The IFIP International Internet of Things (IoT) Conference is the annual event of IFIP totally dedicated to IoT research, innovations and applications.

While the 3rd IFIP IoT Conference was planned to take place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, due to the pandemic situation, it was decided to postpone the physical conference until 2021 and instead organise a virtual conference with invited talks this year.

The virtual conference occurred on 5-6 November 2020, attended by an average of 60 participants from different countries around the world.

The program featured eight invited talks, about 30 minutes each, which reflected the state-of-the art of IoT in its different domains, from IoT technologies to the demanding real-time applications. The first day was dedicated to one of the IoT areas that is, nowadays, the focus of many research groups: IoT Edge Computing and the use of Machine Learning techniques in IoT systems.

The first talk (Prof. Augusto Casaca, INESC-ID/INOV, Portugal) gave an introduction to IoT edge computing and reflected on its current challenges. Two other talks were given on Machine Learning on constrained edge IoT environments (Prof. Srinivas Katkoori, Univ. South Florida, USA) and on the use of DevOps for IoT (Dr. Jean-Yves Tigli, Univ. Côte d’Azur, France). A fourth talk (Dr. Georgios Karagiannis, AIOTI, Belgium) gave a perspective on the current IoT standardisation challenges, which includes challenges at several levels of IoT, from the system to the communication level.

The second day of the conference featured another four talks with a focus into privacy/ security aspects of IoT and IoT vertical applications. The first talk (Prof. Elisa Bertino, Purdue University, USA) summarized some of the key aspects in IoT security and also on the impact of IoT into the privacy of the users. The remaining three talks were dedicated to the advanced IoT applications. Prof. John Stankovic (University of Virginia, USA) gave his view and examples of current developments on the Internet of Health Things. Dr. Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF, Norway) emphasised the role of edge computing and Artificial Intelligence in digitising industry. Finally, Dr. Vijay Rao (Cognizant Technology Solutions, The Netherlands) focused into the tactile Internet present solutions and on what we can expect in this domain in the future.

The videos of these talks will be available on the conference website (http://ifip-iotconference.org) by the first week of December 2020.

This was a very successful event, organised by the IFIP IoT Domain Committee, both from the technical and attendance points of view. We look forward to the next IFIP IoT Conference, scheduled to take place live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on November 4-5, 2021. The Call for Papers is currently being prepared.

For more information or questions on these events, please contact: Leon Strous (strous@iae.nl), Srinivas Katkoori (katkoori@mail.usf.edu), Augusto Casaca (augusto.casaca@inov.pt) or Luís Camarinha Matos (cam@uninova.pt).

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay