Orchestrating Heterogeneous Devices and AI Services as Virtual Sensors for Secure Cloud-Based IoT Applications

The concept of the cloud-to-thing continuum addresses advancements made possible by the widespread adoption of cloud, edge, and IoT resources. It opens the possibility of combining classical symbolic AI with advanced machine learning approaches in a meaningful way. In this paper, we present a thing registry and an agent-based orchestration framework, which we combine to support semantic orchestration of IoT use cases across several federated cloud environments. We use the concept of virtual sensors based on machine learning (ML) services as abstraction, mediating between the instance level and the semantic level. We present examples of virtual sensors based on ML models for activity recognition and describe an approach to remedy the problem of missing or scarce training data. We illustrate the approach with a use case from an assisted living scenario.