Human Face of Internet of Things for Smart Cities

Greetings from Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW 2016) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, where Dr. Kerry Taylor is speaking on Semantic Sensor Networks: The Internet of Things needs the Web of Data. IoT is normally seen as being about devices, but Dr. Taylor reminded us it is for people, including to make cities more livable. She showed a demonstration of a join of two sets of data using the semantic web. In another example the ontology of the data can be fragmented and embedded in sensors in the field. This has been proposed to W3C as a standard "iot-lite Ontology".

Head of MIT edX on Internet of Things

Greetings from the famous room N101 at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Professor Sanjay Sarma from MIT is speaking on "The Internet of Things". In his other role of Director of Digital Learning at MIT covering  MITx and EdX), Professor Sarma will be speaking at the unfortunately named "Blow up the lecture?" event at 6pm (free seats still available).

But this morning Professor Sarma is speaking to an engineering and computer science audience on how to make the Internet less virtual by being able to track and interact with many devices at low cost. There is a video "2014 Capitalizing on the Internet of Things" featuring Professor Sarma.

Unfortunately Professor Sarma is providing a very basic introduction to RFID tags and the use of sensors for applications such as agriculture. These applications are well known to staff and students at ANU and CSIRO IT Research (co-located at ANU) who have been building such applications for many years. It would have been useful to hear about what new work MIT might be doing.