Smart SysTech 2012

 SmartSysTech, the former RFIDSysTech conference, has broadened its scope beyond RFID on sensor tags and smart objects.

Werner Mohr, Head of research alliances at Nokia/Siemens introduced to the emerging 50 billion devices being to te internet connected soon and the resulting challenges.Biggest growth in connectivity already today stems from mobile connections. Challenges will be managing the heterogeneity of networked objects, privacy and security. Main driver is the faster adressing of economic exploitation and societal challenges (logistics, agriculture, energy, health).
Data has to be continuously processed in a distributed manner. Mohr outlined that Japan would mostly focus  broadband, US on new protocols, and EU on combine various protocols. By presenting examples of fleet monitoring and energy distribution, Mohr described Internet of Things (IoT) as the generic enabler for multi-purpose application frameworks instead single applications focus as done by cloud computing.
IoT - based on RFID, cyber physical systems,M2M, NFC - provides the building blocks for various applications (he didn't really tell which in particular;). As a result distributed intelligence would heavily contribute to the overall internet traffic growth such that new challenges emerge from scalability, security and privacy.


Obviously, the acronym RFID in more than half of the titles of the papers being presented clearly documents the roots of this conference. Overall, I had the feeling that this conference could have the potential to establish itself as a major for German/European research on Smart Objects and Internet of Things. I'm looking forward to participating next year again.