Web of Things

IoT 2021 – The IoT conference where it all started…

Dominique Guinard — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 07:55:27 +0000

Hi all,

It’s this time of the year again: the submission for papers at the 11th International Conference on the Internet of Things is open. We encourage you to submit your WoT papers there as this conference has had a long standing of attracting WoT researchers since it’s start 11 years ago!

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1st Call for Papers (Deadline, Monday, August 23, 2021 (23:59 AoE)

11th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2021)

http://iot-conference.org

St Gallen, Switzerland (and virtually).

ACM (SIGCHI) In-Cooperation event

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With the advent of digitalization and communicating physical objects such as machines and vehicles, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become an exciting field of research encompassing pervasive computing, cyber-physical systems, and information and communication technologies. Particular challenges include the understanding of IoT application demands and novel network traffic types, low-latency and reliable communication, and integrating and mediating Things within intelligent systems, where IoT technologies are potential catalysts. In addition, a better understanding of impending social and societal impacts is vital to the success of the IoT.

Topics of Interest

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IoT 2021 solicits original, high impact research papers on all topics related to the development and adoption of the Internet of Things – topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• IoT Architectures

• AI and Machine Learning for the IoT

• Web of Things including Hypermedia Agents for the IoT

• New IoT Communication Technologies

• Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in IoT

• Sensing, Signal Processing, Actuation and Analytics in Small and Large-scale pilots

• Security and Privacy in the IoT

• Human Interaction with the IoT

• (Syntactic/Semantic) Interoperability in the IoT

• Distributed Ledger Technologies for the IoT

• Real-world Deployments, and Testbeds

• Novel Applications of the IoT in Verticals (e.g., industrial, rural, business processes, etc.)

• Societal Impacts and Ethical Implications of the IoT

Submission Information

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Papers must be submitted via the EasyChair (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=iot20210) conference system, written in English and contain original material that has not been published or is currently undergoing review elsewhere. Papers should not exceed 8 pages, short papers are limited to 4 pages, including figures and references. The paper layout should follow the ACM SIGCHI conference format. Papers will be peer-reviewed by three experts from the technical program committee following a double-blind review process. The papers will be selected based on technical novelty, integrity of the analysis, and practical relevance and potential impact. Accepted papers will be listed on DBLP and published via the ACM Digital Library. Cases of plagiarism or multiple submissions will be subject to disciplinary action as per ACM rules and regulations, and no-shows at the conference will result in an exclusion from the ACM Digital Library. Authors of selected papers might be invite!
d to extend their contributions for inclusion in journal special issues under consideration.

Important Dates

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– Abstract Registration Deadline: Aug 16, 2021 (23:59 AoE)

– Paper submission deadline: Monday, August 23, 2021 (23:59 AoE)

– Notifications: Monday, October 4, 2021 (23:59 AoE)

– Camera-ready papers deadline: Monday, October 18, 2021 (23:59 AoE)

– Conference: November 8-12, 2021

Other Sessions

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Apart from the main track, interested authors may submit their work to the Doctoral Consortium, Poster and Demo session, or arrange a collocated Workshop.

Organizing Committee

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TECHNICAL PROGRAM CHAIRS

• Diego Casado Mansilla (University of Deusto)

• Kimberly Garcia (University of St.Gallen)

• Fatima Zohra Benhamida (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique)

GENERAL CHAIRS

• Simon Mayer (University of St.Gallen)

• Barbara Weber (University of St.Gallen)

STEERING COMMITTEE

• Federica Cena, University of Turin (Italy)

• Krzysztof Janowicz, UC Santa Barbara (USA)

• Marc Langheinrich, USI (Switzerland)

• Simon Mayer, University of St.Gallen (Switzerland)

• Florian Michahelles, Vienna University of Technology (Austria)

• Matthias Kovatsch, Huawei Research (Germany)

• Jun Murai, Keio University (Japan)

• Albrecht Schmidt, LMU Munich (Germany)

• Stefan Schneegass (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Best regards,
Diego Casado-Mansilla
Kimberly Garcia
Fatima Z. Benhamida

Teaching the Web of Things at MIT

Dominique Guinard — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 02:28:12 +0000

The world has changed quite a bit since in 2007 a handful of researchers (yours truly included) got together to talk about the need for working on the application layer of the Internet of Things, aka the Web of Things:

The Web of Things is a refinement of the Internet of Things by integrating smart things not only into the Internet (network), but into the Web Architecture (application). @domguinard @vladounet

What once seemed a rather sub-optimal idea has now grown into being a de-facto standard for connected products in the IoT. As a result of increasing research and industry interest around the Web of Things, we were invited by MIT in frame of their IoT Bootcamp to craft a WoT lecture. To goal of the lecture was to teach the fundamentals of the Web of Things but also go deeper into the practical benefits of using the Web to build the IoT.

