Arkadiusz Bokowy at Samsung R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL), who has been recognized as one of the luminaries in open source developer communities for IoT connectivity, has been honored with the Best Contributor Award from the Matter Working Group at the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) member meeting held in November 2025 in Barcelona, Spain. This award highlights Arkadiusz's significant contribution and dedication to Matter, the open source standard for IoT devices.

Open Source Leadership in Matter Development

Matter is an open source standard designed to create a unified, secure foundation for smart home devices. Samsung is one of the core contributors to the Matter specification and implementation, with a strong commitment to advancing the smart home ecosystem through open-source collaboration.

As an active member of the Matter Working Group, Arkadiusz has made substantial contributions to Linux and Tizen platform support. His expertise lies primarily in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and low-level integration with operating systems. In the last few years, he has contributed more than 300 patches to the Matter SDK codebase, focusing on enhancing BLE commissioning reliability and stability, as well as improving the overall performance of Matter on Linux and Tizen platforms.

"I am truly honored to receive the Best Contributor Award from the Matter Working Group," said Arkadiusz Bokowy. "This recognition motivates me to contribute even more to the development of open source technologies that drive innovation in the IoT ecosystem."

Leading by Example: Breakthrough in Commissioning Stability

Especially in 2025, Arkadiusz has been leading the development of BLE-WiFi commissioning integration tests for the Matter SDK. These tests are crucial for ensuring the reliability and compatibility of Matter devices during the commissioning process, which is essential for a seamless user experience.

"The main challenge in developing these tests was to simulate BLE and WiFi connectivity in a simulated environment like GitHub Actions. The main problem was to overcome the limitations of virtualized environments, which do not support direct access to hardware components like Bluetooth and WiFi adapters," explained Arkadiusz. "To address this, I developed mocks for BLE and WiFi functionalities that can be seamlessly integrated with the Matter SDK. This approach allowed us to run comprehensive integration tests in a continuous integration pipeline, ensuring that any changes to the Matter SDK codebase do not introduce any regressions in the commissioning functionality."

This achievement has been recognized as a significant contribution to the Matter SDK project and it has inspired further R&D innovation of commissioning extension to other connectivity, such as WiFi Public Action Frame (PAF), Thread, NFC, and Proxy engaged commissioning, which are all inspired by Arkadiusz’s masterpiece this year. From now on, since the path has been paved, such integration tests will be required for any new Matter commissioning type, ensuring ecosystem stability and reliability. That is why he was nominated for this award through unanimous recommendation by key member companies, such as Google and Apple, in the Matter Working Group.

Open Source Contributions at Samsung Research

Being an open source leader at Samsung Research is not only about code contributions but also about fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing with other open source communities. Arkadiusz actively seeks opportunities to contribute to other Mater-related projects and encourages his colleagues to get involved in open source initiatives. One of such examples is contribution to Wireshark, a widely used network protocol analyzer, where Arkadiusz has contributed patches to improve the analysis of Matter protocol traffic including BLE transport and advertisement. Such contribution helps integrators and developers, including Samsung, to investigate and debug Matter-related issues more effectively which in turn lowers the time to market for Matter-enabled devices.

"I am not only contributing code to one specific project, but also fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing across multiple “playgrounds”. I encourage my colleagues every day to get involved in open source initiatives. It does not have to be a big contribution, even a small patch can make a difference," added Arkadiusz.

Elevating Ecosystem Quality with Commissioning as Code

Beyond earning the Matter Working Group’s Best Contributor Award, Arkadiusz’s work made a lasting ecosystem contribution: it operationalized commissioning quality as code. By advancing a mock-first, CI-gated reference approach (exemplified by another great invention of his, called “BlueZoo”, which is now available in open source at Samsung GitHub), his efforts enable Samsung SmartThings, Google, Apple, and Amazon to catch onboarding regressions before they reach devices.

The BlueZoo commissioning test suite (mock-first, CI-ready) has become a practical reference for catching regressions long before lab runs. By enabling deterministic, hardware-free commissioning checks in PR pipelines, BlueZoo directly supports the quality bars that ecosystem owners rely on to protect end-user experience.

Looking ahead, Samsung Research is proposing a mandatory, open Commissioning CI Conformance Gate for new methods, including NFC, Proxy, and Commissioning over Thread—ensuring that every change proves commissioning correctness in CI, with targeted hardware-in-the-loop retained for nightly stress. This is how we will ensure that we protect the user experience at the ecosystem scale.