Connecting Plants and Soil through Low-data-rate Underground Sensing and High-data-rate In-Field Autonomy to Grow More Crop for Drop | Mehmet Can Vuran
Oct 05, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
The increasing global food demand necessitates advancements in precision agriculture, underscoring the importance of understanding the relationship between soil and plants. This talk focuses on the interconnectedness of the agricultural environment and its operational elements through the Agricultural Internet of Things (Ag-IoT) as a powerful solution to address food production challenges. The innovations in low-power wireless communications and sensing have made deploying sensors below the soil surface feasible. These sensors directly link the soil conditions and plant responses, enabling real-time monitoring of their interaction. We will discuss the technical aspects of wireless communication within these underground settings, outlining both the potential and challenges of data transmission in underground environments. Moreover, our research findings from extensive field experiments will be presented, highlighting the influence of specific crops, such as corn and soybeans, on the millimeter-wave (mmWave) channel. Understanding these interactions is pivotal in realizing high-speed agricultural networks that could reshape how we approach autonomous farming operations. The interconnectedness of soil and plants highlights the role of heterogeneous Ag-IoT systems in enhancing our understanding and management of this vital relationship in the face of growing food production challenges. The talk will conclude by discussing future challenges for Ag-IoT and emphasizing its transformative potential to revolutionize the agricultural sector, optimize resource allocation, and effectively address future food production challenges.
About Speaker:
Mehmet Can (Jon) Vuran received his B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey 2002. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2007, respectively.
He is the Dale M. Jensen Professor of Computing in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Prof. Vuran received an NSF CAREER award in 2010 for “Bringing Wireless Sensor Networks Underground” and was named a “highly-cited researcher in Computer Science” three years in a row by Thomson Reuters "in recognition of ranking among the top 1% of researchers for most cited documents in Computer Science". He is a National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI) Fellow and a Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute (WFI) fellow. Prof. Vuran is the co-author of the Wireless Sensor Networks textbook, TPC Co-Chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2020, and an editor in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials Journal. His research interests include the 6G Internet of Things; wireless underground, mmWave, and THz communications in challenging environments; agricultural Internet of Things; dynamic spectrum access; connected autonomous systems; and cyber-physical networking.
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On indoor localization: a TinyML-based classification approach | Diego Méndez Chaves
Aug 03, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
Positioning systems have gained paramount importance for many different productive sector; however, traditional systems such as Global Positioning System (GPS) have failed to offer accurate and scalable solutions for indoor positioning requirements. Nowadays, alternative solutions such as fingerprinting allow the recognition of the characteristic signature of a location based on RF signal acquisition. In our work, a machine learning (ML) approach is selected in order to classify the RSSI information acquired by multiple scanning stations from TAG broadcasting messages. TinyML has been considered for this project, as it is a rapidly growing technological paradigm that aims to assist the design and implementation of ML mechanisms in resource-constrained embedded devices. This talk presents the design, implementation, and deployment of embedded devices capable of communicating and sending information to a central system that determines the location of objects in a defined environment. A neural network (deep learning) is trained and deployed on the edge, allowing the multiple external error factors that affect the accuracy of traditional position estimation algorithms to be considered. Edge Impulse is used as the main platform for data standardization, pre-processing, model training, evaluation, and deployment.
About Speaker:
Diego Méndez Chaves is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronics Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia. He received his Ph.D (2012) and his M.Sc. (2011) in Computer Science from the University of South Florida, Tampa FL, USA, his M.E. (2008) from the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, and his B.E (2005) in Electronics Engineering from the Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia. Diego’s research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, participatory sensing, digital systems design, operating systems and high-level systems design. He is currently a Research Associate at the T/ICT4D Lab of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy.
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Surprises Included: On Experiences with Outdoor Experiments | Lars Wolf
July 06, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
The use of IoT (Internet of Things) / Sensor Networks is attractive for various application use cases. However, especially if the usage scenarios include outdoor settings or otherwise rough environmental conditions, special care must be taken while planning the deployment and issues be considered which might be not so common for computer scientists. Nevertheless, it may happen that not all components and every part of the designed setup works as originally assumed. This talk will describe some of our work on IoT/WSN systems in outdoor and rough environments and discuss some of the experiences gained.