It then becomes more technical and follows the layers of Web of Things Architecture proposed in Dom’s PhD thesis and described in our book “Building the Web of Things”. Basically the second part of the lecture is a fast overview of all the chapters of the book and offering a selection of labs to give the audience a sense of what the Web of Things has to offer.

Teaching this lecture at MIT was obviously a fantastic experience nonetheless because a lot of the WoT research was and is done within MIT walls (in particular at the AutoID labs but at now also at W3C). For this IoT boot camp, the organisers at the MIT AutoID labs had selected an impressive crowd of about 80 applicants for a most intense one week lecture on all things IoT. Participants ranged from key technical people at major corporations to sales teams and talented students from all over the world. The WoT lecture was just a part of the course that we shared it with an impressive line-up of experts.

I had the chance of attending a few of the other lectures. Some of my highlights were Prof. Sanjay Sarma talking about his adventure to build the Internet of Things with RFID technologies. He talked about how the idea of the Internet of Things emerged in 1999 from the work he and his team did around transforming RFID tagged items into a network (aka, the Electronic Product Code or EPC network). He talked about how 3 key breakthrough the made this leap forward possible: smaller tags meaning getting closer to the key price of 1 cent per tag, the emergence of the cloud to store data rather than on the tags themselves and the apparel industry as a key adopter.

I was also fascinated by Prof. Fadel Adib‘s talk on how to use electromagnetic fields as sensors that are capable of monitoring rather surprising things such as human heartbeats or even emotions! It was also a pleasure to hear Richard Whitney from Particle and compare notes on their experience making IoT projects a reality. Finally, it was great to hear again from ETH fellow Dr. Simon Mayer from the Siemens Web of Things research group about the role of the semantics and the Semantic Web will play for achieving the next level of interoperability in the Web of Things.

The Web of Things part of the lecture continues touring around the world and Vlad and I had the chance to present it at a few other universities and in Geneva a few days ago at the massive IoT Week. We look forward to the next opportunities to present it so do ping us if you are interested.

Meanwhile, the lecture slides are available here, and the book is available here (use code guid20evry to get 20% off on Manning.com).

Lecture on the Web of Things from Dominique Guinard

What is the Web of Things?

Dominique Guinard — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 14:06:27 +0000

Note: this article was first published in the IoT Technica Curiosa magazine.

The Internet of Things – IoT for short – is here to stay and to change our world for the better. This grand vision depicts a world where people, buildings, and physical objects are connected to a single and common network. Bottles of soda, lighting systems, cars and everything in between can provide services and exchange data with each other.

You might have noticed that the Internet of Things feels very much like an Intranet of Things: to interact with 10 different devices from your phone, you have to install 10 different apps. The problems is that there’s not a single “lingua franca” spoken by each and every object – there are literally hundreds! The worst part is that most of these IoT protocols and standards aren’t compatible with each other, and for this reason the IoT hasn’t (yet!) delivered on its promises.

Connecting every Thing to the Internet and giving them an IP addresses in only the first step towards the Internet of Things. Things could then easily exchange data with each other, but not necessarily understand what that data means. This is what Web protocols like HTTP brought to the Internet: a universal way to describe images, text, and other media elements so that machines could “understand” each. The Web of Things – or WoT – is simply the next stage in this evolution: using and adapting Web protocols to connect anything in the physical world and give it a presence on the World Wide Web!

We define it as follow:

The Web of Things is a refinement of the Internet of Things by integrating smart things not only into the Internet (network), but into the Web Architecture (application).

The Web of Things architecture

Just like the OSI layered architecture organises the many protocols and standards of the Internet, the WoT architecture is an attempt to structure the galaxy of Web protocols and tools into a useful framework for connecting any device or object to the Web. The WoT architecture stack is not composed of layers in the strict sense, but rather of levels that add extra functionality, as shown in the figure below. Each layer helps to integrate Things to the Web even more intimately and hence making those devices more accessible for applications and humans!

The Web of Things Architecture composed of 4 layers

To illustrate what these layers bring to the IoT table, let us introduce the WoT Pi, a Raspberry Pi device running at EVRYTHNG in London. The WoT Pi is connected with a bunch of sensors (e.g., temperature, humidity) and actuators (e.g., an LCD screen, LEDs) that you can interact with across the Internet. An Internet-connected camera allows you to see the setup live, check it out here: http://devices.webofthings.io/camera/sensors/picture/

A sample WoT device running in the EVRYTHNG office in London

Layer 1: Access

This layer is responsible for turning any Thing into a Web Thing that can be interacted with using HTTP requests just like any other resource on the Web. In other words, a Web Thing is a REST API that allows to interact with something in the real world, like opening a door or reading a temperature sensor located across the planet.

