Anticipating Future IoT Developments from 2024 Initiatives and Insights

In this final post summarizing interviews with experts across the IoT spectrum we focus on research and development topics that are shaping the long-term roadmap for applications, innovation, and standardization.

We begin with a March 2024 interview with Professor Marcos Katz of the University of Oulu (Finland). After introducing his research activities in the IoT arena, he described SUPERIOT, a Horizon Europe project that he is currently leading. His group also has an interest in sustainability. He explains why telecommunications organizations need to look beyond energy consumption and approach sustainability in holistic terms. In his mind, IoT is the perfect technology to work on sustainability outcomes.

In April 2024, oneM2M interviewed, Andreas Kraft about his career in Deutsche Telekom (Germany) and his involvement in oneM2M’s technical standardization activities. He offers an historical perspective on IoT standardization and sets the stage about future developments and the importance of educating and training students and developers across the world. Andreas sees plenty of opportunity and much more innovation to come as the world moves from IoT 1.0 to IoT 2.0.

N. KISHOR NARANG who is based in Inda and active in national and international standardization initiatives was our interviewee in July 2024. ?Mr. Narang is a technology philanthropist and veteran ICT engineer. His is passionate about energy efficiency, sustainability, and cyber-security in shared digital infrastructure. His reflections cover India’s ‘leapfrogging’ opportunity and characteristics of the indigenous market that require local strategies to drive IoT and ‘smart’ technology adoption. Achieving these goals calls for common standards that are application-domain and use-case agnostic across the Digital Infrastructure Architecture – from Devices to Apps."

In August, oneM2M interviewed the renowned industry expert, Rob van Kranenburg .? Based in Europe, he is a veteran of the IoT industry and founder of the IoT Council. Rob describes his first encounter with IoT concepts and how they transformed his world outlook and career path. He also talks about why it is important for the IoT community to address policy challenges as much as cybersecurity and technology ones.

Our final industry-shaping interview involved Laura Daniele of TNO (Netherlands). The setting for our discussion was a workshop that the European Commission (EC) organized on the topic of ''Enhancing IoT Semantic Interoperability by SAREF for Digital Twins''. The workshop focused on the applicability of the Smart Applications REFerence (SAREF) ontology to the emerging field of digital twins. SAREF is a framework that enables smart device interoperability in IoT ecosystems. The reason why ontologies have a bearing on practical applications stems from the added value of cross stakeholder communications. That is why consumer appliance manufacturers, building managers and smart grid stakeholders want to learn about exchanging information collaboratively between connected devices, platforms and systems as well as across operational processes.