Reprogramming the Internet of Things: From Things to Generative Smart Spaces

CSE Distinguished Seminar

Speaker: Professor Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal
Computer Science and Engineering Department
University of Bologna

Title: Reprogramming the Internet of Things: From Things to Generative Smart Spaces

Date: Monday, 5 October 2026

Time: 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater F (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater), near lift 25/26, HKUST

Abstract:

The Internet of Things has inspired compelling visions of intelligent homes, hospitals, cities, and environments. Yet a fundamental question remains largely unresolved: How do we actually program the IoT? Unlike conventional computers or cloud applications, the IoT is a dynamic computational environment whose components sense and act on the physical world, appear and disappear, expose different capabilities, and form opportune interactions that may not have been anticipated by their developers.

Our early work approached this problem from the bottom up. Service-Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) and the Atlas platform and middleware sought to make the Thing an explicit, self-describing, and programmable computational entity. This enabled service composition in smart spaces and motivated later work on self- and peer-conscious Things, collaborative microservice programmability, and transactional extensions for safer cyber-physical execution (IoTranx). The central lesson is that there are no shortcuts to IoT programmability: the architecture, semantics, and capabilities of Things themselves matter.

But making Things programmable is only half of the challenge. Future IoT environments will be too large, dynamic, and opportunistic for developers to manually anticipate every possible interaction. The next step is therefore to create IoT systems that can generate, organize, and understand their own interaction spaces.

After a quick preview of our SODA and Atlas journey, I will present two emerging directions toward this vision. The first is Generative MQTT (gMQTT), which introduces a generative broker-control plane capable of synthesizing and evolving MQTT-compatible topic spaces from semantic device descriptions, runtime context, user interactions, and/or application goals. Rather than assuming that topics, subscriptions, and routing structures are known in advance, gMQTT generates inspectable and verifiable broker configurations. Large language models serve a constrained semantic mediation role rather than directly controlling the physical environment.

The second direction, Sensor Language Modeling, asks whether the sensors of an intelligent environment may collectively be speaking their own language. Instead of treating sensor data only as numerical signals mapped to predefined activities, we view sensor events as words, temporal combinations as phrases and sentences, and longer sequences as narratives of the evolving smart space. By combining static device semantics with dynamic meanings learned from sensor behavior, foundation models may discover the vocabulary and grammar of intelligent environments.

Together, these directions point toward a future in which we explicitly architect the Things, while enabling the IoT to generate its interaction structures, learn the language of its environment, and ultimately be programmed at the level of intent.

Biography:

Abdelsalam Helal (aka: Sumi Helal) is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Bologna, Italy. Prior to joining the University of Bologna, he spent 26 years as associate and then full processor in the Computer & Information Science and Engineering Department at the University of Florida, USA. At University of Florida, he directed the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory, co-founded and directed the Gator Tech Smart House –a real-world deployment project that aimed at identifying key barriers and opportunities to make the Smart Home concept a common place (creating the "Smart Home in a Box" concept). His active areas of research focus on architectural and programmability aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), service-oriented and generative IoT architectures, IoT edge intelligence, and pervasive/ubiquitous systems and their human-centric applications, especially in the Digital Health area. Helal is also a technologist at heart who founded several successful ventures in the areas of IoT and Digital Health. His patents that came out of his research were licensed by the top multinational tech industry including Google, Apple, Samsung, Bosch, Siemens, IKEA, T-Mobile, Verizon, ATT, Nokia, Ericsson, among others. Helal is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, AAIA, IET, and a member of Academia Europaea. He is also a member of the US National Academy of Inventors. He can be contacted at: