Internet of mobile things: challenges and opportunities

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has been around for some time and applications such as transportation, health-care, education, travel, smart grid, retail, are and will be major benefactors of this concept. However, only recently, due to technological advances in sensor devices and rich wireless connectivity, Internet of Things at scale is becoming reality. For example, Cisco's Internet of Things Group predicts over 50 billion connected sensory devices by 2020.

In this talk, we will discuss the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) since several game-changing technological advances happened on 'mobile things' such as mobile phones, trains, and cars, where rich sets of sensors, connected via diverse sets of wireless Internet technologies, are changing and influencing how people communicate, move, and download and distribute information. In this space, challenges come from the needs to determine (1) contextual information such as location, duration of contact, density of devices, utilizing networked sensory information; (2) higher level knowledge such as users' activity detection, mood detection, applications usage pattern detection and user interactions on 'mobile things', utilizing contextual information; and (3) adaptive and real-time parallel and distributed architectures that integrate context, activity, mood, usage patterns into mobile application services on mobile 'things'. Solving these challenges will provide enormous opportunities to improve the utility of mobile 'things', optimizing scarce resources on mobile 'things' such as energy, memory, and bandwidth.