To illustrate this, the sensors of our Pi can be accessed via a simple HTTP request on the following URL: http://devices.webofthings.io/pi/sensors/

Go ahead and try this in your browser. You’ll get a human friendly HTML representation with links to the sensors. Click on “temperature” and you’ll get the temperature. What you are doing here is navigating the RESTful API of our Pi, just like you would be browsing a Web page. IoT Things can be mapped to REST resources quite easily as show in the figure below.

HTML is great for humans, but not always for machines who prefer the JSON notation – Our Pi provides both. Run the following command in your terminal using cURL, a tool for communicating with HTTP APIs:

curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" "http://devices.webofthings.io/pi/sensors/humidity/"

You will see the humidity level in our London office in JSON in your terminal. This is the ideal first step to build your first application that expands the Web into the real world!

This is all good, but many IoT scenarios are real-time and/or event-driven. Instead of your application continuously asking for data from our Pi, you want it to get notified when something happens in the real world, for example humidity reaches a certain threshold or noise gets detected during the night. This is where another Web protocol can help: WebSocket.This Javascript code below is enough for a Web page to automatically get temperature updates from the WoT Pi. You can paste it in the console of your Web browser and you will see our Pi pushing the temperature every second to your browser.

var socket = new WebSocket('ws://devices.webofthings.io/pi/sensors/temperature/'); socket.onmessage = function (event) { //Called when a message is received var result = JSON.parse(event.data); console.log(result); };

Layer 2: Find

Marking things accessible via an HTTP and WebSocket API is great but it doesn’t mean applications can really “understand” what the Thing is, what data or services it offers, and so on.

This is where the second layer – Find – becomes interesting. This layer ensures that your Thing can not only be easily used by other HTTP clients but can also be findable and automatically usable by other WoT applications. The approach here is to reuse web semantic standards to describe things and their services. This enables searching for things through search engines and other web indexes as well as the automatic generation of user interfaces or tools to interact with Things. At this level technologies such as JSON-LD are in use: a language for semantically annotating JSON. This is also where standards such as the Web Things Model and the work of the W3C WoT group help: they define an abstract set of REST resources that Things should offer.

Layer 3: Share

The Internet of Things will only blossom if Things have a way to securely share data across services. This is the responsibility of the Share layer, which specifies how the data generated by Things can be shared in an efficient and secure manner over the web. At this level, another batch of Web protocols help. First, TLS, the protocol that makes transactions on the Web secure. Then, techniques such as delegated web authentication mechanisms like OAuth which can be integrated to our Things’ APIs. Finally, we can also use social networks to share Things and their resources to create a Social Web of Things!

Layer 4: Compose

Finally, once Things are on the Web (layer 1) where they can be found by humans and machines (layer 2) and their resources can be shared securely with others (layer 3), it’s time to look at how to build large-scale, meaningful applications for the Web of Things. In other words, we need to understand the integration of data and services from heterogeneous Things into an immense ecosystem of web tools such as analytics software and mashup platforms. Web tools at the Compose layer range from web toolkits—for example, JavaScript SDKs offering higher-level abstractions—to dashboards with programmable widgets, and finally to physical mashup tools such as Node-RED as shown below. Inspired by Web 2.0 participatory services and in particular web mashups, physical mashups offer a unified view of the classical web and Web of Things and empower people to build applications using data and services from Web Things without requiring programming skills.

A Physical Mashup with Node-RED

Conclusion

The Web of Things is a high-level application protocol designed to maximize interoperability in the IoT, and we hope this short introduction gave you a taste of its potential. Web technologies are widely popular and offer all the flexibility and features needed for the majority of future IoT applications, including discovery, security, and real-time messaging.

While we only flew over the ideas of the WoT, we hope this sparked your interest in making IoT Things more accessible thanks to the Web. The Web of Things architecture is fully described in our book: “Building the Web of Things”. The book is also packed with code examples on the Raspberry Pi using the Node.js language. The code is open source and freely available from: https://github.com/webofthings/wot-book.

Operating Systems for IoT Embedded Systems

Dominique Guinard — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 08:54:33 +0000

This post is an excerpt of the Chapter 4 of “Getting Started with Embedded Systems” in Building the Web of Things, a Manning book by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa.

There are two broad categories of physical objects in the Web of Things: tagged objects and connected objects. The first category comprises various tagging technologies that are attached to a product, such as barcodes, QR codes, NFC or RFID tags, IR/AR and so on. In this case, objects are not directly connected to the web but only passively, because there’s a need for another device or application to interact with the product. Connected objects are directly connected to the Web of Things and are the world of embedded systems or embedded devices, which are essentially small, relatively inexpensive, low-power computers with limited resources and capabilities.

