Informatics seminar on Thursday, March 26th, 15.30 - Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard

 

TITLE: The Web of Things

 

SPEAKER: Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard

 

DATE: Thursday, March 26th, 2009

 

PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)

 

TIME: 15.30

 

ABSTRACT:

Wireless Sensor Networks provide unprecedented possibilities for monitoring and interacting with the real-world. Unfortunately, the lack of open and simple standards for ad-hoc collaboration between heterogeneous embedded devices makes it difficult to build large-scale deployments. For every particular application requires complex integration work, and therefore technical expertise, effort and time.

Following the success of Web 2.0 mashups, we propose to reuse the founding principles of the modern Web architecture as a lightweight middleware. Using Web standards to network all kinds of devices will encourages widespread adoption by maximizing reuse of shared devices and lowering the access barrier for people to use and develop applications on a much wider ecosystem of shared devices. With our approach, we push the World Wide Web towards sensor networks so that interacting with devices becomes as easy as typing a URI in a Web browser. We will present the building blocks towards the Web of Things and illustrate our ideas with some prototypes we have built on top of an ecosystem of web-enabled devices. We will invite you to join our community (www.webofthings.com <http://www.webofthings.com>) to participate and build the future physical web all together.

 

BIOS:

Dominique Guinard is a PhD student at the Institute for Pervasive Computing of ETH Zurich and a Research Associate for SAP Research Zurich since June 2007. He is also a member of the Auto-ID labs. He was formerly a researcher at the Information Management group of ETH working on mobile interactions with the Internet of Things for Nokia Research. Before this, he was a scientific collaborator of the Software Engineering group of the University of Fribourg and an Intern at Sun Microsystems Switzerland where he worked on scalable software architectures for the Internet of Things. He received his MSc in Computer Science and a BSc in Computer Science and Management from the Universities of Fribourg and Bern. His master thesis was done at the Ubicomp lab of Lancaster University (UK) with Prof. Hans Gellersen, where he worked on using sensor networks to support mobile spontaneous interactions with the physical world.

 

Vlad Trifa is a PhD student at ETH Zurich at the Institute for Pervasive Computing, and a Research Associate SAP Research in Zurich since May 2007. He graduated in april 2006 with a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His thesis project was done at  University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), with Prof. Charles Taylor at the Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution, jointly with Prof. Deborah Estrin at the Center of Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), where he developed a framework to use sensor networks to study the influence of sexual and natural selection upon the evolution of bird songs in real environments. Between may 2006 and april 2007, he spent one year as a researcher at the Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, at the ATR Research Center near Kyoto, Japan, where he worked on multimodal human-robot interaction using video and audio information.

 

HOST: Prof. Cesare Pautasso