Smart Objects

—The proliferation of everyday smart devices able to sense, process, communicate and/or actuate, is changing the way we interact with the world around us. These novel cyber-physical smart devices, or simply Smart Objects (SOs), are the fundamental building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT), a global and highly dynamic ecosystem in which heterogeneous typologies of device networks seamlessly interoperate. Although the IoT component technologies and enabling computing paradigms are not totally new, the development and analysis of an IoT system is still a complex process. In this paper the ACOSO (Agent-based COoperative Smart Object) middleware and the Omnet++ platform have been used as means for the SO-based IoT systems development/management and simulation. Indeed, on one hand ACOSO provides effective instruments and a simple programming model to realize both cyber-physical SOs and IoT systems. On the other hand, leveraging on the parallelism between SOs/agents and the Omnet++ network nodes, simulations of agent-oriented IoT systems in different scale scenarios have been defined and conducted.

Blockchain technology is new technology for digital asset tracking and management. Initially Blockchain was implemented as a financial solution, through the Bitcoin and its digital cryptocurrency. This was changed with the development of Ethereum new approach for management of digital assets. The existence of Smart contracts in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EMV), introduced new ways for dealing the problems with third-parties. This opens opportunities for plethora of new Blockchain implementations for smart homes, smart objects, healthcare, finance management, insurance, supply chain management and many others. This survey paper addresses the state-of-the-art and highlights the possibilities for integration of Blockchain technology and IoT, with main focus to healthcare systems. Due to the Blockchain specifics, there are many unsolved issues and open challenges for the researchers in this area.

The Internet is an existing thing, always changing and growing. New applications and businesses are created endlessly. Besides to developing Internet, technology is changing the backdrop. Broadband connectivity is becoming cheap and omnipresent; devices are becoming more powerful and smaller with a variety of committed sensors. The abundance of more devices becoming connected is leading to a new prototype: the IoT. The IoTs is driven by an extension of the Internet through the addition of physical objects united with an ability to provide smarter services to the upbringing as more data becomes available. Various application domains like Smart Infrastructure, Healthcare, Security and Surveillance, Transportation, Retail, Industrial and Telecommunication etc., there are challenges associated with the IoTs, most explicitly in areas of trust and security, Privacy and Data Confidentiality. In this way, the things/objects are capable of recognizing events and changes in their surroundings and are acting and reacting autonomously.

Internet of Thing (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a giant information system, daily providing novel, advanced, cyberphysical services. Differently from conventional computing services (e.g., web-services, and ubiquitous services) that are usually loosely impacted by context-awareness, co-location or transience, Internet of Things (IoT) services require to actually consider the overall spatio-temporal context of the heterogeneous entities involved in the service provisioning. This paper proposes a novel and full-fledged approach to IoT service modeling, aiming to fully support IoT service development according to opportunistic properties.

The End-to-End VPN security has an essential role especially in connecting smart objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments. It noted that security is a crucial issue in the End-to-End VPN approach. IPSec/IPv6 and OpenSSL are the most common VPN approaches used separately to secure smart IoT objects in different environments. These approaches have strengths and weaknesses. This paper addresses the development of a Hybrid End-to-End VPN security approach achieved by combining the IPSec/IPv6 and OpenSSL security approaches that can secure smart IoT objects in different settings. This proposed solution achieves the best combinations of complementary advantages of IPSec/IPv6 VPN approach and OpenSSL VPN approach and eliminates their shortcomings. Performance evaluation of the proposed Hybrid approach and the analysis of the comparison outputs of the performance of both IPSec/IPv6 VPN and OpenSSL VPN approaches assessed in terms of a group of standard measurements, for example, throughput, round-trip delay, and bandwidth consumption. The results of the simulation for the proposed solution demonstrate the correlation with acceptance levels compared to IPSec/ IPv6 VPN, and OpenSSL VPN approaches.

