Special Session Title: Energy harvesting for self-sustaining sensors.

Organizers: Sebastian Bader (MIUN, Sweden,Sebastian.Bader@miun.se) and Michele Magno (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, michele.magno@ethz.ch)

Description: This special session focuses on energy-harvesting, energy-neutral, transient and self-sustaining sensing systems. These are enabling technologies for future applications in the internet of things and smart sensing devices. The special session invites researchers to submit their work on innovative solutions in hardware for energy harvesting, energy efficient algorithms, power management policies, sensing systems powered by energy harvesting, and in particular deployments and implementation experiences.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Hardware and software concepts for self-sustaining sensing
• Power management, algorithms and circuits for energy-harvesting sensing systems
• Zero-energy sensor networks
• Resource management and operating system support for energy-harvesting sensing systems
• Network-wide distributed energy management (e.g. routing, adaptive duty cycling, etc.)
• Communication in energy harvesting and low-power domain
• In-field measurement of energy intake and consumption of sensing systems
• Ensuring reliable operation in energy-harvesting sensor systems
• Modelling, simulation and tools for energy efficient design of future energy harvesting sensing systems
• Architectures and standards for energy-neutral sensing systems
• Battery-less sensors devices
• Experience with real-world deployments and innovative applications

Special Session Title: Building Blocks and Tools for Secure Hardware Design.

Organizers: Francesco Regazzoni (ALaRI - USI, Lugano, Switzerland, regazzoni@alari.ch)

Description: The pervasive diffusion of embedded and cyber-physical systems brings new security challenges. These devices, all connected to form the Internet of Things (IoT), are often deployed in a hostile environment, where an attacker could easily have physical access, and their life span can be pretty long, posing the problems of crypto-agility and long term security. Security of these devices, and of the application running on top of them, can be guaranteed only if the underlying hardware provides the necessary cyptographic primitives and if it is robust against physical attacks. Yet, these security functionalities should fit the (often) tight area and energy budget available.
This special session addresses these challenges by focusing on secure hardware components and on the design methodologies needed to build them.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Lightweight and low energy hardware for security
• Formal methods for hardware security
• Design methodologies and tools for secure hardware
• Supply chain security for trusted hardware
• Secure hardware architectures
• PUFs and TRNGs
• Hardware Trojans and countermeasures
• Physical attacks and countermeasures
• Reconfigurable hardware for security
• Hardware implementation of post quantum algorithms

Special Session Title: Smart sensing and networking in agriculture.

Organizers: Dimitrios Zorbas (Tyndall National Institute, Ireland) and David Boyle (Imperial College London, UK)

Description: The special session focuses on smart sensing and networking solutions in the agricultural domain. This can be smart sensing solutions for field, animal, or infrastructure monitoring applications. Since the generated data has to be gathered in a central base station for further analysis and possibly forwarded to the cloud or other systems, smart networking solutions that can achieve an efficient data transmission are of high importance. We invite researchers working in this field to submit either new, innovative, and beyond state-of-the-art solutions, or application specific developments of great interest.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Smart hardware or software sensing techniques in agriculture
• Energy efficient architecture designs
• Smart networking and data dissemination solutions
• Protocol-specific network designs
• Long range networking solutions and remote control
• Reliability in agricultural system design
• Drone monitoring solutions
• Real-world developments or deployments