In 2025 we will have a worldwide Internet of Things, but its forerunners are already all around us. Watches and phones monitor our bodies, energy meters influence the power grid, homes communicate with their residents or with care providers, and street lights are constantly 'watching', 'listening' and even 'smelling' to register everything that goes on around them. The growing Internet and vast volumes of data also generate new questions on how to regulate these developments. This necessitates research into the optimal adjustment of rules, processes and institutions. For example, how can we design biometrics, security systems and the Internet of Things in such a way that they satisfy the often contradictory requirements of security, privacy and individual freedom? How could mass government supervision be compatible with such demands? Research can encompass a wide variety of aspects, from the use of iris scanner data at border crossings to the study of global censorship and online extremism.
A researcher introduces himself:
Internet of Things
The research at the University of Twente on ubiquitous computing is all about the ultimate edge of computing: sensors, actuators and their decentralized coordination and computations. It is where automatically measuring society starts, and where intervening in behavior through automated devices ends. On the one hand, it closely aligns to cyber-physical systems, notably in the domain of Internet of Things, while on the other it bears a strong relation with human-centered computing as many of its computing elements interact directly with people.
The scientific challenges for the field are (1) transforming data obtained from a heterogeneous set of sensors into meaningful information, (2) transforming that information into actions to be carried out by actuators. Matters are complicated by the (often) low quality, the large amount, and the variety of sensory data, the scale of the systems in combination with often limited network resources, the difficulty in developing computationally efficient analytical and predictive models, and lack of knowledge on the effects of interventions. The computational efforts needed for model development and evaluation link ubiquitous computing to cloud-based solutions, often leading to what is now coined fog computing.
An important application area is formed by smart societies, and notably the physical domains in which the role of people is integrated. Examples include pedestrian monitoring and management, smart mobility, and personalized health and well-being.
