Special Session on Emerging Social Internet of Things (SIoT)

The concept of Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has emerged from the integration of social networking into the core of the Internet of Things. It envisions objects and devices to have social relationships with each other autonomously, cooperate with other agents, and exchange information with human users and surrounding computing devices. These objects are able to sense/actuate, store, and interpret information in an opportunistic and loosely-coupled fashion. The objects in SIoT paradigm can exhibit different forms of relationships, such as the one established due to the relationship between the object owners; the relationship among the objects of a particular owner; and the relationship that are formed among the co-located objects. The social interaction among the SIoT objects contribute a huge volume of data to be processed and used by various applications such as social VANET, social connected health, SioT-based recommendation service, traffic service, policing, energy management etc. in the area of Smart Cities, Smart Homes, Smart Grid, and Smart Factories to satisfy human needs, interests, and objectives. Such a dynamic landscape with billions of social community of objects and devices requires new models, theories and approaches of interaction and collaboration based on the experience people have already gained in social networking domain over the past few years.

Despite all the possibilities offered by SIoT, there are several critical challenges that need further attention from the industry and research community. Until now, it remains unclear how to efficiently address the application of social concepts into the IoT paradigm, how to discover and utilize SIoT services and applications, how to handle complex interactions in dynamic SIoT environment, how to perceive a social object’s autonomy, and how to handle the darker aspects of SIoT such as privacy and security issues, and so on.