Special Session on IoT and Smart cities

Website: http://www.mcrlab.net/special-session-iot-and-smart-cities/

Important information

• Submission deadline: December 15, 2017 February 2, 2018 (extended)
• Acceptance notification: March 16, 2018
• Camera ready deadline: April 19, 2018
• Online submission: https://submissions.mmsys2018.org/smartcities
• Submission format: 6-12 pages, using ACM style format (double-blind). Please see the submission guidelines for more information about the process.
• Reproducibility: obtain an ACM reproducibility badge by making datasets and code available (authors will be contacted to make their artifacts available after paper acceptance)

Special Session chairs

• Nalini Venkatasubramanian, University of CA Irvin, USA
• Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Anupam Das, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Valérie Issarny, INRIA, France

Scope & goals

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is slowly transforming different areas of human life, involving sectors such as transportation, health, energy, and safety. Over the recent years several IoT deployments and testbeds have been proposed to create new smart infrastructures (e.g., buildings, transportation networks, energy delivery, water and wastewater management) and address specific societal needs through services (e.g., healthcare, public safety and emergency response). Such smart infrastructures and applications enable cities to not only reduce costs and resource consumption but also improve governance and quality of life for residing citizens. Devices embedded in these smart infrastructures capture multimodal information of varying types that differ in scale, volume and semantics - audiovisual information at varying quality levels from cameras and microphones, environmental data from air quality sensors, weather stations, satellite images etc. and personalized data from body-worn devices. The multimodal nature of the information being captured by IoT devices today lends itself to new challenges in multiple dimensions at the information and system levels.

Driven by the concept that IoT testbeds are at the heart of building upcoming smart cities, a key question that arises as these IoT testbeds scale in size and sophistication is how to leverage this new and diverse big data to address all the real world challenges for building smart cities. The testbeds vary significantly in the devices they use, the data/information generated and used and the network/communication technologies they leverage. A variety of old and new communication technologies (such as 5G, WLAN, SIGFOX/LoRa, Zigbee, SDN, gateways) and infrastructure technologies (such as data center clouds, fog computing and edge platforms) are being brought together to operate simultaneously in a coordinated fashion to realize the novel applications. The resulting heterogeneity and capabilities present new opportunities, but create significant complexity and new challenges. Security and privacy also become inevitable requirements not only for personal safety, but also for assuring the sustainability of the ubiquitous city.

This special session addresses recent technologies and latest advances, their benefits and challenges with an aim toward establishing a forum for exchanging ideas, thoughts and contributions to creating the computing, data and communication infrastructure for next generation multimodal IoT systems as well as the reliability, performance, security and privacy challenges that emerge from deploying such IoT systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Novel architectures, protocols, algorithms for multimodal end-to-end IoT systems to orchestrate smart cities
• Technology fusion, multimedia data fusion and information fusion for smart cities
• Novel IoT communication platforms and access technologies
• Software defined infrastructures for end-to-end systems
• Interoperability of IoT communication technologies
• Middleware technologies for IoT systems and applications
• Theoretical modeling and frameworks for IoT environments
• IoT applications and testbeds
• Data processing, analysis and management for smart cities
• Virtual reality for smart cities
• Sensing and aggregation of multimodal data in smart city cloud
• QoE/QoS in IoT multimedia services for smarter city
• Case studies, real solutions, designs and implementations of smart cities
• Security and privacy frameworks for IoT-based smart cities
• Innovative techniques for IoT infrastructure security

Papers should be between six and twelve pages long (in PDF format) including references prepared in the ACM style and written in English. Hence MMSys papers enable authors to present entire multimedia systems or research work that builds on considerable amounts of earlier work in a self-contained manner. MMSys papers are published in the ACM Digital Library; they are available for just as long as journal papers and authors should not feel compelled by space limitations to publish extended works on top of an MMSys paper. Authors who submit very specific, detailed research work are encouraged to use less than 12 pages. The papers are double-blind reviewed.