A Research Agenda for the Programmable World: Software Challenges for IoT Era

摘要

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the next significant step in the evolution of the connectivity and programmability. While the majority of research work in the IoT area today is about data acquisition, real-time and offline analytics, machine learning, data visualization and other fashionable big data topics, in this keynote we argue that there is in fact even more profound change that we arc facing - the programmability aspect that is intimately associated with all IoT systems. Advances in computing hardware development are making it feasible to introduce full-fledged operating systems in even smallest devices; advances in radio and battery technologies are enabling constant connectivity in the Global scale. This new world that is populated by programs of various degree of complexity requires programming skills in various fields that we now typically consider distinct, including in particular web and mobile development on the surface, and embedded and distributed software development at the core. Combining the characteristics of these fields will also force us to reconsider some of the fundamentals of software engineering in the process.