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Prof Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Abstract: IoTility: Unleashing the Utility of Internet of Things through Microservices Architectural Extensions
While we all share the excitements of great IoT visions and impressive IoT scenarios and possibilities, we do not yet have a clear pathway to realizing this vision systematically and on a broad and large scale. In fact, it can be argued that the focus on vision and abstracting away many details, including about “things" themselves were intentional to productively bolster our imagination; but this approach has now run its course. Ignoring the details and staying abstract will be counterproductive at this stage. We view the success of the IoT to largely depend on how its main ingredient, the thing, is architected, prepared, and tooled to deliver on the high expectations of the blue-sky visions. In other words, we see no short cuts to having to walk before we run. Service-oriented device architecture (SODA) was a successful beginning in our research journey, where devices were made capable of generating and publishing their services to an edge node or as endpoints in the cloud. IoT programmability through traditional service composition was a tangible gain at the time, which was utilized in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for graceful aging project.
However, much remains to be needed to achieve an explicit thing architecture capable of delivering on the highly anticipated visions. For example, we still do not understand how to expressly program an IoT as we have programmed previous generations and forms of the computer. This is obviously an essential requirement for any meaningful proliferation and adoption of the IoT technology. Except for a few ideas and tools that exist today, the programmability view of IoT lacks clarity and, in fact, there are no clear boundaries that separate IoT as a distributed computer from IoT as applications.
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In this talk, after a brief introduction to SODA, I will present requisite requirements that we must satisfy to bolster the programmability and utility of IoT as an emerging industry and as an applications ecosystem.
I will present our current/ongoing work on critical extensions to the microservices architecture, collectively referred to as IoTility.
First, I will focus on self- and peer-conscious microservices, which enable the IoT to autonomically learn how its things may relate to one another and what opportunities can be collectively formed, even tentatively, to the IoT users and their smart spaces.
Second, I will show how giving microservices consciousness promises to make them a first-class citizen and a capable actor in the development and operation lifecycles of IoT applications and systems. This “collaborative microservice programmability” extension brings disrupting changes to the well- and long-established roles of software development, making the IoT thing (and its vendor who created it in the first place), as well as the lay user, primary developers of the IoT applications.
Third, I will present IoTranx – a “safety” framework that brings transactional extensions to microservices for the development of safe cyber-physical systems and applications using IoT. I will show how such “safety-oriented programming model” prevents or avoids harms, errors, and malfunctions in presence of several cyber-physical uncertainties or un-orchestrated multiple IoT deployments.
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Biography:
Abdelsalam Helal (aka: Sumi Helal) is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Bologna, Italy. Prior to joining the University of Bologna, he spent 25 years as associate and then full processor in the Computer & Information Science and Engineering Department at the University of Florida, USA. At University of Florida, he directed the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory, co-founded and directed the Gator Tech Smart House –a real-world deployment project that aimed at identifying key barriers and opportunities to make the Smart Home concept a common place (creating the "Smart Home in a Box" concept). His active areas of research focus on architectural and programmability aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), service-oriented IoT architectures, IoT edge intelligence, and pervasive/ubiquitous systems and their human-centric applications, especially in the Digital Health area. Helal is also a technologist at heart who founded several successful ventures in the areas of IoT and Digital Health. His patents that came out of his research were licensed by the top multinational tech industry including Google, Apple, Samsung, Bosch, Siemens, T-Mobile, Verizon, among others.
Helal is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, AAIA, IET, and a member of Academia Europaea. He can be contacted at: helal@acm.org
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