Vlad Trifa

In 2015, Vlad co-authored the Web Thing Model which was accepted as an official W3C member submission. The Web Thing model is a first attempt at creating a simple Web based standard for the application layer of the Internet of Things.

In 2011, Vlad co-founded EVRYTHNG together with Dominique Guinard, Niall Murphy and Andy Hobsbawm. The founding idea of EVRYTHNG was to create digital identities and Web APIs for all kinds of objects: from consumer goods to consumer electronics. As such EVRYTHNG was the first commercial Web of Things platform. Vlad served as the Chief Product Officer and then EVP of Research and Development at EVRYTHNG before joining Swisscom to lead the Swisscom Digital Lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

After graduating from EPFL, he went on to get his PhD in Computer Science at ETH Zurich. During his time as a PhD he also worked as a Research Associate for SAP where he met Dominique Guinard. Both focused on the Internet of Things at SAP especially looking at the integration of real-world devices such as wireless sensor networks to business processes and enterprise software (e.g., ERPs). The complexity of these integrations at the time lead them to look simpler integration mechanisms. In 2007 they defined an application layer for the Internet of Things that uses Web standards called the Web of Things. Vlad wrote his Ph.D thesis on the Web of Things, particularly looking at the real-time aspects of Things on the Web. Towards the end of his Ph.D he experimented with applying the Web of Things concepts to smart cities and worked as a researcher in urban and mobile computing at SENSEable City Lab at MIT in Cambridge, USA and Singapore.