On 28^th and 29^th October the first EAI IoT360 Summit was held in Rome under the patronage of the European Commission – Representation in Italy.

The event, aimed at fostering innovation in Europe in the context of Internet of Things (IoT), attracted a wide audience of well engaged participants, offering a rich combination of exhibits, innovation-oriented sessions and speakers with proven experience in the domain of turning research ideas into successful businesses.

IoT360 Summit Opening (R. Giaffreda, M. Berardo, T. Catarci, I. Chlamtac)

The Summit was opened with a welcome message from EC Representation in Italy Marilena Berardo, Prof. Tiziana Catarci from La Sapienza and EAI and CREATE-NET President Imrich Chlamtac, all highlighting the importance of turning innovation into growth and opportunities in this booming IoT domain.

Big industry was represented well across manufacturing and telecom operators domains, with keynotes from Ericsson (Jan Färjh) and IBM (Gabi Zodik) as well as panels from leading experts of Telecom Italia (Roberto Minerva, Fabio Bellifemine), SK Telecom (Kang-Won Lee), Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs (Fahim Kawsar) and standard bodies like OMG and Industrial Internet Consortium (Richard M. Soley).

From this industry-segment world-class speakers, the audience was able to gather insights into opportunities and challenges as we move from connecting “everybody everywhere” to “everything everywhere”. While focus on wireless technology research will enable within few years access speed in the region of 1Gbps (Prof. Maurizio Decina) we still commit toward design of flexible networks that can offer the right performance according to what type of edge devices they are connecting. A common trend that was outlined in many sessions throughout the summit was the increasing empowerment of the network edges as a means to support envisaged billions of connected objects without unnecessarily overloading and / or grinding to a halt the operation of the core network. From the perspective of application domains, automotive and health came on top of the list: this is where IoT is envisaged will bring the biggest business opportunities.

 Mischa Dohler and Usman Haque at IoT360

To support the innovation spin of the event, IoT360 Summit also featured many contributions from representatives of recently formed SMEs, growing their business in the domain of the Internet of Things. More specifically the booming London IoT community was well represented with Mischa Dohler (Worldsensing, King’s College) and Usman Haque (Xively, Thingful.net, Umbrellium), Michela Magas (Stromatolite), Dom Guinard (Evrythng) as well as the community of open platforms and makers with Martin Spindler, Claudio Carnevali and Simone Cicero animating a lively discussion with Charalampos Doukas (CREATE-NET).

A common view that emerged amongst many of these innovators was that European IoT community started its journey already few years back with worldwide leadership, which it somehow failed to retain as IoT technology made its way up to the peak of popularity in the Gartner Hype-Cycle.

The main message however was that huge opportunities still remain. There is now the need to ensure the research community can be more exposed to understanding the difference between products and prototypes; heterogeneity is to be embraced rather than tamed with cumbersome comprehensive interoperable solutions that are unpractical to use; IoT-harvested data should be structured around user consent (to strive where European consumers have unique needs); the importance of creating markets by engaging users while designing / deploying solutions was also enhanced during the Summit, as well as the fact that merging powerful edges with IoT sensing and actuation will enable moving towards new “skillset delivery networks” paradigms. These were the key messages that came out of the two-day summit discussions on technology and innovation.

Besides these more technology oriented tracks, to achieve the promised 360 degrees coverage of the IoT innovation landscape, the Summit also included sessions dedicated to consensus-building enablers, focusing on the importance of standardization and social-acceptance. Attendants of the Summit also took the possibility of exposing and discussing their ideas with funding and IPR experts following a whole plenary session on funding opportunities for IoT, where the European Commission also took the stage to illustrate Horizon2020 new requirements in the context of IoT (Ari Sorsaniemi talking about upcoming deadline for IoT collaborative projects in LEIT-ICT H2020 workprogramme).

The busy schedule of the IoT360 Summit also featured a whole track dedicated to innovation matters, with speakers from acceleration programmes, IPR monetization experts and private funding representatives.

 iCore Team with Best IoT360 Exhibit Award

On the exhibit front participants also had the chance to see a wide variety of demos and vote for their preferred one, with the stand of the EU iCore project scoring the highest number of preferences and winning the best-exhibit award.

The event attendance numbers, as well as the highly positive response and feedback from the audience, partners and speakers, confirmed the community interest for this IoT360 Summit, strategically positioned to bridge the gaps between researchers community-only conferences and more business oriented type of events. The Summit was a first of a series in the domain of IoT innovation and is due to take place on a yearly basis from now on.

Source: https://eai.eu/IoT360-report

COIOTE 2015, the 2nd International Conference on Cognitive Internet of Things Technologies, will take place in Rome, Italy on October 26-27. The conference aims at gathering enthusiastic researchers and practitioners from AI and IoT-related areas sharing the common goal of addressing the new challenges posed by the Cognitive aspect of IoT by using new or leveraging existing Artificial Intelligence techniques. COIOTE 2015 is now open for submissions on topics ranging from knowledge representation to deep learning in IoT. The conference also caters for a limited number of workshops on dedicated session topics

Participation at this event will give attendees the unique opportunity to be exposed to all aspects of IoT-related topics at co-located conferences, as well as have full access to the IoT marketplace at the IoT360 Summit.

All accepted papers will be published by Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library, one of the world’s largest scientific libraries. Best papers will be invited to publish in the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Cognitive Communications.

Previously unpublished paper in English, up to 6 pages long, can be submitted through Confy by 15 June. The papers must be formatted using the Springer LNICST Authors’ Kit.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2015

Notification deadline: 25 July 2015

Camera-ready deadline: 25 August 2015

Sandro Zilli is a manager and entrepreneur with more than twenty years of professional experience in multinational companies operating in the ICT sector, and in different types of markets such as manufacturing, construction, media and entertainment. He has held a variety of senior positions in both startups and large international enterprises, and is currently the Manufacturing Sales Development Manager at Tech Data Italia. He holds an Executive MBA from LUISS Business School, and is an active Board Member of LUISS University Alumni EMBA, driving key projects in collaboration with  a top Italian startup incubator.  We spoke to him following the latest edition of the IoT360 Summit, at which he participated as a speaker on the subject of readiness for (private) funding.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

The 2014 edition of IoT360 focused on a multitude of different themes related to IoT. The red track was a deep investigation of online innovation platforms and communities that can take an idea all the way to the market. Which specific issues would you like to be discussed at the next edition of Summit? 

I appreciated the themes related to the Internet of Things a lot, because they represent the future of ICT and digital life. In my opinion, it would be very useful to increase the number of cases and best practice examples presented. In addition to that, it would be very useful if IoT360 became a point of reference, networking and training for new companies, students or researchers that have to face the market in order to launch their startup.

In your opinion, as an entrepreneur and an active Board Member of LUISS University Alumni EMBA, how can academia and industry work together to build the future know-how in the ICT field?

I think that the best way is transferring academic experience and knowledge into the real world of startups and new companies through mentoring activities that would help academia enter the market and promote innovation in a proper way, using industry skills and best practice.

 Which challenges do ICT startups have to accept in the era of the Internet of Things?

New technologies – cloud, mobile, social enterprise, and big data – allow startups to effectively respond to the needs of citizens. The Internet of Things is useful for making sense of information, and having the correct information and dynamic data, but the goal is to offer solutions that are translated into specific improvements of the quality of people’s lives. The potential uses of this information are almost unlimited. It can be used for modelling and predicting how changes to a system will affect other systems, reducing the risks of change, and accelerating the return on investment. It can be used for developing new business models in partnership with private and public companies, and may be useful for directing new projects for the benefit of the community.