There are hundreds of embedded platforms out there some of them targeting hobbyists such as the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoards, Intel Edison and the pioneer Arduino platform. On the other hand some of them are targeting industrial and large scale applications such as Marvell, Broadcom/Cypress, Texas Instruments, NXP and Qualcomm.

As you probably noticed on the table above, one thing that distinguishes these platforms is their operating system. To simplify, we can consider two categories of operating system (OS) that are used for embedded devices: real-time OS (RTOS) and, well, not so real-time OS! When it comes to embedded devices, the world of RTOS is dominated by FreeRTOS, an open source real-time operating system, although some viable alternatives exist such as Contiki, TinyOS, mbed OS, or the commercial Intel VxWorks. One of the drawbacks of a real-time OS is that it’s not very good at operating many tasks in parallel, which makes it hard to build complex layers offering simple abstractions. This is where a non-real-time OS can help. It becomes particularly helpful for things that are not so mission critical where user experience and features are more important than a constant, very fast response time.

In this world—even more than in the RTOS world—one operating system rules them all: Linux. Because of its very large community, plethora of tools, abstractions, and supported architectures, Linux is the ideal environment in which to start tinkering and innovating with IoT devices. But don’t get it wrong; it’s also increasingly a solid candidate for real-world and robust IoT applications such as for home automation or to build application gateways. It’s also worth noting that a number of projects offer modified versions of the Linux kernel to transform it into a real-time OS.

In the past few years, Linux has become such a popular operating system used on embedded devices that a project from the Linux Foundation called Yocto is now dedicated to creating custom Linux distributions for embedded devices. Similarly, Google has released Brillo, an extension of Android (which is built on Linux as well) for the IoT, and Ubuntu launched Ubuntu Core for the IoT. Ubuntu Core also shows an interesting way forward with containerization for IoT Operating Systems: allowing to deploy apps in containers, paving the way towards app stores for the IoT (imagine adding capabilities to that elevator after it has been installed in the real-world). In this space our friends at Resin.io pretty much lead the game: with their solution based on Linux Docker containers and we used these solutions to deploy our gateway, THNGHUB. It’s worth noting that although Linux is massively dominating, there are a few alternatives to Linux in this space such as Windows 10 for IoT.

In Building the Web of Things you’ll learn more about the specifics of embedded systems and you’ll learn how to install and customize Linux for platforms such as the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone or Intel Edison.

Node.js, GPIO and the Raspberry Pi

Dominique Guinard — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 13:05:34 +0000

http://ice-station.com.mx This post is an excerpt of the Chapter 4 “Getting Started with Embedded Systems” in Building the Web of Things, a Manning book by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa.

In a previous post we talked about the increasing importance of Node.js for embedded systems in the IoT but we didn’t have a concrete look at what using Node.js on an embedded device looked like. In this post we’ll look at what it means for the Raspberry Pi.

Installing Node.js on a Raspberry Pi

The first step is to install Node on your Pi. The latest versions of Raspbian (the Pi OS) come bundled with Node.js already however the installed version is usually quite outdated. Getting the latest version is pretty straightforward but you’ll need to install a special version of Node. “Why can’t I just use the standard Node.js version?” we hear you say. Well, the Pi — and generally most of the embedded devices out there —run on CPU architectures that are not compatible with the ones your PCs run on (x86 or x64). More precisely a lot of embedded devices run on ARM processors (which is what’s on your Pi). As a consequence the node binaries that you need on your Pi are not the same as the ones you need on your PC. Fortunately enough, since Node version 4.0.0, ARM binaries are also available from the official Node web site. To install the ARM version of Node.js go to the Node download page and select the right version for your Pi (or other embedded device). As shown in the figure below the archive to download depends on the version of the ARM architecture your device uses. As an example, the Pi 2 runs on a ARMv7 architecture while the Pi Zero runs on a ARMv6 architecture.

Node.js downloads for Raspberry Pi

Once downloaded you can install it via:

Sensors, Actuators and GPIOs

With Node.js installed, your Pi is now ready to conquer the World Wide Web of Things, but it doesn’t have much to work with in the real world yet. To make it more real-world connected you’ll connect some sensors (for example, a humidity sensor) and actuators (for example, an LED) to the Pi.

