2nd Cloud of Things workshop (CoT'14)

The next wave of Internet applications, will move beyond managing data to empower people to interact with the physical world which forms the essential fabric of our lives. It promises to facilitate connecting everything in a person’s life from bathroom scales through cookers to cars (facilitating smart-homes and cities), through environmental sensing (enabling government, company and citizen led enterprises) all of which have the potential to have a massive impact on society as a whole. There are formidable challenges in delivering this vision that vary from technology to sociology and political issues. The key technology enablers of this new wave of internet applications are the Internet of Things, Web services, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Environments and embedded computing which are often research as separate topics. In order to provide an opportunity for researchers from the often diverse research communities involved to meet and explore research synergy, we have organized this workshop which we have labelled the “Cloud of Things“. Concerning financial drivers, some estimates suggests that this market could be worth between 22 billion and 50 billion dollars (made up of some 16 billion connected devices) by 2020. These figures seem plausible as there are already said to be of the order of 8 billion embedded-processors and around 1 billion smart phones produced each year, Thus, we believe this workshop is timely and invite you to join us in beautiful Shanghai this summer to discuss the opportunities for research that this these exciting developments offer.