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Interview with Edward Lee (Professor, UC Berkeley) Speaker at Global IoT Conference April 2018 Posted on : Mar 12 - 2018

We feature speakers at Global IoT Conference - April 2 - 4 2018 - Santaclara - CA to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Edward Lee (Professor, UC Berkeley) Topic - "A Component Architecture For IoT"

 

Interview with Edward Lee

 

 

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.

I have been working on embedded software systems for 40 years, and after detours through Yale, MIT, and Bell Labs, landed at Berkeley, where I am
now Professor in the Graduate School and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor Emeritus in EECS. My research is focused on cyber-physical systems, and I strive to make the Internet of Things suitable for Important Things. I work with industry through our iCyPhy (Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems) Research Center (http://icyphy.org).

2.  What have you been working on recently?

My focus is on composable, secure, multi-vendor, and timing sensitive IoT systems and on the foundations of cyber-physical systems.


3. Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?

My research group has been developing an open-source framework for IoT and a development tool called CapeCode (see http://accessors.org).

4. Where are we now today in terms of the state of IoT, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?


The landscape is chaotic with a great deal of innovation. I believe we are in the midst of a rapid Darwinian coevolution of humans and technology, as humans learn and adapt our culture to integrate connected things, and inventors flood the landscape with ideas and products, most of which will fail to survive. I have written about this coevolution in a recent popular-press book. See http://platoandthenerd.org.

5. What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your talk?


Standardizing API-level over-the-wire protocols is cumbersome and unnecessary. Heterogeneous, multi-vendor IoT systems can be more effectively integrated using a web-like architecture, where a generic host (akin to a browser, but for Things rather than people) can instantiate and execute proxies for remote services and Things (akin to web pages with scripts, but again, for Things to talk to Things and services, not for people to talk to services).

6. What is the role of open source software?

The potential for IoT spans across entire industries, covering an astonishing breadth of architectures, traditions, and constraints. Any vendor focusing on stovepiped integrated solutions will fail in the
competitive marketplace. Open standards with open-source software realizations are the only proven way to integrate industries with such broad scope.