About Speaker:
Lars Wolf received his Computer Science diploma degree in 1991 from Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1995 from TU Chemnitz. From 1991 to 1996 he worked at IBM’s European Network- ing Center in Heidelberg, Germany. From 1996 to 1999 he was with the TU Darmstadt as Assistant Professor ("Wissenschaftlicher Assistent"). Dr. Wolf joined Universität Karlsruhe in 1999 where he was associate professor in the Computer Science department and alternate director of the computer center. Since spring 2002 Lars Wolf is full professor for Computer Science at the TU Braunschweig, where he is head of the Institute of Operating Systems and Computer Networks. His current research interests include wireless networking in general, sensor networks / Internet of Things, vehicular networks, delay-tolerant networks, and mobile systems.
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State of LoRaWAN and the IoT Ecosystem | Wienke Giezeman
June 01, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
Learn about the key trends and innovations that have driven the development of the LoRaWAN ecosystem and learn about the key pillars and challenges of a successful IoT project. In this webinar, we will look into the current state of the LoRaWAN network in 2023 and show real examples of how it is being utilized today across a variety of industries.
About Speaker:
Wienke Giezeman is the initiator of The Things Network, the first crowdsourced free and open 'Internet of Things'. The network was set up in 6 weeks in Amsterdam, making it the first smart city in the world. Wienke also serves as a CEO at The Things Industries, a LoRaWAN solutions provider.
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Trust Management in Social Internet of Things | Barbora Buhnova
May 04, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
Digitalization is leading us towards a future where people, processes, data and things are not only interacting with each other, but might start forming societies on their own. In these dynamic systems, converging towards Social Internet of Things (SIoT), trust management on the level of human-to-thing as well as thing-to-thing interaction becomes an essential ingredient to supervise safe and secure progress of our digitalized future. In this talk, we will look into the essential elements of trust management in complex digital ecosystems and SIoT, including trust assessment and its influencing factors (e.g., feeling vulnerable), trust propagation (e.g., via reputation), and trust updates (e.g., via dynamic certification schemes). We will give an overview of the current open discussions about the trust management strategies and discuss their risks and related trust attacks (e.g, self-promotion or whitewashing).
About Speaker:
Barbora Buhnova is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at Masaryk University (MU), Faculty of Informatics (FI MU) in Brno, Czech Republic. Following her research career in Germany and Australia, she now leads multiple research teams at Faculty of Informatics MU (software architecture) and Czech CyberCrime Centre of Excellence C4e (critical infrastructures), with special emphasis on trust management in autonomous ecosystems. She is a Steering Committee member of the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) and has been involved in organization of numerous leading conferences (e.g. in OC of ICSE, ESEC-FSE, ASE). She acts as a reviewer and (guest) editor in multiple journals (e.g. IEEE TSE, Springer EMSE, Elsevier SCP, Elsevier JSS, Springer SoSyM, Wiley SME), and is member of the IEEE TSE Review Board. Next to her academic activities, she is the chair of the Association of Industrial Partners at FI MU (with 30+ companies), and is a Co-Founding and Governing Board member of Czechitas, a non-profit organisation aiming at making IT skills more accessible to youth and women (with 30,000+ graduates).
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Sunlight for wireless communication | Marco Zúñiga
Apr 06, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
We, humans, already use 50% more energy moving information than moving airplanes around the world. Communication is central to our societies but is taking a toll on the earth.
We want to use a free, abundant, and natural resource for wireless communication: sunlight. Similar to the way you can use a mirror to communicate by reflecting light, our aim is to change the surfaces of objects to control their reflection properties to send information, but without noticing any flicker!
In this manner, objects will be able to talk to each other using daylight, an eco-friendly solution. In this talk, we will present some of our recent work on this exciting area and its potential applications.
A world that communicates through natural light. That’s the goal.
About Speaker:
Dr. Marco Zúñiga is an Associate Professor in the Networked Systems Group at TU Delft. His research interests are in the areas of the Internet of Things, Mobile Computing, and Visible Light Communication. He obtained his Ph.D. and MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and his BSc in Electronics Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
Dr. Zúñiga has more than 60 scientific publications and has received three Best Paper Awards, five Best Paper Runner-ups, and an Accenture Innovation Award in 2017. Two of his publications are the 3rd and 16th most cited papers in the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. Dr. Zúñiga has also been invited to present his work on "Sunlight for wireless communication" at the Innovation Expo 2018, a flagship event organized by six Dutch Ministries to showcase Dutch innovation to the world.
