Internet of Things Conference May 15, 2011

On May 16, 2011. the European Commission and the Hungarian Innovation Office are jointly organizing a high level Internet of Things conference in Budapest, as part of the program of the Hungarian EU Presidency. The conference is joining a series of other events of the Future Internet Week between 16-20 May, 2011.

The results of IoT research have important contribution to the economy and promotes the development of such diverse areas as smart cities, green IT, intelligent transport, health care, supply chain management, factory automation and many other industries and sectors.

The conference will cover topics which presently are high on the agenda of policy makers, technology providers and potential users. The program (see details on the website) will include presentations about the aims and objectives of the EU in respect of the technology, the new research roadmap, privacy and data protection issues, as well as panel discussions about the societal challenges of IoT, major application areas, and governance aspects.

Representatives of the Commission and the Hungarian government, as well as renown speakers of industry and academia from around the World will introduce the newest results and challenges of the new technology.

Internet of Things: the Umbrella for a New Paradigm

The growth of the Internet is an ongoing process: only twenty-five years ago it was connecting about a thousand hosts and has grown ever since to link billions people through computers and mobile devices. One major next step in this development is to progressively evolve from a network of interconnected computers to a network of interconnected objects, from books to cars, from electrical appliances to food, and thus create an ‘Internet of things’ (IoT). These objects will sometimes have their own Internet Protocol addresses, be embedded in complex systems and use sensors to obtain information from their environment (e.g. food products that record the temperature along the supply chain) and/or use actuators to interact with it (e.g. air conditioning valves that react to the presence of people).

The scope of IoT applications is expected to greatly contribute to addressing today’s societal challenges: health monitoring systems will help meet the challenges of an ageing society; connected trees will help fight deforestation3; connected cars will help reduce traffic congestion and improve their recyclability, thus reducing their carbon footprint. This interconnection of physical objects is expected to amplify the profound effects that large-scale networked communications are having on our society, gradually resulting in a genuine paradigm shift.

To complement this overview, it is worth noting three points that highlight the complex nature of IoT. First, it should not be seen as a mere extension of today’s Internet but rather as a number of new independent systems that operate with their own infrastructures (and partly rely on existing Internet infrastructures). Second, as detailed in a recent ISTAG report, IoT will be implemented in symbiosis with new services. Third, IoT covers different modes of communication: things-to-person communication and thing-to-thing communications, including Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication that potentially concerns 50-70 billion ‘machines’, of which only 1 % are connected today. These connections can be established in restricted areas (‘intranet of things’) or made publicly accessible (‘Internet of things’).

(Citation from “Internet of Things — An action plan for Europe” Brussels, 18.6.2009; COM 278 final)

Conference information provided by konferenciakalauz.hu

Official Website: http://www.iot-budapest.eu/