TIPPERS is an IoT data management middleware system developed at UCI that manages IoT smart spaces by collecting sensor data, inferring semantically meaningful information, and providing developers with data for intelligent applications.

(Don’t) Mind the Gap: Bridging the Worlds of People and IoT Devices

Dr. Roberto Yus
University of California, Irvine

1:00-2:00 pm ET, Tuesday, 23 March 2021
online via WebEx

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to improve our lives through different services given the diversity of smart devices and their capabilities. For example, the IoT can empower services to make the re-opening of business during the current pandemic safer by monitoring adherence to regulations. But the large amounts of highly heterogeneous data captured by IoT devices typically require further processing to become useful information. The challenge is thus for IoT systems to determine which sensor data has to be captured/stored/processed/shared to, for instance, determine the occupancy of a specific office building or the spaces in which a potential exposure took place. This becomes even more challenging when IoT systems have to take into account the privacy preferences of individuals, such as the need to prevent sharing data about their daily patterns or habits.

In this talk, I will discuss my efforts into helping IoT systems bridge the gap between the world of IoT devices and the world where people act. First, I will introduce a model to represent knowledge about sensors/actuators, people, spaces, events, and their relationships. Based on the model, I will explain an algorithmic solution to translate user requests and privacy preferences defined in a high-level, more semantically meaningful way into operations on IoT devices and their captured data. Second, I will talk about the enforcement of privacy preferences in the context of the IoT. Finally, I will overview my experience building and deploying an IoT data management system, TIPPERS, which has been deployed at UC Irvine and two US Navy vessels and is soon to be deployed on other campuses. I will conclude the talk by discussing the exciting future work opportunities towards supporting the next generation of ubiquitous IoT data management systems and technologies that autonomously, transparently, and at scale, balance the trade-off between providing users with high utility and respecting people’s privacy requirements.

Roberto Yus is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Science department at the University of California, Irvine working with Prof. Sharad Mehrotra. Before that, he spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County working with Prof. Anupam Joshi and Prof. Tim Finin. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Zaragoza, Spain, funded through a 4-year fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. His research interests are in the fields of data management, knowledge representation, privacy, and the Internet of Things (IoT). His research focuses on the design of semantic data management solutions to empower IoT systems to understand user information requirements and user privacy preferences and adapt their operations taking those into account. Roberto’s research has been published in top-tier conferences and journals such as VLDB and the Journal of Web Semantics. He is part of the editorial board of the “Sensors” and “Frontiers in Big Data” journals and has served as part of the organizing and program committee of several conferences and workshops in addition to serving as an external reviewer for multiple conferences and journals.