CNS Core: Small: Collaborative Research: Context-Assisted Interactions in the Internet of Things

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises "smart spaces" that sense and respond to individuals' needs. However, today's IoT applications fall short of this grand vision. Applications are often not personalized, do not respond to dynamics, and require manual intervention and knowledge to work. This project builds a "middleware" that sits between a user's application and the IoT devices that the application uses. This middleware has three components necessary to the long-term vision of a personalized IoT. First, the project develops mechanisms to authenticate and authorize individuals and their applications to use devices embedded in the surroundings. This allows applications to operate even in completely new environments, without requiring the user to perform complex manual steps to set up the IoT devices. Second, the project creates algorithms and protocols to automatically select the IoT devices in the surroundings that an application should use, based on the context of an application's request, including the physical nature of the environment (e.g., the built environment or the user's movement). This allows applications to delegate the act of directly using particular IoT devices to the middleware. Third, this project constructs feedback pathways between applications and IoT devices. These pathways collect successes (and failures) of applications' uses of IoT devices. This allows both the devices and the middleware to learn and adapt over time. The IoT is central in everyday environments. However, the state of the art prevents users from personalizing the behavior of spaces, especially spaces they do not "own". This project's research is on the critical path to the vision of personalized and immersive IoT experiences. To make an application's use of the IoT implicit, IoT devices must transparently and efficiently authenticate users and their applications. To avoid a global catalog of all IoT devices, applications must dynamically discover contextually-relevant IoT devices. These are key efforts in this project. To demonstrate its contributions, this project will deploy a set of micro-testbeds that will validate the results and generate a general-purpose data set for IoT applications. The project also includes student-led research projects designed to transition to museum quality interactive exhibits showcasing the potential of the IoT. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.