Advancements on microelectromechanical systems, embedded technologies, and wireless communications have recently enabled the evolution of conventional everyday things in enhanced entities, commonly defined Smart Objects (SOs). Their continuous and widespread diffusion, along with an increasing and pervasive connectivity, is enabling unforeseen interactions with conventional computing systems, places, animals and humans, thus fading the boundary between physical and digital worlds. The Internet of Things (IoT) term just refers to such futuristic scenario, namely a loosely coupled, decentralized and dynamic ecosystem in which billions (even trillions) of self-steering SOs are globally interconnected becoming active participants in business, logistics, information and social processes. Indeed, SOs are able to provide highly pervasive cyberphysical services to both humans and machines thanks to their communication, sensing, actuation, and embedded processing capabilities. Nowadays, the systemic revolution that can be led through the complete realization of the IoT vision is just at its dawn. As matter of facts, whereas new IoT devices and systems have been already developed, they often result in poorly interoperating "Intra-nets of things", mainly due to the heterogeneity featuring IoT building blocks and the lack of standards. Thus, the development of massive scaled (the total number of "things" is forecasted to reach 20.4 billion in 2020) and actually interoperable IoT systems is a challenging task, featured by several requirements and novel, even unsurveyed, issues.
In this context, a multidisciplinary and systematic development approach is necessary, so to involve different fields of expertise for coping with the cyberphysical nature of IoT ecosystem. Henceforth, full-fledged IoT methodologies are gaining traction, aiming at systematically supporting all development phases, addressing mentioned issues, and reducing time-to-market, efforts and probability of failure. In such a scenario, this Thesis proposes an application domain-neutral, full-fledged agent-based development methodology able to support the main engineering phases of IoT ecosystems. The definition of such systematic approach resulted in ACOSO-Meth (Agent-based COoperating Smart Objects Methodology), which is the major contribution of this thesis along with other interesting research efforts supporting (i.e., a multi-technology and multiprotocol smartphone-based IoT gateway) and extending (i.e., a full-fledged approach to the IoT services modeling according to their opportunistic properties) the main proposal. Finally, to provide validation and performance evaluation of the proposed ACOSO-Meth approach, four use cases (related to different application contexts such as a smart university campus, a smart digital library, a smart city and a smart workshop) have been developed. These research prototypes showed the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and improved their respective state-of-the-art.

The dynamic, rapidly changing and technology rich digital environment enables the provision of added value applications that exploited a multitude of devices contributing service and information. With the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT) from the internet as a web service, large numbers of devices (objects) and environment are also becoming smarter and are in the position to interact with one another than ever before. IoT has gained substantial attention over the preceding decades, with the intentions of connecting Billions of sensors to the internet, in order to effectively and efficiently utilise them resourceful for smart cities.

ABSTRACT If new televisions are bringing more and more features in our living rooms, they are still lacking an important axis of the TV user experience: emotions. And this is particularly true for visually and hearing impaired people. Therefore, we want to find innovative ways to bring them emotions that are usually conveyed through sound and images, by taking advantage of arousal modeling of films. Such empathic TV experiences will give them the possibility to fully enjoy visual media.

—The future Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a new and wide range of decentralized systems (from small-scale smart homes to large-scale smart cities) in which " things " are able to sense/actuate, compute, and communicate , and thus play a central and crucial role. The growing importance of such novel networked cyber-physical context demands suitable and effective computing paradigms to fulfill the various requirements of IoT systems engineering. In this paper, we propose to explore an agent-based computing paradigm to support IoT systems analysis, design, and implementation. The synergic meeting of agents with IoT makes it possible to develop smart and dynamic IoT systems of diverse scales. Our agent-oriented approach is specifically based on the agent-based cooperating smart object (ACOSO) methodology and on the related ACOSO middleware: they provide effective agent design and programming models along with efficient tools for the actual construction of an IoT system in terms of a multiagent system. A case study concerning the development of a complex IoT system, namely a Smart University Campus, is described to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Index Terms—Agent-oriented software engineering, cooperative smart objects, Internet of Things (IoT), multiagent systems (MASs).

Comment un smartphone peut interagir dans les dynamiques de notre vie sociale ? Et comment, conserve-t-il l’image de notre monde contemporain ? L’article ana- lyse cet objet dans une perspective phénoménologique en utilisant les catégories sim- meliennes afin de retracer les sentiers invisibles de la matière et de clarifier le rôle et la position de l’objet dans la socialité contemporaine.

