The 2024 Warren B. Nelms Annual IoT Conference was held Dec. 5–6 in the heart of the University of Florida campus. Organized along the theme of ‘Secure and Intelligent Internet of Things for Solving Global Problems,’ the conference successfully brought together thought leaders and researchers from academia, industry, and government to explore the current state of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and its convergence with artificial intelligence (AI).
The Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World works to advance research, education, and outreach in all core aspects of IoT and AI. The institute’s mission focuses on developing groundbreaking IoT technologies and innovative applications to address pressing global challenges in diverse areas including healthcare, transportation, agriculture, education, and energy, transforming our industry and our lives. With that goal in mind, “the conference was organized to connect students and faculty, industry and government participants, and inspiring leaders from different sectors,” said Dr. Swarup Bhunia, General Conference Chair and Director of the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World.
More than 300 attendees and 25 invited speakers filled the NVIDIA Auditorium in Malachowsky Hall over the two-day event. In addition to attendees from 15 universities, representatives from more than 30 different companies and government agencies were in attendance. Participating organizations included Intel, Siemens, L3Harris, NVIDIA, RTX Technologies, Mercury Systems, Riverside Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army, the Air Force Research Lab, and NIST.
Conference sponsors included the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, IEEE Section 3, the UF Office of Research, and the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World.
Program
The conference featured an exciting agenda with five keynote talks, twelve visionary talks, two panel discussions, nine faculty signature research talks, and a local industry roundtable discussion. The talks, delivered by experts from around the country, covered a wide variety of IoT and AI topics and their impacts across healthcare, defense, manufacturing, security, construction, energy systems, and more. Central to many of the discussions was the idea of pushing the bounds of AI and IoT and improving safety, security, scalability, and efficiency of the smart IoT systems that are increasingly deployed in all spheres of our society. Many speakers addressed challenges in the emergent field of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), which integrates intelligent data analysis and decision-making capability with IoT end-point devices, and highlighted the need for specialized workforce development in this burgeoning field.
Opening remarks were delivered by Sachio Semmoto Endowed Chair of ECE Dr. Mark Tehranipoor on day one and Interim Dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering (HWCOE) Dr. Forrest Masters on day two.
Student Activities
Two notable sessions of the conference were the student demo and poster competitions. Talented students from University of Florida and other participating universities from the southeast region showcased 25 demos and more than 80 posters to conference attendees. Six winners were selected by the industry and government judges in each session. Many of these are included in the gallery below.
“The student demo and poster sessions were highlights of our program,” said Dr. Bhunia. “These sessions are invaluable in providing students with a platform to present their research to a broad audience of government representatives and industry leaders and receive their feedback. This opportunity not only helps our students refine their communication skills but also fosters important connections with the IoT technology leaders that can drive their future endeavors and innovations.”
The Best Demo Award went to F1Tenth Autonomous Driving, which demonstrated an autonomous car’s ability to drive around a non-predetermined track, map it, and create an optimal racing line. The second and third place winners were PLASMA: Platoon Security Against Multi-Channel Perception Adversaries, and Energy-Efficient, High-Security Body Area Network Enabled by Human Body Communication. Receiving Honorable Mentions were Exploring the Underwater Frontier with CavePI, Wearable Sensor System for Scapular Motion Monitoring, and LATENT: Leveraging Automated Test Pattern Generation for Hardware Trojan Detection.
The Best Poster award was given to ML Model Extraction Attacks on IoT Devices: Strategies, Challenges and Defenses for Industry Applications, which showed state-of-the-art model extraction attacks and defense and their practical limitations. The second and third place winners were Zero-shot Safety Prediction for Autonomous Robots with Foundation World Models, and Exploring the Underwater Frontier with CavePI. Receiving Honorable Mentions were Enabling Decentralized Privacy-Preserving FL for Edge Computing, Language-Enhanced Latent Representations for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Autonomous Driving, and Bridging Dimensions: Confident Reachability for High-Dimensional Controllers.
Future Plans
The 2024 Warren B. Nelms Annual IoT Conference was the event’s second edition, with the first one having been successfully organized in 2019. The Warren B. Nelms Institute leaders intend to host this conference annually, with the next conference to be held next winter. They plan to scale-up the 2025 event to feature more efforts from the Southeast Region of the United States and an even wider scope of IoT and AI topics.
“We are encouraged by the overwhelming positive feedback we had from this year’s conference,” said Dr. My T. Thai, General Conference Chair and Associate Director of the Warren B. Nelms Institute. “We are thrilled to resume hosting the conference annually to bring new opportunities to our students to share research to a larger audience, and foster innovation and collaboration in the IoT community.”
