David Alan Grier, professor at George Washington University and president-elect for the IEEE Computer Society, suggests five ways the computing world will change in the coming year.

1) “New companies and applications will bring the long-held vision of the Internet of Things closer to reality,” Grier writes for Forbes. By 2020, there will be an estimated 100 billion Internet-connected objects, triggering “an explosion of new uses by consumers and enterprises alike,” he predicts. “New types of sensors, new ways of connecting devices, and new strategies for embedded computing must be rolled out to bring IoT’s vision to the forefront.”

2) “Visualization and analytics will help solve the challenges of big data.” More and more data is collected and generated than ever before, but analyzing big data has become a significant challenge. Federal agencies and large corporations have launched research programs to address the problem of overwhelming or quickly outdated data.

3) “Enterprises will deploy hybrid clouds and consumers will embrace personal clouds.” Looking for energy-saving green approaches, companies will increase the demand for cloud computing; cloud interoperability and standards will also advance.

4) “The battle over Internet censorship and control will reach new heights,” Grier writes. “In 2013, expect to see these battles continuing, in the form of Internet filtering versus circumvention, surveillance versus anonymization, denial-of-service attacks and intrusion attempts versus protection mechanisms, and on- and offline persecution and defense of online activists.”

5) “Researchers and companies will develop new tools and approaches to help unleash the power of multicore computing,” which will be a “critical priority” in the age of parallel processing.