Depuis quelque années, de nombreux objets se sont vus attribuer l'adjectif “intelligent”. Outre l'effet de mode, force est de constater l'émergence de dispositifs divers incorporant une dimension numérique et des capacités de traitement de données. Environnements, accessoires, voire directement incorporés, ces artefacts à la fois outils et capteurs collectent de larges quantités de données sur leurs porteurs. Nombre de discours (y compris celui de leurs interfaces) les positionnent comme auxiliaires du 'bien-vivre' au quotidien. Ils sont appelés à transformer 'l'humain' et à influencer ses mécanismes de décision.
Quel rôle joue le design dans leur conception ? Peut-il être un outil de déconstruction des mécanismes à l'oeuvre ? Quels sont les usages et communautés constitués autour des objets existants ? Quelles sont les implications de cette mesurabilité constante des corps ? Nous exposerons les terrains de recherches et les questions méthodologiques qu'ils soulèvent, pour présenter les premières esquisses d'un cadre théorique global sur cette famille d'objets (Wittgenstein, 1953).

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Smart Objects (SOs) promotes an high-level architectural organization of the future IoT designed around the basic concept of SO. An SO is an autonomous , cyberphysical object augmented with sensing/actuation, processing , storing, and networking capabilities. An important issue in supporting future SO-based IoT systems is how to classify SOs. Classification of SOs is an important activity directly influencing the definition of effective SO discovery services and management systems. In particular , the discovery service is a fundamental middleware component of the IoT as it allows SOs and their users to dynamically discover distributed SOs and, specifically, the services, operations, and data that they provide. This paper aims at proposing a reference taxonomy for SOs that is highly functional for an SO discovery service, and, more generally, for an SO management system. The taxonomy is based on a metadata model that is able to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of an SO.

O artigo explora as materialidades digitais da informação a partir do percurso da experiência de dataficação da ansiedade e do monitoramento da respiração mediante uso do vestível Spire Stone. Apresentamos o relato de uso pessoal do wearable e uma análise descritiva da trajetória de produção informacional na associação corpo-algoritmos-vestível. Argumentamos que as materialidades da informação se referem menos às essências representacionais (soft) ou materiais (hard) do vestível-plataforma, e mais às cadeias de ação e às consequências práticas produzidas durante a experiência de monitoramento. Sugerimos a noção de experiência em William James como abordagem com-plementar aos estudos que optam por explorar as materialidades digitais da informação no processo dinâmico de sua própria formação, evitando perspec-tivas centradas na especificidade técnica dos objetos inteligentes ou restritas à percepção humana sobre o uso deles.

The aim of this paper is to consider the Gehlen’s critique of modernity through his concept of the awkwardness of technology. In order to highlight his philosophical anthropology, I will focus on the special relationship between humankind and the multitude of objects that surround us in everyday life. To clarify this relationship in the age of modernity, firstly I tackle two key concepts of Gehlen’s work. If with the notion of ‘technological action’ I will focus on anthropobiological aspects, through his idea of ‘imagination’ I will handle psychosocial problems. Only after this overview I will deeply focus on the sociological and psychological aspects of modern technology and their effects on contemporary man.

This paper engages the notion of an internet of things and its implications for conceptualisations of the social, as exemplified by issues such as network identity, privacy, and surveillance. The paper argues that this problematic is fundamentally a function of a social projection ill-equipped to maneuver in hybrid space, and suggests an examination of mobile socio-digital assemblages with a conceptual apparatus borrowed from actor-network theory (ANT) and the work of Gabriel Tarde. The main strength of this conceptual apparatus lies in its capacity to encounter the hybrid complexity of socio-digital assemblages without assigning a priori subject-object relationalities;spatial relations are performed simultaneously with the construction of (hybrid) objects. The argument is illustrated with case-studies of the internet of things

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Smart Objects (SOs) promotes an high-level architectural organization of the future IoT designed around the basic concept of SO. An SO is an autonomous, cyberphysical object augmented with sensing/actuation, processing, storing, and networking capabilities. An important issue in supporting future SO-based IoT systems is how to classify SOs. Classification of SOs is an important activity directly influencing the definition of effective SO discovery services and management systems. In particular, the discovery service is a fundamental middleware component of the IoT as it allows SOs and their users to dynamically discover distributed SOs and, specifically, the services, operations, and data that they provide. This paper aims at proposing a reference taxonomy for SOs that is highly functional for an SO discovery service, and, more generally, for an SO management system. The taxonomy is based on a metadata model that is able to describ...

