The connection of everyday objects with the digital world has moved forward swiftly, and technologies available today enable the “ubiquitous computing web”, where the Internet of Things (IoT) is the predominant paradigm. Industry has paid considerable attention to the IoT for its potential economic impact on new mechanisms for remote monitoring, control detection, and use of data as a service for new business models. IoT design will gradually leverage techniques from the field of robotics, creating the IoT objects that react to users in various ways, including movement. Recently, even minimal movement of an abstract non-humanoid robotic object has been shown to provide social cues in the context of greeting. The IoT paradigm is now moving to a next level, where in addition to the actual sensing and monitoring capabilities new approaches are needed to more effectively deal with the deluge of data generated by the IoT, and to design appropriate IoT technologies for diversifying domains. This is the moment that this workshop is inspired by.
This workshop seeks to bring together HCI researchers, designers, and industry practitioners that push the boundary of IoT-based research and design; in particular, we are interested in novel environments and domains for the IoT, as well as new approaches for the design, development, and control of the IoT applications and services. For example, the connected objects may now include rules and basic learning processes to perform some tasks on behalf of humans, based on more advanced processing of sensor data, actuating change and working autonomously as a result. This Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT) is just one example, albeit a key one, of new approaches to the IoT. The A-IoT includes as key features automation, autonomy and delegation of tasks and this raise new challenges for both application domains and approaches that this workshop seeks to discuss. As IoT technologies are increasingly used and adapted to everyday environment, we elicit some exemplary domains and approaches in the following to inspire potential participants to take part in our workshop.
We aim to explore socio-technical challenges that have emerged from existing designs and studies, and further explore how future technologies might rise to broader socio-economic issues.
We invite contributions including, but not limited to the following topics:
- What can be learnt from the emergent use of IoT in new domains?
- Techniques for interacting with—and making sense of— the autonomous IoT
- Ethical considerations and privacy issues in relation to user data in the IoT
- Visualisation of configured devices and collected data to support user understanding and interactions
- Approaches for studying and delivering IoT technologies sustainably within the sharing economy
- Environmental and socio-cultural challenges for design, adoption, interaction, and engagement with IoT.
New Directions for the IoT: Automate, Share, Build, and Care 