Keynotes

In addition to scientific papers, the MSWiM 2026 program includes distinguished Keynote Speakers.


Title: Rethinking IoT Programmability: From Things to Generative Smart Spaces

Prof Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal, PhD,
University of Bologna


Abstract: The Internet of Things has inspired compelling visions of intelligent homes, hospitals, cities, and environments. Yet a fundamental question remains 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 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. The central lesson is that there are no shortcuts to IoT programmability: the architecture, semantics, and capabilities of Things 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, and user 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.

Short Bio: 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 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: helal@acm.org

Title: Non-Coherent MIMO communications: from massive to cell-free

Prof. Ana García Armada,
Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, Spain


Abstract: In this talk we will introduce the concept of non-coherent communications and explain why it is a good time for its combination with massive multiple input – multiple output (MIMO), in view of the trends and requirements of mobile communications towards a new generation. In particular, we will see that high mobility and range are challenges not well solved with current technologies. Then, the fundamentals of differential modulation-based approaches will be explained followed by a review of practical aspects, such as their combination with current waveforms (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing – OFDM) or beamforming. Multi-user constellations to multiplex several users on the same time-frequency resources, the performance in more realistic Rician channels and the extension to cell-free massive MIMO will be also explained.

Short Bio: Ana García Armada is a Professor at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, where she is leading the Communications Research Group. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Bell Labs and University of Southampton. She is an IEEE Fellow. She has published more than 300 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and she holds seven granted patents, all related to wireless communications. She was awarded the third place Bell Labs Prize 2014 for shaping the future of information and communications technology. She has received the Outstanding service award from the IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing and Communications Electronics technical, the Outstanding service award from the IEEE ComSoc Women in Communications Engineering Standing Committee, and the IEEE ComSoc/KICS Exemplary Global Service Award.