Gordon Farrar in 'Untangling the web': "WOULD you feel hurt if your refrigerator stopped returning your emails? Would you be annoyed to have your dinner interrupted by a pot plant demanding a drink? Are you friends with your toilet on Facebook? Do you like the idea of a virtual avatar that contains your personality and memories — the essence of you — that could communicate with your descendants? It's only a matter of time."
Nicolas Nova is a both a researcher interested in field studies for design and a consultant working for Lift lab, a research agency. He is interested by mobile/urban/location-based applications to tangible and gestural interactions, network objects, social computing and gaming. He also teaches in various design schools such as HEAD (Geneva) and ENSCI (Paris).
Abdur Rahim Biswas is project manager of EU FP7 large integrated project, iCore - Empowering IoT through virtual objects and cognitive technologies. Dr.-Ing. Biswas has acquired diverse experience throughout studying/working/living in several countries like Bangladesh (BSc Degree), Sweden (MSc degree), Germany (Dr.-Ing degree), Spain (visiting researcher) and now Italy at Crate-Net (leading IoT research group). He is involved in many activities related to cognitive and IoT technologies, steering committee co-chair (CROWNCOM), leader of SEG group in EC RAS cluster, leader of cognitive UWB and coexistence working group in EUWB project, management board member of COST-TERRA.
Kristina Höök is Professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University/KTH since 2003. She also upholds a part-time employment at SICS. She started the Mobile Life centre in 2007 - a centre that has now grown into being 50 researchers, working in close contact with industrial partners such as Microsoft Research, Ericsson, Nokia, TeliaSonera and Stockholm City. Her research focuses on bodily and emotional interaction. She has published in high-rated venues such as ACM SIGCHI, DIS, NordiCHI, ToCHI, IJHCS, and the Royal Society in the U.K.