The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Alberta’s Digital Oilfield: Technological Opportunities and Benefits for Alberta Companies and Communities

The global oil and gas sector has recently undergone a significant shift in supply economics, which has rippled throughout the supply chain. This has been felt as strongly in Alberta, Canada as it has in any other oil producing region. The intense need for operational changes to production, coupled with the proliferation of digital technologies into industrial processes (Industry 4.0), has led to new opportunities to dramatically reduce costs and inefficiencies through the supply chain. These opportunities can be summarized as Digital Oilfield Technologies, which are a combination of tools and disciplines that are incorporated into advanced software to improve operations efficiencies. This paper explores the different types of Digital Oilfield Technologies, its benefits to industry, and uncovers how communities in oil and gas producing regions can support the growth of this new subsector to improve the health of local industry and economy. Keywords: oilfield technology, oil and gas, oilfield optimization, digital analytics, digitalization, industry 4.

Shake-n-shack : enabling secure data exchange between Smart Wearables via handshakes

Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this paper, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel Shake-n-Shack system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn't involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed Shake-n-Shack 1 system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to real-time mimicking attacks: in our experiments the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed Shake-n-Shack system can be extremely lightweight, and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

NILM techniques for intelligent home energy management and ambient assisted living: a review

The ongoing deployment of smart meters and different commercial devices has made electricity disaggregation feasible in buildings and households, based on a single measure of the current and, sometimes, of the voltage. Energy disaggregation is intended to separate the total power consumption into specific appliance loads, which can be achieved by applying Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with a minimum invasion of privacy. NILM techniques are becoming more and more widespread in recent years, as a consequence of the interest companies and consumers have in efficient energy consumption and management. This work presents a detailed review of NILM methods, focusing particularly on recent proposals and their applications, particularly in the areas of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), where the ability to determine the on/off status of certain devices can provide key information for making further decisions. As well as complementing previous reviews on the NILM field and providing a discussion of the applications of NILM in HEMS and AAL, this paper provides guidelines for future research in these topics.Agência financiadora: Programa Operacional Portugal 2020 and Programa Operacional Regional do Algarve 01/SAICT/2018/39578 Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through IDMEC, under LAETA: SFRH/BSAB/142998/2018 SFRH/BSAB/142997/2018 UID/EMS/50022/2019 Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain: SBPLY/17/180501/000392 Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (SOC-PLC project): TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R MINECO/FEDERinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Enhancing Usability, Security, and Performance in Mobile Computing

We have witnessed the prevalence of smart devices in every aspect of human life. However, the ever-growing smart devices present significant challenges in terms of usability, security, and performance. First, we need to design new interfaces to improve the device usability which has been neglected during the rapid shift from hand-held mobile devices to wearables. Second, we need to protect smart devices with abundant private data against unauthorized users. Last, new applications with compute-intensive tasks demand the integration of emerging mobile backend infrastructure. This dissertation focuses on addressing these challenges. First, we present GlassGesture, a system that improves the usability of Google Glass through a head gesture user interface with gesture recognition and authentication. We accelerate the recognition by employing a novel similarity search scheme, and improve the authentication performance by applying new features of head movements in an ensemble learning method. as a result, GlassGesture achieves 96% gesture recognition accuracy. Furthermore, GlassGesture accepts authorized users in nearly 92% of trials, and rejects attackers in nearly 99% of trials. Next, we investigate the authentication between a smartphone and a paired smartwatch. We design and implement WearLock, a system that utilizes one\u27s smartwatch to unlock one\u27s smartphone via acoustic tones. We build an acoustic modem with sub-channel selection and adaptive modulation, which generates modulated acoustic signals to maximize the unlocking success rate against ambient noise. We leverage the motion similarities of the devices to eliminate unnecessary unlocking. We also offload heavy computation tasks from the smartwatch to the smartphone to shorten response time and save energy. The acoustic modem achieves a low bit error rate (BER) of 8%. Compared to traditional manual personal identification numbers (PINs) entry, WearLock not only automates the unlocking but also speeds it up by at least 18%. Last, we consider low-latency video analytics on mobile devices, leveraging emerging mobile backend infrastructure. We design and implement LAVEA, a system which offloads computation from mobile clients to edge nodes, to accomplish tasks with intensive computation at places closer to users in a timely manner. We formulate an optimization problem for offloading task selection and prioritize offloading requests received at the edge node to minimize the response time. We design and compare various task placement schemes for inter-edge collaboration to further improve the overall response time. Our results show that the client-edge configuration has a speedup ranging from 1.3x to 4x against running solely by the client and 1.2x to 1.7x against the client-cloud configuration

5G in Public Safety Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Este documento aborda as possibilidades abertas pela 5G na área das Redes de Segurança Pública, ou seja, nas redes de comunicação destinadas às autoridades, polícia, protecção civil, bombeiros, infra-estruturas críticas, e a todos os envolvidos em actividades de emergência e segurança. É apresentada a evolução dos terminais e serviços, até aos novos elementos de desgaste; os serviços associados são também abordados, até às realidades aumentadas e virtuais, bio-métricas e monitorização de sinais vitais do corpo, bem como uma melhor precisão de localização. Os aspectos técnicos são abordados numa perspectiva geral, nomeadamente a métrica de implementação de serviços-chave (taxas de dados, latência, fiabilidade e capacidade de conectividade), interface rádio (maior flexibilidade e eficiência dos 4G) e características de rede (virtualização/slicing de redes e arquitecturas de nuvem/edge). As oportunidades e desafios na implementação de 5G especificamente para Redes de Segurança Pública são muitos, os primeiros englobando a utilização de redes comerciais e o salto das actuais redes baseadas em 2G para as 5G, enquanto que os segundos incluem escassez de espectro, implementação das características necessárias e problemas de segurança. Ainda assim, as possibilidades que são abertas por 5G para as Redes de Segurança Pública são infinitas e ninguém pode dar-se ao luxo de ficar de fora.This paper addresses the possibilities opened by 5G in the area of Public Safety Networks, i.e., in communication networks aimed at authorities, police, civil protection, fire departments, critical infrastructures, and all of those involved in emergency and security activities. The evolution of terminals and services is presented, up to the new wearables; the associated services are also addressed, up to augmented and virtual realities, bio-metrics and body vital signs monitoring, as well as improved localisation accuracy. Technical aspects are addressed in a general perspective namely key services implementation metrics (data rates, latency, reliability, and connectivity capacity), radio interface (increased flexibility and efficiency of 4G’s) and network features (virtualisation/slicing of networks and cloud/edge architectures). The opportunities and challenges on the deployment of 5G specifically for Public Safety Networks are quite many, the former encompassing the usage of commercial networks and the leap from today’s 2G based networks to 5G ones, while the latter includes shortage of spectrum, implementation of required features and security problems. Still, the possibilities that are opened by 5G for Public Safety Networks are endless and no one can afford to be left out.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio