Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) refers to uniquely identifiable objects and people as well as their virtual representations in an Internet-like infrastructure. After the first and second industrial revolutions, IoT has been hailed as the next technological revolution of our lifetime and become an indispensible and enabling technology for smart systems, e.g., Smart Cities and Smart Homes. It is IoT that makes systems “smart”, i.e., making it possible for them to possess such capabilities as learning, dynamic adaptation, and decision-making based upon data received, transmitted, and/or processed to improve their response to various situations. IoT enables smart systems to perform self-detection, self-diagnosing, self-correcting, self-monitoring, self-organizing, self-replicating, and self-controlled functions. Their design and implementation require methodologies and architectures able to effectively collect, manage, and process large/complex data sets and processes, and ultimately to manage and control themselves at different levels (from local to global), as they are composed of many networked entities of different scales (smart objects, sensors and actuators, embedded computers, mobile devices, machines, factories, buildings, and people). The large-scale nature of IoT-enabled smart systems raises a number of specific challenges and issues including: effective data collection, cleaning, and storage; data latency and real-time Big Data analytics; novel methods for global system control; effective development of large-scale management platforms; well-defined control interfaces for IoT technologies; and various IoT standards. This talk intends to present some of recent progress and initiatives toward the resolution of these issues and outline some promising applications in Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Smart Factories, Smart Buildings, and Smart Homes.
Bio-sketch
MengChu Zhou received his B.S. degree in Control Engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China in 1983, M.S. degree in Automatic Control from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 1986, and Ph. D. degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1990. He joined New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, NJ in 1990, and is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in intelligent automation, Petri nets, sensor networks, Internet of Things, Web service, big data, and energy systems. He has over 580 publications including 11 books, 280+ journal papers (180+ in IEEE transactions), and 22 book-chapters. He is the founding Editor of IEEE Press Book Series on Systems Science and Engineering. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He was General Chair and Program Chair of many international conferences. He was the recipient of NSF’s Research Initiation Award, CIM University-LEAD Award by Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Perlis Research Award and Fenster Innovation in Engineering Education Award by NJIT, Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists, and Outstanding Contributions Award, Distinguished Lecturership and Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award of IEEE SMC Society, and Distinguished Service Award from IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He has been among most highly cited scholars for years and ranked top one in the field of engineering worldwide in 2012 by Web of Science/Thomson Reuters. He is Fellow of IEEE, IFAC and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).