The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI) is a premier venue on IoT. In 2023, IoTDI will be held for the 8th time, and will be part of CPS-IoT Week 2023, in San Antonio, TX.

New in 2023: The Internet of Things has changed! Over the last decade, significant and exciting advances in the research landscape have redefined the vision, frontiers, and challenges of IoT research. In 2023, we re-imagine the conference to reflect these fast-paced advances. While all historic IoT topics remain definitely welcome, we would like to draw special attention to the following five growth areas that have recently reshaped our field (in particular, since the emergence of this conference):

Machine learning, and emergence of edge AI: In the last decade, advances in AI/ML have revolutionized many fields. In IoT, where distributed applications run on limited edge-hardware and interact with physical context, this meant new challenges, such as reducing the resource footprint of AI/ML, model complexity reduction, improved latency/quality trade-offs, novel neural network architectures for the edge, prioritization of machine attention, early exit neural networks, federated learning, data augmentation (for IoT data modalities), embedding multimodal data, (physical world) representation learning, learning in the frequency domain, semantic IoT data compression, edge-cloud load balancing, resilience, privacy, and many more. Those topics are becoming central to the future smart IoT.

The emergence of AR/VR and metaverse-inspired research: Very recently, large corporations, such as Facebook, have invested in a new type of digital connected world, where people, things, and algorithms seamlessly interact. Their investments redefine what a future Internet of Things might look like. Novel challenges in realizing this futuristic vision include low-power compute platforms for augmented reality, ability to build high-fidelity digital twins, high fidelity simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), platforms for data collection for ML, low-latency display systems for AR. We call for original contributions that address these challenges.

The proliferation of digital twins for networked “things”: Popularized by NASA’s attempts to improve physical-model simulation, and re-introduced into recent visions of future social connectivity, such as the metaverse, digital twins are envisioned to become commonplace for a growing majority of future network physical things. Challenges in maintaining them include ultra low-latency interfaces, data synchronization, low-resource operation, edge-cloud coordination, and applications in both industrial and social contexts.

The exponential growth of machine-generated data: The proliferation of IoT devices and machine-generated data have created a world where data volume grows exponentially (by more than an order of magnitude per decade). What does that imply for the network and back-end architecture of future IoT applications, from industrial to social? What future data services are needed to support IoT systems? What is the impact on storage, access, and other data needs, such as semantic summarization? In short, what back-end challenges are introduced by the IoT data explosion?

IoT Security: The IoT offers novel security challenges. It is a backdoor for unwanted manipulation of physical things. Its scale has recently enabled massive botnets to fuel many high-profile DDoS attacks. Its protection, nevertheless, is not straightforward due to the significant resource limits of individual devices. In the US (among other nations), the Department of Homeland Security prioritized addressing the challenge of securing the IoT to prevent threats to physical infrastructure and public safety. IoTDI recognizes security as a core research problem in the IoT space.

In addition to the above emphasized areas, the conference remains a venue for exchange of ideas on a broad range of other IoT topics motivated by a world, where the boundaries between cyber, physical, and social realms are blurred, smart cities grow, fed by millions of data points from multitudes of human and physical sources, machine intelligence algorithms extract value for a growing list of novel applications, cyber-attacks become more nefarious as digital connectivity exposes physical vulnerabilities, and novel social media platform concepts seamlessly integrate humans, avatars, physical devices, and digital twins, redefining what an Internet of connected “things” looks like. Collectively, these developments continue to shape our quickly evolving field. This conference remains an interdisciplinary forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to discuss challenges, technologies, and emerging directions in IoT system design and implementation. This conference invites original, previously unpublished work on a range of IoT topics, broadly defined. These topics include but are not limited to:

    Emphasized Topic: Machine learning and edge AI for IoT
    Emphasized Topic: AR/VR and metaverse-inspired challenges
    Emphasized Topic: Digital twins for networked things
    Emphasized Topic: Handling exponential growing (IoT) data
    Emphasized Topic: IoT Security
    Continued Topics:
        Analytic foundations and theory of IoT
        Reliability, security, timeliness, and robustness in IoT systems
        Novel protocols and network abstractions
        IoT for extreme environments (e.g., space/satellite, air, and underwater)
        Low power IoT architectures
        Data streaming architectures and AI/ML analytics for IoT
        IoT-motivated cyber-physical and Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems
        Novel quality requirements and their enforcement mechanisms
        Energy/Power Management and Harvesting for IoT Platforms
        Privacy considerations in IoT
        Cloud back-ends and resource management for IoT applications
        Edge and fog computing
        Network protocols for IoT: Low-power WAN, LoRa, NB-IoT, 5G/6G
        Personal, wearable, and other embedded networked front-ends
        Applications domains (e.g., smart cities, smart health, smart buildings, smart transportation)
        Deployment experiences, case studies, and lessons learned

For papers reporting results based on experiments with human subjects, appropriate ethics approvals should be demonstrated as part of the submission.

Accepted papers will be submitted for inclusion into IEEE Xplore subject to meeting IEEE Xplore’s scope and quality requirements.

New in 2023: Best papers from IoTDI 2023 will be fast-tracked to a special issue of the IEEE Internet of Things Journal (h5-index: 144 according to Google Scholar. Impact factor: 10.2 according to JCR 2022).

IoTDI collaborates closely with the IPSN conference, given the proximity in research themes (both related to IoT) and the co-location in CPS-IoT Week. We provide submission guidelines to aid prospective authors with the conference venue selection.