Delivering IoT Services in Smart Cities and Environmental Monitoring through Collective Awareness, Mobile Crowdsensing and Open Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the paradigm that allows us to interact with the real world by means of networking-enabled devices and convert physical phenomena into valuable digital knowledge. Such a rapidly evolving field leveraged the explosion of a number of technologies, standards and platforms. Consequently, different IoT ecosystems behave as closed islands and do not interoperate with each other, thus the potential of the number of connected objects in the world is far from being totally unleashed. Typically, research efforts in tackling such challenge tend to propose a new IoT platforms or standards, however, such solutions find obstacles in keeping up the pace at which the field is evolving. Our work is different, in that it originates from the following observation: in use cases that depend on common phenomena such as Smart Cities or environmental monitoring a lot of useful data for applications is already in place somewhere or devices capable of collecting such data are already deployed. For such scenarios, we propose and study the use of Collective Awareness Paradigms (CAP), which offload data collection to a crowd of participants. We bring three main contributions: we study the feasibility of using Open Data coming from heterogeneous sources, focusing particularly on crowdsourced and user-contributed data that has the drawback of being incomplete and we then propose a State-of-the-Art algorith that automatically classifies raw crowdsourced sensor data; we design a data collection framework that uses Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) and puts the participants and the stakeholders in a coordinated interaction together with a distributed data collection algorithm that prevents the users from collecting too much or too less data; (3) we design a Service Oriented Architecture that constitutes a unique interface to the raw data collected through CAPs through their aggregation into ad-hoc services, moreover, we provide a prototype implementation

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

A robust coding scheme for packet video

A layered packet video coding algorithm based on a progressive transmission scheme is presented. The algorithm provides good compression and can handle significant packet loss with graceful degradation in the reconstruction sequence. Simulation results for various conditions are presented

Project ATCOSIMA – Air traffic Control Simulations at the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences

Air traffic controller training is a highly regulated sector. It is prescribed by international rules and requirements. The important segment of training is the provision of practical exercises on air traffic control simulators. Although regulations prescribe required performance objectives for initial training, they do not set any assessment criteria on how to assess the candidates, nor do they consider any flight efficiency indicators. In this paper, an overview objectives of the ATCOSIMA project is presented. Baseline air traffic simulations performed at the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences of the University of Zagreb were analysed in more detail explaining exercises, assessment criteria description, as well as the achieved candidates’ scores

Exploratory Cluster Analysis from Ubiquitous Data Streams using Self-Organizing Maps

This thesis addresses the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) for exploratory cluster analysis over ubiquitous data streams, where two complementary problems arise: first, to generate (local) SOM models over potentially unbounded multi-dimensional non-stationary data streams; second, to extrapolate these capabilities to ubiquitous environments. Towards this problematic, original contributions are made in terms of algorithms and methodologies. Two different methods are proposed regarding the first problem. By focusing on visual knowledge discovery, these methods fill an existing gap in the panorama of current methods for cluster analysis over data streams. Moreover, the original SOM capabilities in performing both clustering of observations and features are transposed to data streams, characterizing these contributions as versatile compared to existing methods, which target an individual clustering problem. Also, additional methodologies that tackle the ubiquitous aspect of data streams are proposed in respect to the second problem, allowing distributed and collaborative learning strategies. Experimental evaluations attest the effectiveness of the proposed methods and realworld applications are exemplified, namely regarding electric consumption data, air quality monitoring networks and financial data, motivating their practical use. This research study is the first to clearly address the use of the SOM towards ubiquitous data streams and opens several other research opportunities in the future

Internet of Things in Geospatial Analytics

Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things emerged as a holistic proposal to enable an ecosystem of varied, heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing modern pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth.Comment: Book chapter at the Manual of Digital Earth Book, ISDE, September 2019, Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild and Alessandro Annoni, (Publisher: Springer, Singapore

A Novel Real-Time Edge-Cloud Big Data Management and Analytics Framework for Smart Cities

Exposing city information to dynamic, distributed, powerful, scalable, and user-friendly big data systems is expected to enable the implementation of a wide range of new opportunities; however, the size, heterogeneity and geographical dispersion of data often makes it difficult to combine, analyze and consume them in a single system. In the context of the H2020 CLASS project, we describe an innovative framework aiming to facilitate the design of advanced big-data analytics workflows. The proposal covers the whole compute continuum, from edge to cloud, and relies on a well-organized distributed infrastructure exploiting: a) edge solutions with advanced computer vision technologies enabling the real-time generation of “rich” data from a vast array of sensor types; b) cloud data management techniques offering efficient storage, real-time querying and updating of the high-frequency incoming data at different granularity levels. We specifically focus on obstacle detection and tracking for edge processing, and consider a traffic density monitoring application, with hierarchical data aggregation features for cloud processing; the discussed techniques will constitute the groundwork enabling many further services. The tests are performed on the real use-case of the Modena Automotive Smart Area (MASA)

Reputation-aware Trajectory-based Data Mining in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is a critically important technology for the acquisition of spatiotemporally dense data in diverse applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to surveillance systems. Such data helps us improve our transportation systems, monitor our air quality and the spread of diseases, respond to natural disasters, and a bevy of other applications. However, IoT sensor data is error-prone due to a number of reasons: sensors may be deployed in hazardous environments, may deplete their energy resources, have mechanical faults, or maybe become the targets of malicious attacks by adversaries. While previous research has attempted to improve the quality of the IoT data, they are limited in terms of better realization of the sensing context and resiliency against malicious attackers in real time. For instance, the data fusion techniques, which process the data in batches, cannot be applied to time-critical applications as they take a long time to respond. Furthermore, context-awareness allows us to examine the sensing environment and react to environmental changes. While previous research has considered geographical context, no related contemporary work has studied how a variety of sensor context (e.g., terrain elevation, wind speed, and user movement during sensing) can be used along with spatiotemporal relationships for online data prediction. This dissertation aims at developing online methods for data prediction by fusing spatiotemporal and contextual relationships among the participating resource-constrained mobile IoT devices (e.g. smartphones, smart watches, and fitness tracking devices). To achieve this goal, we first introduce a data prediction mechanism that considers the spatiotemporal and contextual relationship among the sensors. Second, we develop a real-time outlier detection approach stemming from a window-based sub-trajectory clustering method for finding behavioral movement similarity in terms of space, time, direction, and location semantics. We relax the prior assumption of cooperative sensors in the concluding section. Finally, we develop a reputation-aware context-based data fusion mechanism by exploiting inter sensor-category correlations. On one hand, this method is capable of defending against false data injection by differentiating malicious and honest participants based on their reported data in real time. On the other hand, this mechanism yields a lower data prediction error rate