IoT (Internet of Things) is the next big transformational change that is and will impact our life be it as consumers or employees. IoT influences the life of every one on this planet, by instrumenting and connecting our homes, cars, offices, etc. we are enabling to collect huge amounts of data about every aspect of our life. With Cognitive computing / AI we are able to understand this data and reason about it and gain insights, that we as humans can't gain by ourselves due to the huge number of data sources and vast quantity. In this talk we will present some of the most difficult research challenges IBM Research is tackling to enable this new era. These challenges span from the IoT platform capabilities (e.g., scale to hundred of millions of connected devices), starting from the edge (e.g., wearables, Arduiono boards, etc.) all the way to the Cloud, utilizing in some scenarios Blockchain technology, making sure we have and e2e secure connectivity. Finally we shall describe some novel industry solutions for buildings, industry 4.0, Insurance, Automotive and Electronics.

Speaker: Gabi Zodik is the Director for IoT and MobileFirst Platforms in Research, as well as the Department Group Manager of the Mobile and Industry Solutions Dept. at IBM Haifa Research. He oversees the lab's research and development efforts in Mobile, IoT, Wearables, and emerging Cloud Computing platforms. In his IoT and MobileFirst global role, Gabi oversees all the research activities in IoT and Mobile platforms. Gabi is the Research relationship manager for MobileFirst and IoT platforms. He has an M.Sc. and B.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Technion, and an MBA from the University of Haifa.