The way to do this on most embedded platforms, Pi included, is to connect the sensors and actuators using the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) ports. Essentially, a GPIO is a pin on which current can be read or outputted. GPIOs have two modes: an input mode and an output mode. When the output mode is selected, the pin can be set to HIGH, which means it outputs 3.3 volts; when the pin is set to LOW, it is off and does not output any voltage. With the input mode you essentially can read a value on the pin. Unlike other embedded platforms (such as Arduino), the Pi supports only digital input. What this means concretely is that you can work only with components that supply series of 0s (LOW, ~0 volts) or 1s (HIGH, 3.3 volts) to the input pins, that is, with digital components. As an example, an LED is a digital actuator and a button is a digital sensor.

Back to our GPIOs: the numbering and type of each GPIO differs depending platform you’ll choose to use. For instance this is the layout for a Pi Zero or a Pi B, Pi 2 and Pi 3.

Figure 1 – GPIO layout for the Raspberry Pi

or the layout for the Intel Edison when using the mini prototyping board:

Figure 2 – GPIO layout of Intel Edison board

Your first circuit using GPIOs: LEDs

If you’ve never worked with the GPIOs of embedded devices let’s start with the Hello World of embedded : blinking LEDs! For the sake of simplicity we’ll assume you have a Pi in the rest of the post but you can also implement this with an Intel Edison, Beaglebone, Samsung ARTIK or any Linux-based embedded device you can think of!

Start by placing the elements on the breadboard, as shown in the figure below. If it’s the first time you work with electronics, we recommend you use an anti-static mat or a grounding strap to avoid damaging your embedded device.

Figure 3 – Connect an LED to the Pi GPIOs

GPIO and Node.js

The hardware is now ready, so you can start working with GPIOs! You can find a dozen Node.js GPIO libraries for the Pi, offering different abstraction layers and functionality. We decided to use one we really like called onoff. Create a new folder and install onoff with NPM
npm install onoff --save

You’re now ready to interface the Pi with sensors and actuators. In software engineering, the simplest piece of code one can write—the famous Hello World—is a piece of code that displays “Hello World” in the console. The Hello World equivalent of the IoT is to make a real LED blink, so let’s build exactly that as shown in the next listing.

As mentioned before, you’ll use pin 7, corresponding to GPIO 4 (see Figure 1 above). You’ll then create a function that opens the pin in output mode (which means you’ll “push” current on it). It then either activates the pin or deactivates it (depending on the result of the modulo function) and launches itself again at a specified interval. Finally, you listen for SIGINT, which corresponds to pressing Ctrl-C, and ensure that you release the pin and turn the LED off before exiting.

That’s it for this introduction but should you want to learn more our latest book: Building the Web of Thing covers how to integrate other sensors and actuators such as a passive infrared sensor (aka PIR) or a temperature and humidity sensor. Furthermore, you’ll discover how to integrate these sensors to Web with protocols such as HTTP, WebSockets, CoAP and MQTT.

Influencer Series event at USVP

Dominique Guinard — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:53:11 +0000

Hi all, we have a short notice but great opportunity for our Californian followers: an invitation to participate to the next Influencer Series. A high profile evening that will be focused on “Unearthing Software & Service Winners in IoT”. These series are high end networking events, capped at 60 leaders chosen by a hosting committee, and hosted at a VC fund office. The event will be the night of Tuesday, September 13 (specific location will be disclosed if an invite is extended) in Menlo Park from 5:30 PM to 9:00 PM.

Because these invites are invite-only and capped, a screening committee needs to approve your invitation.
To request an invitation, please fill this form out here:

https://influencerseries.wufoo.com/forms/pg7j2i31u4hpo3/

We will follow up with a formal invitation once you are approved.

The Influencer Series are gatherings of 60 influential, good energy entrepreneurs, executives, academics and advisors for an evening of stimulating conversation.

The theme for the evening is on “Unearthing Software & Service Winners in IoT”. Broadly, this encompasses looking at the non-hardware side of IoT: that is, which software and service ventures will win in the emerging IoT ecosystem, and how will those unfold.

The intent is for you to have fun, high impact, “dinner table” conversations with people you don’t know but should. The evening is comprised of cocktails, food bites, and a series of small, 20 person roundtable discussions created by your peers.

Confirmed Roundtable Leaders

* Michael Dolbec, Managing Director, Venture Capital and Corporate Business Development, GE Digital
* David Friedman, CEO, Ayla Networks
* Jim Hunter, Chief Scientist & Technology Evangelist, Greenwave Systems
* Shireen Santosham, Sr. Policy Advisor, Chief Innovation Officer, Office of Mayor Sam Liccardo, City of San Jose

Confirmed Co-Hosts

* Niall Murphy, Founder & CEO, EVRYTHNG
* Amit Chaturvedy, Head, IoT Acquisitions & Venture Investments, Cisco Systems
* Mike Kaul, Vice President, Head of IoT Software Solutions, Ericsson
* David Mount, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
* Dan O’Neill, CEO, Nightingale Analytics
* Seth Page, EVP Corporate & Business Development, DataRPM
* Aymerik Renard, Director, SanDisk Ventures
* Adam Sah, CTO, Byte Foods
* Matthew Stein, CEO & Co-Founder, Multitude
* Nate Williams, CRO & Head of Business, August Home, Inc.