There are numerous definitions of technical Objects in various fields. However, we still lack of a methodological approach to the definition of the so-called ‘smart’ Objects—technical objects imbued with digital ‘intelligence’. Various frameworks have been proposed in the field of Computer Sciences for their classification and description. How to synthetize those different approaches in order to articulate the specificity of ‘smart’ objects—if there is indeed one? We will build upon a semio-pragmatic analysis of the phone, as a technical object which considerably evolved through time, to identify the aspects and issues at stake.

The aim of this paper is to consider the Gehlen’s critique of modernity through his concept of the awkwardness of technology. In order to highlight his philosophical anthropology, I will focus on the special relationship between humankind and the multitude of objects that surround us in everyday life. To clarify this relationship in the age of modernity, firstly I tackle two key concepts of Gehlen’s work. If with the notion of ‘technological action’ I will focus on anthropobiological aspects, through his idea of ‘imagination’ I will handle psychosocial problems. Only after this overview I will deeply focus on the sociological and psychological aspects of modern technology and their effects on contemporary man.

Optimal cardiovascular, respiratory and motor activity assessment of wheelchair users using modern technologies of pervasive sensing and computing represents the main objective of the running project. In order to extract accurate information about physiological parameters provided by physical measurement channel and also to estimate additional parameters associated with virtual measurement channels advanced processing algorithms are implemented on embedded computing platform of the wheelchair. Will be implemented ballistocardiography, electrocardiography, plethysmography, skin conductance smart sensing devices that extract the health status information in unobtrusive way. The informations from the smart sensors, as from the localization units based on GPS technology (for outdoor localization) and RFID technology (for indoor localization) are processed on the embedded computing platform based on DSP that also assure the wireless data transmission to the human machine interface (HMI) ...

In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting affordances and new meanings for Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era. After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issues, we propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is twofold: on the one hand, it is the objective of the observation for defining a set of ambiguous objects or affordances; on the other hand, it is the result of a design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive dissonance and finalized to understand people adaptation processes and behaviors.

Il presente lavoro si divide in due parti. La prima parte si concentrerà sul rapporto tra l’uomo, gli oggetti e l’immaginario. Nella seconda parte, attraverso la morfologia di Goethe, Simmel e Benjamin, si tenterà di comprendere le specificità della forma degli oggetti e di delineare alcune indicazioni metodologiche al fine studiare l’immaginario attraverso l’osservazione della forma degli oggetti.

The End-to-End VPN security has an essential role especially in connecting smart objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments. It noted that security is a crucial issue in the End-to-End VPN approach. IPSec/IPv6 and OpenSSL are the most common VPN approaches used separately to secure smart IoT objects in different environments. These approaches have strengths and weaknesses. This paper addresses the development of a Hybrid End-to-End VPN security approach achieved by combining the IPSec/IPv6 and OpenSSL security approaches that can secure smart IoT objects in different settings. This proposed solution achieves the best combinations of complementary advantages of IPSec/IPv6 VPN approach and OpenSSL VPN approach and eliminates their shortcomings. Performance evaluation of the proposed Hybrid approach and the analysis of the comparison outputs of the performance of both IPSec/IPv6 VPN and OpenSSL VPN approaches assessed in terms of a group of standard measurements, for example, throughput, round-trip delay, and bandwidth consumption. The results of the simulation for the proposed solution demonstrate the correlation with acceptance levels compared to IPSec/IPv6 VPN, and OpenSSL VPN approaches.

Digital libraries are distributed software infrastructures that aim at collecting, managing, preserving, and using digital objects (or resources) for the long term, and providing specialized services on such resources to its users. Service provision should be of measurable quality and performed according to codified policies. Currently, modern digital libraries include a wide range of conventional digital objects: text document, image, audio, video, software, etc. In the emerging domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), cyberphysical smart objects (or simply smart objects) will play a central role in providing new (smart) services to both humans and machines. It is therefore challenging to include smart objects, the newest type of digital objects, into digital libraries as novel first-class objects to be collected, managed, and preserved. However, their inclusion poses critical issues to address and many research challenges to deal with. This paper aims at paving the way towards such a novel inclusion that will enable effective discovery, management and querying of smart objects. In particular , our approach is based on a metadata model purposely defined to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of smart objects. The metadata model is then used for a seamless integration of smart objects into digital libraries compliant with the digital library reference model proposed by the DL.org community. The proposed approach is also exemplified through a simple yet effective case study.

