8,230 research outputs found
Enabling IoT ecosystems through platform interoperability
Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms
We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware
solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet.
To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as
platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT
ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users,
among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these
platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to
meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more
focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players,
rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The
evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with
respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating
technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and
privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support
offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem,
and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims
to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration
to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis,
we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting
over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of
future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we
conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT
platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer
Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges
and solution
A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines
The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise
various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human
collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world
processes and activities including human communication, interactions and
knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The
relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption
of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation,
continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra
dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult
to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level.
This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term
Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the
associated challenges of security and privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City
Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management
challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living
standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change,
pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and
security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these
problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban
administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network
communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and
integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure -
which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT
technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many
objectives of the Smart City vision.
The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of
IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a
Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims
for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events
and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a
case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide
insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated,
end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page
German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds
This study reviews – through desk research and expert interviews with Mittelstand companies, startups and ecosystem experts – the current status of the Israeli startup ecosystem and the Mittelstand region of North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW), Germany. As a case study, it highlights potential opportunities for collaboration and analyzes different engagement modes that might serve to connect the two regions.
The potential synergies between the two economies are based on a high degree of complementarity. A comparison of NRW’s key verticals and Israel’s primary areas of innovation indicates that there is significant overlap in verticals, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), sensors and cybersecurity. Israeli startups can offer speed, agility and new ideas, while German Mittelstand companies can contribute expertise in production and scaling, access to markets, capital and support. The differences between Mittelstand companies and startups are less pronounced than those between startups and big corporations. However, three current barriers to fruitful collaboration have been identified: 1) a lack of access, 2) a lack of transparency regarding relevant players in the market, and 3) a lack of the internal resources needed to select the right partners, often due to time constraints or a lack of internal expertise on this issue.
To ensure that positive business opportunities ensue, Mittelstand companies and startups alike have to be proactive in their search for cooperation partners and
draw on a range of existing engagement modes (e.g., events, communities, accelerators). The interviews and the research conducted for this study made clear that no single mode of engagement can address all the needs and challenges associated with German-Israeli collaboration
The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019
An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains
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Pairing a Circular Economy and the 5G-Enabled Internet of Things: Creating a Class of “Looping Smart Assets”
The increase in the world’s population has led to a
massive rise in human consumption of the planet’s natural
resources, well beyond their replacement rate. Traditional
recycling concepts and methods are not enough to counter such
effects. In this context, a circular economy (CE), that is, a
restorative and regenerative by-design economy, can reform
today’s “take–make–dispose” economic model. On the other hand,
the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gradually transform our
everyday lives, allowing for the introduction of novel types of
services while enhancing legacy ones. Taking this as our
motivation, in this article we analyze the CE/IoT interplay,
indicating innovative ways in which this interaction can drastically
affect products and services, their underlying business models,
and the associated ecosystems. Moreover, we present an IoT
architecture that enables smart object integration into the IoT
ecosystem. The presented architecture integrates circularityenabling
features by maximizing the exploitation of assets toward
a new type of IoT ecosystem that is circular by design (CbD).
Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation and an
application study of the proposed architecture and results
regarding the applicability of the proposed approach for the
telecommunications (telecom) sector
Perspectives of Integrated “Next Industrial Revolution” Clusters in Poland and Siberia
Rozdział z: Functioning of the Local Production Systems in Central and Eastern European Countries and Siberia. Case Studies and Comparative Studies, ed. Mariusz E. Sokołowicz.The paper presents the mapping of potential next industrial revolution clusters in Poland and Siberia. Deindustrialization of the cities and struggles with its consequences are one of the fundamental economic problems in current global economy. Some hope to find an answer to that problem is associated with the idea of next industrial revolution and reindustrialization initiatives. In the paper, projects aimed at developing next industrial revolution clusters are analyzed. The objective of the research was to examine new industrial revolution paradigm as a platform for establishing university-based trans-border industry clusters in Poland and Siberia47 and to raise awareness of next industry revolution initiatives.Monograph financed under a contract of execution of the international scientific project within 7th Framework Programme of the European Union, co-financed by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (title: “Functioning of the Local Production Systems in the Conditions of Economic Crisis (Comparative Analysis and Benchmarking for the EU and Beyond”)). Monografia sfinansowana w oparciu o umowę o wykonanie projektu między narodowego w ramach 7. Programu Ramowego UE, współfinansowanego ze środków Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego (tytuł projektu: „Funkcjonowanie lokalnych systemów produkcyjnych w warunkach kryzysu gospodarczego (analiza porównawcza i benchmarking w wybranych krajach UE oraz krajach trzecich”))
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