The event is made possible through the sponsorship of Ernst & Young, GrowthPoint Technology Partners, Nokia Growth Partners and Perkins Coie.

You can see a sample of the attendees of our past events below. Everyone invited has been nominated by a member of the Host Committee of the event or a member of the Leadership Team of the Influencer Series.

These evenings are a lot of fun because of the caliber of attendee that comes and everyone’s willingness to play. If you cannot attend but would like us to keep you in mind for future events, please let us know by clicking here.

Past Attendees for the Series Include:

Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator
Amr Awadallah, Co-Founder, CTO, Cloudera
Adam Cheyer, Co-Founder, Viv Labs, Siri
Kevin Chou, CEO & Co-Founder, Kabam
Kris Gale, Co-founder Clover Health
Logan Green, Co-Founder & CEO, Lyft
Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director, DFJ
David Kelley, Founder, IDEO
JT Kostman, Chief Data Oficer, Time, Inc.
Jeff Lawson, CEO, Twilio
Alfred Lin, General Partner, Sequoia Capital
Joe Lonsdale, Co-founder, Palantir
Marissa Mayer, President & CEO, Yahoo!
Jim McKelvey, Co-founder, Square
Rob Mee, CEO Pivotal Labs,
Rich Miner, General Partner, GV, Android
Andrew Ng, Baidu, Founder Coursera
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Scott Phoenix, Co-founder Vicarious
Matthew Prince, CEO, Cloudflare
Eric Ries, Author, The Lean Startup
Sam Shank, CEO & Co-Founder, HotelTonight
Bob Sutton, Professor, Stanford University; Co-Author of “Scaling Up Excellence”
Max Ventilla, Founder & CEO, Alt School, Aardvark
Maynard Webb, Founder, Everwise, former CEO Liveops, COO, eBay

Supporting ThingMonk 2016 & IoT Diversity Program

Dominique Guinard — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 13:54:27 +0000

In the early days of the IoT there were a handful of conferences you had to attend every year. Most of these early birds are still in play such as Ubicomp & Pervasive, ACM IoT, RFID Journal Live, O’Reilly Solid or smaller ones such as the very fine Sketching in Hardware or our very own WoT Workshop (edition 2016 taking place real soon!).

Things have changed however, with the IoT developing at light speed, conferences and events started to mushroom. There isn’t a city that isn’t organizing it’s dozen of IoT events every month. This is all a bit overwhelming and the quality does not necessarily match the quantity.

We’ve been to many IoT events in the past few years and one we were particularly impressed with is ThingMonk. Somehow ThingMonk managed to attract the right mix of makers, developers, entrepreneurs and employees of big companies truly active in the IoT field. Their secret sauce? Well if you ask me the fact the ThingMonk crew is composed of people who know what they are talking about for all things IoT, plays a significant role

This is why we are particularly happy to announce that we’ll be supporting the ThingMonk diversity scholarship program by offering a copy of the Building the Web of Things to each scholar. The objective of the ThingMonk diversity scholarship program is to create a warm, nurturing and secure environment where people who are interested in the IoT space but may feel intimidated by its lack of diversity can put this aside, and feel invited to attend. Their goal is to improve the diversity comprising the IoT industry, which is definitely severely lacking. They would like each scholar to leave with a pocket full of business cards, a head full of ideas, and inspiration to carry them through to the next step of their journey into an IoT career.

Unfortunately the lucky scholars were already selected, however there is still time to register to attend ThingMonk and we encourage you to do so, especially if you are based in the UK.

Besides handling the book to the lucky scholars we’ll also have a booth in the Device Room as they call it on September 12, presenting the main concepts behind the Web of Things methodology as well as introducing people to the free dev tier of the EVRYTHNG IoT platform.

The rest of the program? Well it does look really good! If we have to choose? Well on the 12th we’d take a sneak peak at the Eclipse Day meeting key techies such as Benjamin Cabe, the IoT evangelist at Eclipse or Boris Adryan speaking about the semantics aspects of IoT at Eclipse.

On the 13th, we will not miss Alasdair Allan to hear about IoT and privacy from someone who knows what he is talking about! We will also make sure we catchup with Yodit Stanton whom we heard a lot of good things about, she’ll be talking about the complexities of IoT deployments.

Finally, on the 14th we would not miss Alex Deschamps-Sonsino who will reflect on 5 years of IoT meetups in London. Next, Johan Stokking will be talking about The Thing Network: an open low power WAN for Things and we look forward to this. Finally, our own Dom Guinard who will be giving a talk about Node.js, the Web and the IoT.

