This year SECON will feature two exciting workshops:

1. CoWPER - Toward A City-Wide Pervasive EnviRonment http://secon2016.ieee-secon.org/cowper
2. Internet of Things - Physical Data Analytics http://secon2016.ieee-secon.org/iotpda 

CoWPER - Toward A City-Wide Pervasive EnviRonment

The increasing availability of smart objects will radically change our cities. It is in fact a common opinion that, in the near future, our cities will be populated by a potentially higher number of devices that actively participate to the execution of pervasive and advanced services. Being massively distributed into the environment, such devices may generate, collect, exchange and process big data, provide distributed services, offer computational resources, and cooperate to perform some tasks locally, as well as to delegate the their execution to more powerful nodes in the infrastructure or at the network edge.

At the same time, end-user mobile devices are becoming more and more pervasive. In many countries, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions greatly overcomes the current population (even more than +150%). Furthermore today’s smartphones/devices are provided with increasing sensing/communication/computation capabilities and they are capable to produce fine-grained context-information by properly analysing/mining the data produced by embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, etc.

In this futuristic scenario the citizens with their smartphones, tablets and portable devices, will assume the very special role of information prosumers (PROducers and conSUMERS). In fact, they will be constantly connected with whatever surroundings them and they will be formidable information consumers. At the same time, citizens roaming around the city may be considered as mobile probes that, by making uses of cyber and physical data accessible by smartphones, will analyze the situation and will produce reports to the community. Furthermore the citizen’s smartphones will actively contribute in creating the communication infrastructure by forwarding data coming from surrounding devices thus partially relieving the communication infrastructure from the heavy burden of the huge amount of data produced in the envisioned scenario.

The CoWPER workshop aims to solicit contributions on novel algorithms, methodological studies and experimentations on how to enable the formerly described ecosystem. Specifically, on how devise a city-wide networking infrastructure capable to efficiently guarantee communication in the new envisaged ecosystem, to manage the complexity of heterogeneous devices and access technologies, and to guarantee robust, ubiquitous, and secure connectivity over the urban environments.

Accepted papers: http://secon2016.ieee-secon.org/CoWPER-accepted-papers

Workshop Co-chairs: Valeria LOSCRI, Giuseppe RUGGERI, Zhengguo SHENG, Athanasios VASILAKOS

Internet of Things - Physical Data Analytics   

The internet of things (IoT) is becoming an increasingly important area of research.  The ubiquity of interconnected sensors embedded in the physical world continues to grow; enriching the sensing fabric overlay that has the potential to increase our understanding of the interaction between people and their environments.  This is transforming various industries including building energy management and maintenance, industrial sector applications, connected cars, and healthcare.  We are also seeing it in our homes through smart thermostats and smart appliances.  Smart phones are more ubiquitous than ever and most new smart phones come with at least half a dozen sensors, providing information of the surrounding environment.  Data acquired using IoT devices will be massive in quantity, but to unlock its value the data needs to be processed and analyzed in reliable and useful ways. This presents researchers with the opportunity to explore how all the available data can be merged to get a holistic, time-varying understanding of the world like never before.

Fundamental challenges remain.  For example, we are seeing a growing use of cheap sensors transmitting physical readings over lossy links and stacks, often involving layers of transmission before reaching a data store for analysis.  The readings are noisy, missing, often uncalibrated, and temporally and spatially unaligned.  Moreover, the combination of modeling and data presents a family of new challenges as well.  In order to fulfill the potential of the internet of things we must explore ways to handle this complexity.

Accepted papers: http://secon2016.ieee-secon.org/IoTPDA-accepted-papers

Workshop Co-chairs: Zoran KOSTIC, Jorge ORTIZ