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The IoT and the two sides of Sustainability | Carlo Boano
Mar 02, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
IoT systems are often portrayed as a key driver for sustainability and as an essential technology to achieve many of the seventeen United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030. Among others, IoT systems can help improving health and well-being, building smart cities, promoting a responsible production and consumption, increasing awareness and visibility into energy and resource usage, as well as facilitating access to clean energy. At the same time, sustainability is often not a concern during the design of an IoT system: several IoT gadgets are unnecessary, many IoT products become quickly obsolete, and poorly-performing IoT devices are quickly dismissed. As a result, IoT hardware often ends up as e-waste into landfill after a very short lifespan, which is worrying considering the magnitude of IoT devices expected in the next decade. In this talk, I will illustrate this paradox with concrete examples and highlight the need to maximize the usability and lifetime of IoT systems, presenting technical solutions that could help in this regard.
About Speaker:
Carlo Alberto Boano is an associate professor at the Institute of Technical Informatics of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), Austria. He received the Venia Docendi in “Embedded Systems” from TU Graz with an Habilitation thesis entitled “Technologies and Tools for the Design of Dependable Networked Embedded Systems” in 2020. He also received from TU Graz a doctoral degree under the auspices of the President of the Austrian Republic in 2016 with a thesis entitled “Dependable Wireless Sensor Networks” and completed under the supervision of Kay Römer.
Before joining TU Graz, Carlo Alberto Boano was researcher at the University of Lübeck, Germany (2009-2013) and at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden (2008-2009). During his post-doctoral time at TU Graz, he has visited Thiemo Voigt’s group at Uppsala University, Mun Choon Chan’s group at the National University of Singapore, and Yuan He’s group at Tsinghua University.
Carlo Alberto’s research interests encompass the design of dependable networked embedded systems, with emphasis on the efficiency and reliability of low-power wireless communications, as well as on the robustness of IoT networking protocols against environmental influences. Within this area, he has published over 100 peer-reviewed contributions – including papers at prestigious venues ranked CORE A/A*, such as SenSys, IPSN, NDSS, INFOCOM, RTSS, ICNP, ICDCS – and received several awards.
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AIoT for environmental Intelligence | Pietro Manzoni
Feb 02, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
Environmental Intelligence refers to using digital technologies to gain insight into our impact on the environment and develop strategies to mitigate or reverse the effects of climate change. The talk will provide insights related to the applications of AIoT for environmental intelligence, focusing on data collection. It will show the approach and some of the results from research activities related to monitoring a natural lagoon in the southern part of Spain, namely the Mar Menor lagoon (Murcia, Spain). This ecosystem supports many human activities encompassing tourism, agriculture, fishing, and mining, leading to its deterioration. The project’s overall objective was to develop cross-cutting and green technology for modeling and predicting socio-environmental processes across different temporal and spatial scales. We wanted to achieve this through a digital twin strategy that allows researchers, stakeholders, and policy-makers to collect data cost-effectively and create more precise models and predictions to support better decision-making.
About Speaker:
He received the master degree in Computer Science from the “Università degli Studi” of Milan, Italy, in 1989, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the “Politecnico di Milano”, Italy, in 1995. From November 1992 to February 1993 he did an internship at the Bellcore Labs, Red Bank, New Jersey, USA, and from February 1994 to November 1994 he was a visiting researcher at the ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) Berkeley, California, USA. He is full professor of computer engineering at the “Universitat Politècnica de València”, Spain. He is the coordinator of the Computer Networks Research Group (GRC) and a senior member of the IEEE. His research activity is related to the use of Mobile Wireless Networks to the design of dynamic systems. He is currently working on solutions for the Internet of Things focusing on LPWAN-based networks, and Pub/Sub systems. He published more than 200 scientific papers in conferences and more than 90 papers in international journals.; his Google scholar H index is 49. He is part or has been part of various editorial boards and organizing committees of International journals and conferences.