This is a short summary of what you’ll find at ThingMonk this year, but there is a lot more so make sure to check the full lineup! Hope to see many WoTers at ThingMonk this year. Don’t worry too much if you’ll miss it this year, we’ll be blogging about the highlights here soon.

WoT 2016: Seventh International Workshop on the Web of Things

Dominique Guinard — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 15:00:07 +0000

It’s our pleasure to announce the WoT 2016, the seventh edition of the international workshop on the Web of Things. WoT was the first workshop on the topic and where much of the WoT was born, it bootstrapped the community and is definitely the place where WoT researchers and practitioners meet. We look forward to receiving your paper submissions until September 19 and to meeting many of you there!

CALL FOR PAPERS – Seventh International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2016)

Held in conjunction with IoT 2016, Stuttgart, Germany, November 7-9, 2016.

Official workshop site: https://webofthings.org/events/wot/wot2016/

Abstract

Continuing the successful Web of Things workshop series, this workshop aims at further exploring the use of technologies and principles at the core of the Web to provide methods for a seamless integration of physical devices. In particular, our goal is to foster discussion about systems that enable a real-time Web of Things and the discovery, search, and composition of services provided by Web-enabled things as well as the interaction of users with such devices.

Important Dates

* Paper submission deadline: September 19, 2016
* Notification of acceptance: October 10, 2016
* Camera-ready papers due: October 24, 2016
* Workshop date: tbd (November 7-9, 2016)

Contributing to WoT 2016

WoT 2016 solicits contributions in all areas related to the Web of Things, and we invite application designers to think beyond sensor networks and Web applications, and to imagine, design, build, evaluate, and share their thoughts and visions on what the future of the Web and networked devices will be.

* Integration of embedded computers, wireless sensor networks, every-day appliances, smart gateways, and things using a Web approach
* Real-time communication with physical objects (e.g., WebSocket, Web-RTC, MQTT, CoAP, AMQP)
* Web-based discovery, search, composition, and physical mashups
* Use of semantic technologies to facilitate the interaction with and between things on the Web
* Models, paradigms, and systems that enable the interaction with physical things for humans
* Security, privacy, access control, and sharing of physical things on the Web
* Application of Web tools and techniques in the physical world (e.g., REST, HTML5, 6lowpan, social networks)
* Cloud platforms and services for the Web of Things
* Concrete applications, use-cases, deployments, and evaluations of Web-enabled Things in contexts such as smart homes, connected cities, and Web 2.0 enterprises

This seventh edition of the Web of Things workshop series will provide an interactive forum for WoT researchers to learn about and discuss existing efforts related to Web-based interactions with smart things. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) ACM conference format pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published to the ACM digital library and listed on DBLP. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to present the paper on-site. If you can, we encourage authors of accepted papers to bring a prototype and demonstrate it at the workshop, as part of an open demonstration session.

For more instructions on how to submit to WoT 2016, please visit https://webofthings.org/events/wot/submission-guidelines/

Organizers

Simon Mayer, Siemens Corporate Technology, USA
Dominique Guinard, EVRYTHNG Ltd., UK,
Erik Wilde, CA Technologies

5 Years of Web of Things Workshops from Dominique Guinard

Node.js for Embedded Systems

Dominique Guinard — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 16:46:13 +0000

This post is an excerpt of the Chapter 3 of “Node.js for the Web of Things” in “Building the Web of Things“, a Manning book by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa.

Long gone are the days when JavaScript was solely used to animate banners on a web page! Thanks to its widespread support by virtually all web browsers, relative ease of use, and flexibility, JavaScript has become the de-facto solution for writing dynamic, client-side applications.

Developers usually love or hate JavaScript for various good (or less good) reasons but overall it is safe to say that it isn’t safe anymore to ignore JavaScript! According to the number of public repositories on GitHub, it has also become one of the most popular programming languages ever, with a community of developers growing faster than any other.
This popularity in parts linked to the fact that a few years back (in 2009) JavaScript entered a new space: the space of server side applications in the form of Node.js or aka Node. Node provides an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O API that optimizes an application’s throughput and scalability. This model is commonly used to design high-performance Data-Intensive Real-Time (DIRT) applications. Node basically took the Web by a storm with a simple core principle moving out of the one-request-one-thread model of most Web servers back them (Apache, older Tomcat, etc.):

to a system where all requests are served by the same thread but parked until the I/O operations the request depends on have returned:

Okay well what does it have to do with the Internet of Things or the Web of Things?

