Professor Rich Wolski of UCSB CS

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly approaching technological change that envisions ubiquitous and network-accessible digital instrumentation and actuation of literally every "thing" we encounter in everyday life. Like the World Wide Web (now simply called The Internet) before it, IoT will likely represent another societal sea change as objects in the physical world become network-enabled so that they can communicate and interact with people and, autonomously, with each other.

This technological vision also carries with it significant new challenges. With estimates of between 50 billion and 1 trillion network-connected IoT devices in the next 20 years, the energy efficiency of these devices and the network technologies that interconnect them is paramount to their utility. Moreover, the current Internet architecture, which is evolving to accommodate cloud computing, will require substantial additional innovation and augmentation before IoT will come to complete fruition.

In this talk, we will discuss some of the computer science research questions that have grown from early experiences in architecting and deploying working IoT systems and infrastructure. In particular, the talk will focus on a potentially new approach to software infrastructure that is designed to meet many of the current and future IoT challenges.To save power, reduce network latency, and ease network congestion, devices export data and actuation services that are accessed by applications running in the cloud. "Flipping" the current Internet architecture in this way, with services at the extreme edge of the network and applications running at the core (i.e., in the cloud), requires a new technological approach that creates a Software Platform of Things -- SPOT -- spanning devices, computing elements located at the edge (e.g., edge clouds), and traditional cloud data centers.

Biography:

Dr. Rich Wolski is a Professor of Computer Science at UCSB, where he holds the Duval Presidential Chair in Energy Efficiency. Having received his MS and PhD degrees from UC Davis (while a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at UC San Diego, University of Tennessee, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Wolski has led several national-scale research efforts in the area of distributed systems and is the progenitor of the Eucalyptus open source cloud project.