A Roadmap to the Programmable World: Software Challenges in the IoT Era

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the next significant step in the evolution of the Internet and software development. Although most IoT research focuses on data acquisition, analytics, and visualization, a subtler but equally important transition is underway. Hardware advances are making it possible to embed fully fledged virtual machines and dynamic language runtimes virtually everywhere, leading to a Programmable World in which all our everyday things are connected and programmable dynamically. The emergence of millions of remotely programmable devices in our surroundings will pose significant software development challenges. A roadmap from today's cloud-centric, data-centric IoT systems to the Programmable World highlights the technical challenges that deserve to be part of developer education and deserve deeper investigation beyond those IoT topics that receive the most attention today.