Well it turns out that Node did not stop at the server. Over the past few years it also sneaked into the very core of Things and devices! In a world massively dominated by devices running low-level C programs, JavaScript and Node.js have managed to stand out as a viable and easy-to-use alternative for powering all kinds of things from robots to wireless sensor nodes. Indeed, a number of embedded device platforms today directly support JavaScript and Node.js to write embedded code. This is the case for most Linux-based platforms such as the Raspberry Pi, the Intel Edison, or BeagleBoards, but also for some low-power platforms such as the Tessel or Espruino.

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail!” we hear you say! Not exactly: we don’t advocate using JavaScript and Node.js for every IoT implementation. We’d rather compare JavaScript and Node.js to the Swiss army knife of modern IoT and WoT development than to a hammer. It certainly isn’t the optimal solution for every IoT project we can think of, but it’s quite good at a number of things!

An embedded application requiring absolutely predictable and real-time performance (for example, the code running in a high-speed train) is better off being written in a low-level language such as C. Moreover, JavaScript as a language is often criticized by its detractors for its lack of static typing and a plethora of different programming patterns and styles leading to code that’s sometimes harder to maintain, such as for very big projects involving a large number of people. Nevertheless, its ubiquity, portability, asynchronous event-driven model, along with a large and vibrant online community make it a solid candidate to consider seriously, especially when using Node.js to build scalable and real-time web systems, but also increasingly more frequently for the blazing-fast development of hardware projects.

You can see this in a number of recent Node.js projects from programming robots with Johny-Five and Cylon.js, to creating physical mashups with Node-red and EVRYTHNG or elegantly and efficiently manage GPIOs with onoff.

The recent domination of Node for the IoT does not stop at libraries: new embedded systems are now built with Node and JavaScript as their primary development platform. This is the case of the Samsung Artik platform, the Intel Edison, the BeagleBone black, the Tessel or the Espurino. These great developments show that Node for embedded systems isn’t simply a short living trend: like it or not it is here to stay and makes embedded devices more accessible by bringing them one step closer to the Web!

This is why we decided to adopt Node and JavaScript as the main language for our book. You can already check all the Node and JavaScript examples of the book on our GitHub repository and should this be not enough to convince you getting the book then check webofthings.js, a sample Web of Things server for the Pi, Beaglebone or Edison that you’ll learn how to build step by step in Building the Web of Things.

Building the Web of Things Book is Out!

Dominique Guinard — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 07:36:29 +0000

December 1oth, 2014 Vlad and I signed a contract with Manning Publications for a book on the Web of Things, a year and 8 month later, we are thrilled to announce that Building the Web of Things is out!

We learned the hard way that writing a book is not as trivial as it seems. “Oh, we’ll just refresh our PhD theses and we’re done in a few weeks” has gradually turned into “OK, well, I guess we’ll have to write these chapters from scratch over the next few months. What about the source code? Which source code? Let’s just rewrite this whole thing in Node.js!” Nevertheless, the many weekends and late nights we spent putting together this book have been a lot of fun and a unique challenge. Distilling all the knowledge we acquired over a decade of IoT R&D into a single book and making sure that book is easy to use has been a tough and very motivating aspiration.

Building the Web of Things is a guide to using cutting-edge web technologies to build the IoT. This step-by-step book teaches you how to use web protocols to connect real-world devices to the web, including the Semantic and Social Webs. Along the way you’ll gain vital concepts as you follow instructions for making Web of Things devices. By the end, you’ll have the practical skills you need to implement your own web-connected products and services.

What’s inside

Introduction to IoT protocols and devices
Connect electronic actuators and sensors to a Raspberry Pi
Implement standard REST APIs with Node.js on embedded systems
Learn about IoT protocols like MQTT and CoAP and integrate them to the Web of Things
Use the Semantic Web (JSON-LD, RDFa, etc.) to discover and find Web Things
Share Things via Social Networks to create the Social Web of Things
Build a web-based smart home with HTTP and WebSocket
Compose physical mashups with EVRYTHNG, Node-RED, and IFTTT

The book is quite hands-on so all the principles are illustrated with Node.js and Javascript code and physical prototypes built on the Raspberry Pi (3 and Zero included!). There is also an appendix helping you to understand how to build similar code for the BeagleBone, Intel Edison and the Arduino.

Writing this book clearly was the heck of an adventure and we hope you’ll like the book as much as we enjoyed writing it. Yes, it was a lot of hard work and sacrificed weekends but we are proud of the result and hope the book will be a solid ground to learn how to use Web protocols to build the IoT.

Thanks to everyone who made this book possible, thanks also to you, the readers of Webofthings.org (est. 2007!) and because we like you so much we’ll tell you a secret: use “guid20evry” when buying the book and you’ll get 20% off!

Vlad and Dom