An IoT-based contribution to improve mobility of the visually impaired in Smart Cities

The Internet of Things envisions that objects of everyday life will be equipped with sensors, microcontrollers, transceivers for digital communication and suitable protocol which communicates among them and with users, becoming an integral part of Internet. Due to the growing developments in digital technologies, Smart Cities have been equipped with different electronic devices based on IoT and several applications are being created for most diverse areas of knowledge making systems more efficient. However, Assistive technology is a field that is not enough explored in this scenario yet. In this work, an integrated framework with an IoT architecture customized for an electronic cane (electronic travel aid designed for the visually impaired) has been designed. The architecture is organized by a five-layer architecture: edge technology, gateway, Internet, middleware and application. This new feature brings the ability to connect to environment devices, receiving the coordinates of their geographic locations, alerting the user when it is close to anyone of these devices and sending those coordinates to a web application for smart monitoring. Preliminary studies and experimental tests with three blind users of the Cane show that this approach would contribute to get more spatial information from the environment improving mobility of visually impaired people.This research was supported by the Brazilian National Council of Scientific & Technological Development—CNPq, Grant Number 315338/2018-0, and Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa no Estado de Santa Catarina -FAPESC, (Programa Sinapse da Inovação Operação SC III)

Intelligent Information Systems for the representation and management of the city. Urban survey and design for resilience.

Recent emergencies have triggered a series of proposals, revisions and regulatory updates. In Italy, as part of the Italian Decreto Rilancio, a proposal to introduce a compulsory building file seems to have been accepted. If this proposal is followed up, we could soon see the collection of a series of data and information on the building stock of our cities. This contribution defines a proposal for the organisation of this systematic collection, suitably supported by advanced IT tools, to make possible the start of a renewed season of monitoring, management, planning and development of more resilient buildings and cities. The proposed idea is to channel the information and data on individual buildings into a single database that can provide a comprehensive, unambiguous and multi-scalar picture of the urban system

Blockchain Solutions for Multi-Agent Robotic Systems: Related Work and Open Questions

The possibilities of decentralization and immutability make blockchain probably one of the most breakthrough and promising technological innovations in recent years. This paper presents an overview, analysis, and classification of possible blockchain solutions for practical tasks facing multi-agent robotic systems. The paper discusses blockchain-based applications that demonstrate how distributed ledger can be used to extend the existing number of research platforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.Comment: 5 pages, FRUCT-2019 conference pape

Machine-to-machine emergency system for urban safety

Nowadays most people live in urban areas. As populations grow, demand on the city ecosystem increases, directly affecting the entities responsible for the city control. Challenges like this make leaders adopt ways to engage with the surroundings of their city, making them more prepared and aware. The decisions they make not only directly affect the city in short term, but are also a means to improve the decision making process. This work aimed to develop a system which can act as an emergency and security supervisor in a city, generating alerts to empower entities responsible for disaster management. The system is capable of monitoring data from sensors and provide useful knowledge from it. This work presents an architecture for the collection of data in the Internet of Things (IoT). It delivers the analysis of the used tools and the choices made regarding the implemented system. Also, it provides the necessary inputs for developers to participate in the project, since it describes all the techniques, languages, strategies and programming paradigms used. Finally, it describes the prototype that receives data and processes it to generate alerts with the purpose of warning emergency response teams and the future implementation of a prediction module that can act as a useful tool to better manage the emergency personnel. The completion of the internship allowed the learning of new concepts and techniques, as well as the development of those that were already familiar. With regard to the company, the developed system will integrate the company’s Citibrain platform and will act as a central point, in which, every application (e.g. water management, waste management) can be subscribed to receive alerts

Engineering the application of machine learning in an IDS based on IoT traffic flow

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are now widely used, enabling intelligent services that, in association with new communication technologies like the 5G and broadband internet, boost smart-city environments. Despite their limited resources, IoT devices collect and share large amounts of data and are connected to the internet, becoming an attractive target for malicious actors. This work uses machine learning combined with an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect possible attacks. Due to the limitations of IoT devices and low latency services, the IDS must have a specialized architecture. Furthermore, although machine learning-based solutions have high potential, there are still challenges related to training and generalization, which may impose constraints on the architecture. Our proposal is an IDS with a distributed architecture that relies on Fog computing to run specialized modules and use deep neural networks to identify malicious traffic inside IoT data flows. We compare our IoT-Flow IDS with three other architectures. We assess model generalization using test data from different datasets and evaluate their performance in terms of Recall, Precision, and F1-Score. Results confirm the feasibility of flowbased anomaly detection and the importance of network traffic segmentation and specialized models in the AI-based IDS for IoT.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Collaboration-Centred Cities through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data

This paper describes the IES Cities platform conceived to streamline the development of urban apps that combine heterogeneous datasets provided by diverse entities, namely, government, citizens, sensor infrastructure and other information data sources. This work pursues the challenge of achieving effective citizen collaboration by empowering them to prosume urban data across time. Particularly, this paper focuses on the query mapper; a key component of the IES Cities platform devised to democratize the development of open data-based mobile urban apps. This component allows developers not only to use available data, but also to contribute to existing datasets with the execution of SQL sentences. In addition, the component allows developers to create ad hoc storages for their applications, publishable as new datasets accessible by other consumers. As multiple users could be contributing and using a dataset, our solution also provides a data level permission mechanism to control how the platform manages the access to its datasets. We have evaluated the advantages brought forward by IES Cities from the developers' perspective by describing an exemplary urban app created on top of it. In addition, we include an evaluation of the main functionalities of the query mapper.European Union's Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (ICT-PSP CIP Programme). Grant Agreement Number: 32509