Manifesto describes the scientific aims, methodological approach and ethical principles of ACI and proposes a research agenda for its systematic development."

Check it out and let me know what you think about ACI.

Mancini, Clara (2011). Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI): a manifesto. Interactions, 18(4), available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/28857/

"Helsinki Design Lab helps government see the 'architecture of problems.' We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solution..."

Overview

Workshop Facilitators

Prelimnary schedule:

1. The Manchseter Open Data Store. Presentation by Julian Tait.
2. A closer look at open data. Participants will collaboratively explore concrete data sets from the Manchester Open Data Store to identify opportunities and discuss potential issues (data quality, privacy, ownership etc.)
3. Idea Generation. Participants will collaboratively generate ideas for data-driven products and services and discuss to what extent current data sets are suitable or appropriate to support these products.  

Who should attend?

Gerd Kortuem and Fahim Kawsar. Market-based User Innovation for the Internet of Things. Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT-2010) Nov 29 - Dec 1, Tokyo, Japan. (A corresponding presentation is available on slideshare or as pdf.)

Here the gist of the argument: the iPhone powerfully demonstrates how user innovation can be fostered by open markets and market-based mechanism. By combining programming tools, application platform and distribution channel, Apple has created an environment that effectively supports user innovation networks in the sense of von Hippel*, in which innovation development, production, distribution and consumption are performed by users (or more precisely by user/developers and micro software firms). The user innovation network supported by the iPhone ecosystem is horizontal, where innovation – in the form of iPhone apps – is created by and for users. In contrast to von Hippel’s original notion, which refers to open-source development and the ability to replicate and adapt a product, the iPhone innovation network does not compel users to make their innovations openly accessible to other users. Instead, transfer of innovation among users is facilitated by a two-sided market (realized by the App Store), with user/developers on the one side and users-only on the other. 

However unlike the iPhone ecosystem, the Internet of Things cannot be confined to a single device platform and a unified distribution channel. Instead, the IoT ecosystem will necessarily consist of a heterogeneous collection of hardware, software and data components. This greatly complicates user innovation as it introduces dependencies and compatibility issues, which make it harder to share and reuse artifacts. Thus in order to foster user led innovation in the IoT space I argue for a connected set of marketplaces, each one addressing a particular innovation touchpoint. I define marketplaces as connected if products of one marketplace can be used to enhance, control or interact with products of another marketplace.

A simple example of this concept is www.liquidware.com, an online shop for open-source DIY hardware. Liquidware not only sells hardware but also offers an App Store for software that runs on this hardware. Following our definition, the Liquidware hardware store and the Liquidware App Store are connected. In order to be traded in connected marketplaces, products need to be compatible: in this example software in the one marketplace needs to be compatible to the hardware in the other. Another form of connection can be envisioned between a marketplace for sensor devices and a marketplace for sensor data produced by these devices. However, there is no example yet for such a link (even though simple forms of data marketplaces exist, for example as part of Pachube). Connection is a one-way relationship and connections between three or more marketplaces can be complex. For example, two sensor device marketplaces could be linked to the same data marketplace. Marketplaces may also be chained: a marketplace for electronics components may be connected with a marketplace for sensor devices built from these components, which in turn could be connected with a data marketplace.   Connected Marketplaces for the Internet of Things

Applying the concept of connected marketplaces to a future smart buildings ecosystem we can envision a set of connected marketplaces as follows: 

1. Smart Object Marketplace
2. Application Marketplace
3. Configuration Marketplace
4. Data Marketplace
5. Data Manipulator Marketplace

The details of these marketplaces are described in a recent paper: Gerd Kortuem and Fahim Kawsar. Market-based User Innovation for the Internet of Things. Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT-2010) Nov 29 - Dec 1, Tokyo, Japan. 

 A corresponding presentation is available on slideshare or as pdf.  Connected marketplaces create an open ecosystem that supports innovation and diffusion across multiple levels of complexity.  An innovator can use lower-level marketplace to acquire devices and tools to build something more complex and use higher-level marketplace to share (or sell) his/her creations with others, who in turn can use them as a starting point their for their own innovations. This mechanism not only supports an innovation chain from low complexity to high complexity, it also allows for a distribution of ownership and control of marketplaces. 

*von Hippel, E. (2002). Open Source Projects as Horizontal Innovation Networks - By and For Users (June 2002). MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 4366-02)

Two question now arise:

• How do we design user interfaces that support interactions that cross objects, time and space? 
• How do we design interactive systems that support interactions that cross objects, time and space?  

In a recent paper entitled Supporting Interaction with the Internet of Things across Objects, Time and Space and presented at the Internet of Things 2010 conference at Tokyo, my colleague Fahim Kawsar and I tackled the second question. In the paper we describe a software architecture for flow-based interactive systems. A flow, or more precisely a situated flow, is a high-level activity model that is linked to physical entities and digital devices.

Situated Flow

At runtime the model maintains the state of the interaction between one user and one or more devices, making it possible to carry interaction state from device to device. A corresponding software framework provides the foundation for flow-based interaction and device co-ordination. 

The work was done in a hospital context, so our application examples relate the use of smart medical devices in a future care scenario. Details can be found in the paper: 

Fahim Kawsar, Gerd Kortuem and Bashar Altakrouri. Supporting Interaction with the Internet of Things across Objects, Time and Space. Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT-2010), Nov 29 - Dec 1, Tokyo, Japan. 

The corresponding presentation slides can be found on slideshare.

This Bike Share System is more than just a transporting system. It deals not only with the problem of stocks and flows of people, but adds extra value to its user and to the city itself. We suggest that the Bike Share System becomes an integral part of the city. The bicycles should function as censors [I suppose this should mean sensors GK] and inform the system about certain behaviors, so that the system can react according to the situation. To predict the performance of a system, the entities have to exchange information. An internet-based platform can analyze the different interests and could then manage possible conflicts. The bicycles are equipped with GPS and W-Lan, so they are connected to each order and can inform the system about their position and status. (Is a bike being used? Where is the bike and where is it moving to? Is there a reservation for the bike? etc.) Privacy protection is a matter that has to be taken into account in the process. [http://www.rafaa.ch/rafaa/Copenhagn.html]

A bit on the speculative side in terms of technology and functionality but I really do like the design. 

New Bike Share System in Copenhagen by RAFAA (photo copyright by RAFAA)

New Bike Share System in Copenhagen by RAFAA (photo copyright by RAFAA)

New Bike Share System in Copenhagen by RAFAA (photo copyright by RAFAA)

In my talk I discussed how user innovation and market-based innovation can be combined to create user-centered ecosystems that are open for and provide incentives for end-user innovation. The talk was motivated by the observation that traditionally the development of the Internet of Things has been driven by large commercial players, leaving not much room for small independent players or non-profits. This situation is changing, however, as the success of the open hardware movement and the work of design firms such as Tinker London and Berg London testifies. 

A workshop summary has been published in the IEEE Pervasive Magazine.