News Story

Future Internet Symposium (FIS 2008)

John Domingue, Monday 6 Oct 2008

We are now at the start of an exciting new venture – designing a new planetary scale network to meet todayï¿½s industrial and societal needs. The first Future Internet Symposium (FIS 2008) which was held in Vienna, 28-30 September, provided a forum for leading researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss the wide-ranging scientific and technical issues related to the design of a new Internet. FIS 2008 covered topics related to the requirements that a Future Internet must satisfy: an Internet of Things, where every electronic device will be an active participant in the network; an Internet of Services, where applications live in the network, and data becomes an active entity; an Internet of Content and Media, where most of the content is generated by end-users; an Internet of Publicity, Privacy and Anonymity, where people and software must understand how much trust to extend to others; an Internet of Mobility and Ubiquity, where connectivity everywhere is expected, and depended upon. All these nascent Internets, and the others that we have yet to imagine, require further research activity, especially at the interdisciplinary boundaries where opportunities lie and problems lurk. FIS 2008 provided the first open forum for discussions on these cross-domain topics to occur. Attendees from academia, industry and public funding bodies came to engage in a programme which contained two prestigious Keynotes: Dr. Joï¿½o da Silva, Director of the Network and Communication DG-INFSO; and Dr. Alexander Hauptmann from Carnegie Mellon University. Our Invited Speakers included: Dr. Michael Brodie (Chief Scientist of Verizon Services Operations); Dr. Stephan Haller (Senior Researcher at SAP Research); Prof. Fabio Massacci (University of Trento) and Dr. Jaap Gordijn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Additionally, FIS 2008 hosted two full day workshops and three tutorials, as well as a meeting of the NESSI Semantics Working Group. FIS 2008 follows on from the Future Internet Conference which was held in Bled, Slovenia at the end of March and will be followed by the Future Internet Assembly held in conjunction with Service Wave in the second week of December.