The Internet-of-Things (IoT) revolution promises a future defined by pervasive computing. The integration of networked computers and everyday objects and artifacts creates new opportunities for entrepreneurship, innovative services, and efficiencies. The development of IoT, however, also creates significant resilience challenges. Creating a resilient IoT is an open and pressing challenge that calls for research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries and joins engineering, computer science, and the social sciences.

This project views the emerging IoT as a socio-technical system: a set of technologies and practices that are embedded within larger economic, legal, and political institutions. The embedded approach highlights the ways in which resilient IoT practices can be alternately supported or dampened by these larger currents. The proposed project convenes an interdisciplinary team of faculty and researchers from GRI and Northeastern University to investigate the ways in which resilient practices can be encouraged through technical innovation and institutional design. The project is both diagnostic and normative: it examines the current state of play —exploring why and how resilient IoT practices are or are not currently being adopted and deployed; and it investigates the sorts of technical and institutional changes that can help to achieve a resilient IoT.

Project Principal Investigators