The ‘Minutes’ Are In: OpenFog Consortium Members’ Meeting

What a great experience last week. OpenFog members descended on Cupertino, California from the U.S., Europe, and Asia to attend our second members’ meeting of the year.

I kicked off the session with the new “This is Fog” video, created by the OpenFog Marketing Committee. It provides a 2-minute overview of how fog is applied in industry. I also highlighted some of our work in progress and welcomed our new members to the session.

OpenFog co-founder Dr. Mung Chiang, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University, followed me on stage. He discussed the role of fog in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and highlighted three concepts that research members are working on now to make this real.

Sastry Malladi, CTO of FogHorn Systems, followed Mung and showcased industry applications using fog, including manufacturing, transportation, and energy.

The Technical Committee made substantial progress on critical architectural diagrams, which show the interdependencies between how items in the fog system and the fog node interact with each other.

Blockchain took center stage at the meeting, with high interest given its applicability to fog and the related expertise of many members. Speakers on this included Lei Zhang, leader of Security R&D at iExec Blockchain Tech; Roman Arutyunov, co-founder of Xage; and Igor Lebedev, CTO of SONM.

Each presented overviews of their companies’ blockchain solutions. Rob MacInnis, president and co-founder of AetherWorks, then joined Roman and Igor on stage in a lively panel moderated by Frank Michaud, co-chair of the Security Working Group.

At the conclusion of the panel, there was agreement to create a new OpenFog task group, under the security workgroup, to address blockchain in fog environments. This group will begin meeting in May.

Testbeds is another area where OpenFog is making good progress. There are three testbeds in process from a variety of OpenFog member organizations (research institutions, large corporations, and startups). Some of this work will be highlighted at Fog World Congress.

Next Member Meeting Plans Underway + Making Progress on Industry-Wide Standards

The Marketing Committee spent the week planning for Fog World Congress, which takes place October 1-3, in San Francisco. This year’s event, building on the success of last year’s inaugural conference, will attract 600 attendees, about 75 speakers, pre-day tutorials, an expo area, and a Fog Tank for startups to go before a panel of Venture Capitalists for bragging rights to “most innovative in fog.”

The conference Program Committees are narrowing the choices for the three tracks of Technical, Industry, and Innovation sessions. They’re also identifying keynotes, and the first sponsors are confirming their participation.

The final activity in the week was done by IEEE-SA p1934, the standards association workgroup that is creating standards for fog computing based on the OpenFog Reference Architecture. This work was approved with very few changes suggested. This is an important first step in creating industry-wide standards for fog computing.

We now have a little less than three months until the next members’ meeting, which will take place in Vancouver at the end of July. We expect significant progress across all work areas from the membership as we continue our work to create an open, interoperable architecture for fog computing.

To learn more, visit the OpenFog Consortium web site.