IF-THEN in the Internet of Things

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT), more and more smart things automatically engage in people's daily life by various means as they are becoming capable of computation and communication. Both challenges and opportunities are posed. To exploit the potential of IoT, different concepts from various points of view have been explored. One of the IoT developing trend is so-called Ambient Intelligence (AI), which refers to things that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of other things and people. The things shall be aware of ambient environments (e.g., other things or people) and take actions accordingly. However, complicated configuration of AI hinders the popularity of IoT. To tackle this problem, we advocate applying the highly abstract concept of “IF-THEN” as the front-end of AI in IoT. To realize such a concept, we present a preliminary design in this paper, including issues of the architecture design, the uniformly understandable language and function assembly.