Pre-Conference Workshops

The proliferation of sensor-based systems across smart cities, healthcare, and industrial IoT (IIoT) has created unprecedented challenges in ensuring security, privacy, and real-time intelligence. Conventional centralized approaches are increasingly inadequate due to latency constraints, data sensitivity, and scalability issues in distributed sensor environments.

The program develops on three keynote contributions. The first explores the role of optical fiber sensing in infrastructure monitoring and physical layer security, highlighting how distributed sensing technologies can enhance safety, resilience, and threat detection in critical systems. The second focuses on biomedical applications in ionizing radiation environments, presenting recent developments in fiber optic sensors for dosimetry, radiotherapy, and nuclear medicine, where precision and real-time monitoring are essential. The third keynote addresses the rapidly evolving field of theranostic devices and sensing in in vivo scenarios, showcasing how fiber optic technologies are enabling minimally invasive diagnostics and integrated therapy solutions, while maintaining high standards of safety and biocompatibility. After a roundtable offering space for open discussion with speakers, moderators and attendees, time will be dedicated to flash talks of young researchers and to a meet-the-expert session.

The sensing landscape is increasingly dominated by ultra-constrained IoT devices. Due to their massive number and targeted applications, such devices should be batteryless, maintenance-free, self-sustained/sustainable, cheap, autonomous, and imperceptible. We refer to such devices as energy-neutral devices (ENDs) and note that they remain partially/fully unsupported by modern connectivity solutions. This workshop is conceived as a collaborative forum that bridges the sensing and communication communities, bringing together complementary expertise on device capabilities, physical phenomena, low-power hardware, wireless connectivity, distributed intelligence, and sustainable network operation.

Picotesla-level magnetic biosensing is rapidly advancing as a promising non-invasive to physiological measurement, with potential applications in healthcare, wearable, and human-machine interfaces. Compared to conventional electrical measurements, biomagnetic measurements can provide improved spatial resolution without the need for direct electrical contact with the body. However, achieving reliable and repeatable measurements requires more than highly sensitive magnetic sensors. It requires an integrated system-level approach that combines sensitive and robust sensor technology, realistic simulation platforms, advanced signal processing, and application-driven system development.

A retrospective on the challenges faced as image sensor technology developed to enable its present commercial success, how these were met, and what the experience can teach other sensor technologies to follow. It includes a historic perspective, an overview of process enhancements to embed a transducer element into the mass-market CMOS flow, and case studies to illustrate the process. It also has a forward look into how image sensors are adapting to the role as sensors at ""the edge of the Cloud"". Image sensor technology has been a pathfinder as a highly-integrated, manufacturable link between physical phenomena and the electronic world. It has demonstrated the successful development of design and process enhancements to enable this while building on the CMOS flow that is the foundation of the success of the semiconductor ecosystem that benefits us all today. It has overcome technical barriers to where its products have mastered the challenge of integrating mega-arrays of sensors with wide dynamic range and a precision that reaches down to counting individual photons. It has accomplished this in a way that it can be in our cell phones, in our autos, in our factories, and more.