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Low Power Wide-Area Wireless Internet of Things with LoRaWAN | Dirk Pesch
Jan 05, 2023 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
Connectivity, particularly wireless connectivity, is a key enabling technology for the Internet of Things. A plethora of technologies exist, ranging from short-range to long-range and low to medium power options. Recently, long-range, low-power wireless communication technologies have been introduced for both licensed and unlicensed radio spectrum. Unlicensed spectrum technologies such as LoRa/LoRaWAN have become very popular because of their low cost, open standard and open-source software support. However, the current standard has many weaknesses in supporting a vision of dense, wireless IoT device deployment. In this talk, we will briefly review long-range, low-power wireless technologies, review some of the weaknesses of LoRaWAN and present a range of advances that address these weaknesses; in particular, we will focus on medium access fairness, power efficiency and delay performance for both terrestrial and satellite-based smart city and industrial IoT applications.
About Speaker:
Dirk Pesch is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at University College Cork, where he leads research initiatives in the area of future networks, the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems with applications in smart and connected communities and smart manufacturing. Dirk’s research interests focus on the study, design and performance evaluation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and associated communication protocols and system architectures and their applications to smart, energy-efficient and sustainable cities and connected communities as well as smart manufacturing. He is also interested in addressing the interoperability problem of IoT/CPS, which limits the widespread adoption of the technology to many real-world problems and situations. Dirk is the Director of a national doctoral training initiative, the Science Foundation Ireland funded Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies. He is also a Principal Investigator of the SFI-funded CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and the CONFIRM Centre for Smart Manufacturing. He is an editorial board member of a number of journals and contributes to ACM/IEEE/IFIP conference organization in his area of expertise. Prior to joining academia, Dirk was a design engineer with Nokia in Germany and the UK, developing and implementing communication protocols for a range of cordless telecommunication products. Dirk received a Dipl.Ing. degree from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.
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Dec 01, 2022 | 4:00 PM CET
About Topic:
This seminar will engage in the lessons learned from designing, developing and deploying the LoRa-DTN IoT platform. This platform was tailor-made by and for the Sami reindeer herding population in the north of Sweden. Due to the harsh Arctic winter conditions, lack of power and internet infrastructure, remoteness and inaccessible terrains, conventional off-the-shelf IoT solutions were not applicable. Hence, the LoRa-DTN platform was developed in order to provide reindeer herders ability to track their reindeer herds, exchange short messages, use drones as a data relay and monitor the ice thickness on lakes during winter time. The platform is built on a custom hardware and employs LoRa radios and custom-built network protocol based on the Delay Tolerant Network architecture (using Store-And-Forward principle).
About Speaker:
Since 2016, Samo Grasic has worked at Dálvvadis economical association, Jokkmokk, where he designs and develops the Nomatrack LoRa-DTN (Delay Tolerant Network) platform. This platform is tailor-made for reindeer herding purposes in remote Arctic environments. Samo is the member of the The Inter Planetary Networking Special Interest Group and the co-author of the PRoPHET routing protocol (RFC 6693). Samo received his PhD from Luleå University of Technology, in the subject of of Human Work Science, in 2014. Here, focus ison development and deployment of the ICT infrastructure DTN for sparsely populated Arctic regions. Samo’s interests include routing in computer networks, energy harvesting, low power systems, soft, and hardware development as well as embedded systems. Samo is also interested in the social, and economical aspects of ICT deployments. Prior to his academic career, Samo worked for more than six years in the industry, developing hardware and software components for meteorological and radiological systems.
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Toit, a modern framework for IoT | Florian Loitsch
Nov 03, 2022
About Topic:
Modern microcontrollers, like the ESP32, are more powerful than the first Unix machines. Despite their
speed, they are still treated like 8-bit microcontrollers from the 90s: by flashing monolithic applications on them.
Individual components have no protections from each other, and the development process is brittle, since
a change or bug in one part of the firmware could adversely affect the rest.
This doesn’t need to be. In this presentation we will present Toit. A modern framework for IoT devices. A new language, virtual machine, and lots of libraries, work together to provide a great development experience with properties we generally expect from operating systems: memory separation, individual applications, ease of use with a high-level garbage-collected language, and fast development iterations.
About Speaker:
Florian Loitsch did his PhD in compiler technologies, compiling Scheme to JavaScript. He was then hired by Google to work on V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript engine). He was part of the team that developed the Dart programming language, for which he was the technical lead for the Dart-to-Javascript compiler and later for the Dart libraries. Almost 5 years ago, he co-founded Toitware, where he has been developing and improving Toit since.
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