COMPUTING FOR THE CLOUD AND INTERNET OF THINGS

Course Description

The term Cloud has long been used as a metaphor for the Internet. Servers connected to the Cloud provide data and/or computing services to authorized clients using standard protocols. The Cloud conceals a complex infrastructure which makes it relatively easy to develop client and the server applications that can be deployed anywhere geographically with high availability.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects, devices, vehicles, buildings and other items which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data. Cloud computing is a natural evolution of network computing, and encompasses many broad computing paradigms: distributed, grid, utility, on-demand, open source; Web services; P2P; Web 2.0, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS). Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. IoT is the next step in the evolution of Computing where advances in Cloud and communication technologies will lead to billions of smart objects to connect to the Internet. IoT enables an exchange of data and services never available before and in a more secure way. Lead by industry giants Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google and Amazon designing IoT standards and interface specifications and infrastructure for both open and closed eco-systems and hardware vendors such as TI, Intel, Nvidia offering micro controllers and SDKs we already have a proliferation of smart IoT devices. The revolution is still at its infancy, yet about to explode.

This is a variable-unit, advanced, hands-on course. The course will start with lecture style covering of the evolutionary foundations of cloud computing and then focus on the emerging IoT specifications, infrastructures and security technologies to build IoT devices, covering the still evolving state-of-the-art practices, tools, languages, protocols, infrastructures used for building IoT solutions. Guest speakers from industry and academia will cover various topics and technologies in the field. Additional focus will be placed on security, authentication and hardware architectures as it relates to internet of things.

Each student will work on a research paper or project and will receive 4-6 units based on the extent of work.