Optimal cardiovascular, respiratory and motor activity assessment of wheelchair users using modern technologies of pervasive sensing and computing represents the main objective of the running project. In order to extract accurate information about physiological parameters provided by physical measurement channel and also to estimate additional parameters associated with virtual measurement channels advanced processing algorithms are implemented on embedded computing platform of the wheelchair. Will be implemented ballistocardiography, electrocardiography, plethysmography, skin conductance smart sensing devices that extract the health status information in unobtrusive way. The informations from the smart sensors, as from the localization units based on GPS technology (for outdoor localization) and RFID technology (for indoor localization) are processed on the embedded computing platform based on DSP that also assure the wireless data transmission to the human machine interface (HMI) ...

This paper examines how circular economics addresses and uses smart
technology, and demonstrates the lack of consideration given to ownership issues in such contexts. The extent to which circular economic ideals require controlling goods down-stream will be exposed. Following this is an analysis of the ramifications of smart technology, illustrated with recent examples of control through smart technology. This leads to a critique of the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on patent exhaustion Impression Products v Lexmark alongside the CJEU’s decision in UsedSoft on copyright, addressing implications for contracting practices. The article concludes by urging close comparison of claimed benefits arising from circular economic approaches to smart technology with the potential costs of control (or lack thereof) of novel technologies.

Comment un smartphone peut interagir dans les dynamiques de notre vie sociale ? Et comment, conserve-t-il l’image de notre monde contemporain ? L’article ana- lyse cet objet dans une perspective phénoménologique en utilisant les catégories sim- meliennes afin de retracer les sentiers invisibles de la matière et de clarifier le rôle et la position de l’objet dans la socialité contemporaine.

Within the Information and Communication Technology hype cycle the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a prominent subject, being rich in potentiality as well as in development issues. In this paper, we face the IoT developing process first " in the small " by designing the Smart Objects (SOs, representing the fundamental IoT building blocks) as agents, and after " in the large " by treating the IoT systems as Multi Agent Systems (MASs). Indeed, the agent abstraction is a suitable paradigm to instill smartness and autonomy within a single SO and consequently to realize distributed, self-steering and heterogeneous IoT systems. In such directions, the Agent-based COoperating SO (ACOSO) middleware represents a viable solution for the programming, development and management of agent-based SO systems while its performance verification on different IoT networks of different scale has been made through the Omnet++ simulator.

Digital libraries are distributed software infrastructures that aim at collecting, managing, preserving, and using digital objects (or resources) for the long term, and providing specialized services on such resources to its users. Service provision should be of measurable quality and performed according to codified policies. Currently, modern digital libraries include a wide range of conventional digital objects: text document, image, audio, video, software, etc. In the emerging domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), cyberphysical smart objects (or simply smart objects) will play a central role in providing new (smart) services to both humans and machines. It is therefore challenging to include smart objects, the newest type of digital objects, into digital libraries as novel first-class objects to be collected, managed, and preserved. However, their inclusion poses critical issues to address and many research challenges to deal with. This paper aims at paving the way towards such a novel inclusion that will enable effective discovery, management and querying of smart objects, so establishing cyberphysical digital libraries. In particular, our approach is based on a metadata model purposely defined to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of smart objects. The meta-data model is then used for a seamless integration of smart objects into digital libraries compliant with the digital library reference model proposed by the DL.org community. The proposed approach is also exemplified through a simple yet effective case study.

Wearable devices for self-tracking are gradually spreading on the market, allowing people to monitor their own behaviors almost everywhere at every time. However, their integration in people's daily life poses a variety of challenges. In this landscape the concept of affordance becomes crucial: it can reframe the design of wearable devices by focusing it on their "smart materiality".

In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting affordances and new meanings in Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era. After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issue, we propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is twofold: on one hand it is the objective of the observation to define a set of ambiguous objects or affordance; on the other hand it is the results of a design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive dissonance and finalized to understand adaptation processes and behaviors.