Virtual Things for Machine Learning Applications

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, especially sensors are producing large quantities of data that can be used for gathering knowledge. In this field, machine learning technologies are increasingly used to build versatile data-driven models. In this paper, we present a novel architecture able to execute machine learning algorithms within the sensor network, presenting advantages in terms of privacy and data transfer efficiency. We first argument that some classes of machine learning algorithms are compatible with this approach, namely based on the use of generative models that allow a distribution of the computation on a set of nodes. We then detail our architecture proposal, leveraging on the use of Web-of-Things technologies to ease integration into networks. The convergence of machine learning generative models and Web-of-Things paradigms leads us to the concept of virtual things exposing higher level knowledge by exploiting sensor data in the network. Finally, we demonstrate with a real scenario the feasibility and performances of our proposal.