Title: System Abstractions for the Internet of Things
Speaker: Silvery Fu
Date: December 12, 2024
Time: 12:30 – 1:30 pm

Abstract:

Three decades ago, Mark Weiser envisioned a future where technology seamlessly integrates into our daily lives. Today, our living spaces – homes, offices, and retail locations – are being transformed by the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Yet, we still face challenges in fully realizing Weiser’s vision. Current smart space apps remain confined to siloed domains and narrow use cases, while big data systems lack effective methods for handling the new class of data sources presented by IoT.

In this talk, I will discuss the design of a system framework for building data-intensive applications that harness these ubiquitous data sources. First, I will introduce the digi interface, an intuitive and powerful abstraction for expressing and composing data processing logic over physical-world data. Second, I will present Jut, a mechanism that enables just-in-time data integration between digis, and Zed, a self-describing data model for efficient representation and analytics of heterogeneous digi data. Third, I will describe how these abstractions can be implemented with Knactor, a microservice-based, Kubernetes-compatible runtime, allowing digis to easily deploy and scale on cloud and edge infrastructure. I will demonstrate how the framework supports a representative set of real-world data applications with significantly less development effort and how it makes these applications easier to manage and interoperate.