Title

Beyond Next Generation IoT Solutions: The Internet of People

Organizers

Peter Reichl, Svenja Schröder, Andrea Passarella, and Marco Conti

Motivation and objectives

The Internet of Things (IoT) is mainly driven by technological opportunism, based on the idea of ubiquitous connectivity. New technologies like 5G promise to enable a new level of Quality of Service which brings a wide range of potential usage scenarios with a high Quality of Experience.

IoT solutions are designed primarily from a technological and business-oriented point of view. However, often IoT devices are only one part of a much broader networked eco-system where human users are central and, through their personal mobile devices, interact with physical objects via IoT devices as well as with each other. In such an ecosystem, personal user devices become sort of “proxies” of their human users in the cyber world and, when owned by human users, even IoT devices attached to physical objects might inherit properties of their users while interacting with each other. Unleashing this human-centric view allows us to redesign Next Generation Internet systems by taking into account not only engineering principles, but also by embedding models of the human users’ behaviour into the algorithms and protocols that govern the autonomous actions of the related technical components.

The emerging notion of the “Internet of People” (IoP) aims at providing a novel interdisciplinary framework for tackling these challenges, and allows embedding quantitative models of human behaviour coming from many different disciplines (e.g., complex networks, sociology, anthropology, micro-economics) in Next Generation Internet systems. In addition, this novel perspective will allow creating a sustainable and long-term value for people, businesses and society. Here, the major challenge concerns using the vast opportunity space of the IoP for creating applications that are valuable, empowering and trustworthy, thus maximizing their utility for the human user and eventually developing a novel approach towards responsible innovation.

Topics of interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Future scenarios and use cases for the Next Generation Internet and the Internet of People
User-centric approaches towards building the Internet of People
Smart Home, Smart Office and Smart City solutions using human-centric novel technology paradigms
User-centred design for sustainable NGI solutions
Responsible innovation in the IoP ecosystem
Quality of User Experience for IoT and IoP solutions
Wireless network architectures and protocols for the IoP
Privacy and knowledge sharing in IoP
Multimodal user interfaces for IoP applications
Quantitative human behavioural models applied to IoP protocols and systems design
IoP toolkits