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Personal fabrication is celebrating technological break-throughs that will enable us to easily generate new physical forms and shapes. It democratizes the capability of building physical things and may usher in the era of physical natives. Stefanie Mueller and Patrick Baudisch critically review the state of the art and speculate on the future use and users of personal fabrication, while highlighting corresponding research challenges for the HCI community.

As the adoption of Federated Learning (FL) in the manufacturing industry grows and systems get increasingly complex, a need to inspect their behavior arises. Stakeholders of the FL process want a more transparent system to understand the current state and analyze how its performance changed over time. However, current representation approaches are often not designed for industrial applications and do not cover the entire FL model lifecycle. We propose the Lifecycle Dashboard, which considers the different requirements and perspectives of industrial stakeholders by visualizing information from the FL server. In addition, our representation approach is generic enough to be applied to different use cases and industries. We evaluate the Lifecycle Dashboard in a semi-structured expert interview, show improvements in the understandability of FL systems, and discuss possible use cases in the industry.

The two articles in this special section represent ongoing Internet of Things applications in the context of Europe trying to make solutions usable to people in daily times.

The articles in this special section illustrates the wide range of ways in which pervasive fabrication technologies can contribute to producing physical artifacts that fulfill user needs in a more tailored and customized way than today’s mass production does. At the same time, they provide a glimpse of the future, where technology-informed and technology enabled making can address physical needs individually.

Computing evolution has brought about multiple paradigm shifts in how we use technologies. In the living laboratory that is modern life, our ability to design and control the computers and computing power of the future will require an ability to program systems and applications in situ and in vivo.

For a long time, the Internet of Things initiative was driven by academics—developing embedded hardware, sensing algorithms, network protocols, software frameworks, applications, business scenarios, and interaction paradigms. Only recently industrial stakeholders realized the unparalleled potential of these technologies, instigating a paradigm shift that we refer to as the fourth industrial revolution. However, as this shift starts entering the mainstream and disrupting a multitude of business dynamics, it also uncovered myriads of challenges—some are technical, some are political, and some are ethical. In this special issue, together with our guest authors, we focus our attention on some of the daunting system development challenges in bringing bleeding-edge Internet of Things (IoTs) technologies to the real world. Each of the five articles featured in this issue tackles unique challenges associated with the deployment of real-world IoT systems.

Today, many areas in the Alps, despite the high altitude and distance from urbanized environments, offer ubiquitous mobile phone and data connectivity, with 3G networks widely available. Many skiing resorts have recognized their users' desire for connectivity, and some even provide free Wi-Fi hotspots at cable car stations and restaurants. Furthermore, increased connectivity and other advance in pervasive computing have led to new products and services aimed at enhancing the user experience for skiers.

Florian Michahelles posted an online survey with questions about the meaning of IoT, who is in control, what's in store for jobs, and whether IoT is good or evil. Learn how readers responded to these questions.

The EPC Network is a global RFID data sharing infrastructure based on standards that are built around the Electronic Product Code (EPC), an unambiguous numbering scheme for the designation of physical goods. The authors present the fundamental concepts and applications of the EPC Network, its integration with enterprise systems, and its functionality for data exchange between organizations in the supply chain.

RFID technology tracks the flow of physical items and goods in supply chains to help users detect inefficiencies, such as shipment delays, theft, or inventory problems. An inevitable consequence, however, is that it generates huge numbers of events. To exploit these large amounts of data, the Supply Chain Visualizer increases supply-chain visibility by analyzing RFID data, using a mix of automated analysis techniques and human effort. The tool's core concepts include rule-based analysis techniques and a map-based representation interface. With these features, it lets users visualize the supply-chain structure, together with performance metrics, and detect problematic hot spots.

Product authentication is needed to detect counterfeit products and to prevent them from entering the distribution channels of genuine products. Security is a critical property of product authentication systems. In this paper, we study trust and security in RFID-based product authentication systems. We first present a formal definition for product authentication process and then derive the general chain of trust as well as functional and nonfunctional security requirements for product authentication. Most of the scientific literature that covers the topic focuses on cryptographic tag authentication only. This paper, however, provides a broader view including also other known approaches, most notably location-based authentication. To derive the functional security requirements, we employ the concept of misuse cases that extends the use case paradigm well known in the field of requirements engineering. We argue that the level of security of any RFID-based product authentication application is determined by how it fulfills the derived set of functional and nonfunctional requirements. The security of different RFID-based product authentication approaches is analyzed. To study how RFID supports secure product authentication in practice, we investigate how the current EPC standards conform to the functional security requirements of product authentication and show how the unaddressed requirements could be fulfilled. The benefits of implementing a service that detects the cloned tags in the level of the network's core services are identified.

At the Pervasive Technology Applied workshop (part of Pervasive 2006), practitioners and researchers discussed how to bridge the gap between academic research and the practical hurdles in pervasive technology. The wide range of submissions demonstrated the great potential of applied pervasive technologies. In the emerging discussions, participants highlighted the most important technical and cooperation issues.

We conducted a project with professional skiers and their trainers in which we used wearable sensors to improve the trainer-athlete relationship by helping them share their observations and impressions. In particular, we analyzed which sensors reveal important features describing the athlete's motions. Visualization software shows the athletes' movements by overlaying and synchronizing a video stream with sensor data. A system based on wearable sensors and video recording can reveal information about a skier's motions, helping trainers identify the skier's strengths and weaknesses.

Ubiquitous computing technologies enable new in situ data-collection opportunities that can reveal insights into mobile users' behaviors and preferences.

Smart-Its are self-contained, stick-on computers that attach to everyday objects. These augmented objects become soft media, enabling dynamic digital relationships with users and each other. In the Smart-Its project, we are developing technology to realize a vision of computation everywhere, where computer technology seamlessly integrates into everyday life, supporting users in their daily tasks. By embedding sensors, computation, and communication into common artifacts, future computing applications can adapt to human users rather than the other way around. However, it's currently difficult to develop this type of ubiquitous computing because of the lack of toolkits integrating both the required hardware and software. Therefore, we are creating a class of small computers - called Smart-Its - equipped with wireless communication and sensors to make it possible to create smart artifacts with little overhead.

Welcome to this inaugural department focused on the Internet of Things! Learn how IoT got started, what's ahead, and how IoT News can help you stay on top of emerging developments in this growing field as it moves beyond its visionary promises.