Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Citizen Science and Smart Cities

The report summarizes the presentations, discussions, and conclusions of the Citizen Science and Smart Cities Summit organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre on 5-7th February 2014. In the context of the Summit, the label Citizen Science was used to include both citizen science projects, and others that are about user-generated content, not necessarily addressing a scientific process or issues. The evidence presented by 27 different projects shows the vitality and diversity of the field but also a number of critical points: • Citizen science project are more than collecting data: they are about raising awareness, building capacity, and strengthening communities. • Likewise, smart cities are not only about ICT, energy and transport infrastructures: Smart cities are about smart citizens, who participate in their city’s daily governance, are concerned about increasing the quality of life of their fellow-citizens, and about protecting their environment. Technology may facilitate, but is no solution per se. • Unfortunately to date there seems to be little synergy between citizen science and smart cities initiatives, and there is little interoperability and reusability of the data, apps, and services developed in each project. • It is difficult to compare the results among citizen science, and smart cities projects or translate from one context to another. • The ephemeral nature of much of the data, which disappear short after the end of the projects, means lack of reproducibility of results and longitudinal analysis of time series challenging, if not impossible. • There are also new challenges with respect to the analytical methods needed to integrate quantitative and qualitative data from heterogeneous sources that need further research. • Building and maintaining trust are key points of any citizen science or smart city project. There is a need to work with the community and not just for, or on, the community. It is critical not just to take (data, information, knowledge) but to give back something that is valued by the community itself. The development of citizen science associations in Europe and the US are important developments that may address some of the points above. There are also actions through which the European Commission Joint Research Centre can make an important contribution: • Map citizen science and smart cities projects, and generate a semantic network of concepts between the projects to facilitate search of related activities, and community building. • Provide a repository for citizen science and smart cities data (anonymised and aggregated), software, services, and applications so that they are maintained beyond the life of the projects they originate from, and made shareable and reusable. • Develop regional test beds for the analysis and integration of social and environmental data from heterogeneous sources, with a focus on quality of life and well-being. • Undertake comparative studies, and analyse issues related to scaling up to the European dimension. • Support citizen science and smart cities projects with the JRC knowledge on semantic interoperability, data models, and interoperability arrangements. • Partner with the European Citizen Science Association, and contribute to its interoperability activities. • Work towards making the JRC, and the European Commission, a champion of citizen participation in European science.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Next Generation Internet of Things – Distributed Intelligence at the Edge and Human-Machine Interactions

This book provides an overview of the next generation Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation, development priorities, to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone in a series covering the activities of the Internet of Things European Research Cluster (IERC), including research, technological innovation, validation, and deployment.The following chapters build on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT–EPI), the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme and the IoT European Security and Privacy Projects, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the next generation of IoT research, innovation, development, and deployment.The IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are evolving towards the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT, bringing together hyperconnectivity (5G and beyond), edge computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), virtual/ andaugmented reality (VR/AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation.Following the wider adoption of consumer IoT, the next generation of IoT/IIoT innovation for business is driven by industries, addressing interoperability issues and providing new end-to-end security solutions to face continuous treats.The advances of AI technology in vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and dialog are enabling the development of end-to-end intelligent systems encapsulating multiple technologies, delivering services in real-time using limited resources. These developments are focusing on designing and delivering embedded and hierarchical AI solutions in IoT/IIoT, edge computing, using distributed architectures, DLTs platforms and distributed end-to-end security, which provide real-time decisions using less data and computational resources, while accessing each type of resource in a way that enhances the accuracy and performance of models in the various IoT/IIoT applications.The convergence and combination of IoT, AI and other related technologies to derive insights, decisions and revenue from sensor data provide new business models and sources of monetization. Meanwhile, scalable, IoT-enabled applications have become part of larger business objectives, enabling digital transformation with a focus on new services and applications.Serving the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT real-time use cases over 5G and Network Slicing technology is essential for consumer and industrial applications and support reducing operational costs, increasing efficiency and leveraging additional capabilities for real-time autonomous systems.New IoT distributed architectures, combined with system-level architectures for edge/fog computing, are evolving IoT platforms, including AI and DLTs, with embedded intelligence into the hyperconnectivity infrastructure.The next generation of IoT/IIoT technologies are highly transformational, enabling innovation at scale, and autonomous decision-making in various application domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, energy, agriculture, transportation and autonomous vehicles, the military, logistics and supply chain, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, mining and oil and gas

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Bibliographic and Text Analysis of Research on Implementation of the Internet of Things to Support Education

The Internet of Things (IoT) has pervaded practically all aspects of our lives. In this exploratory study, we survey its applications in the field of education. It is evident that technology in general, and, in particular IoT, has been increasingly altering the educational landscape. The goal of this paper is to review the academic literature on IoT applications in education to provide an understanding of the transformation that is underway. Using topic modeling and keyword co-occurrence analysis techniques, we identified five dominant clusters of research. Our findings demonstrate that IoT research in education has mainly focused on the technical aspects; however, the social aspects remain largely unexplored. In addition to providing an overview of IoT research on education, this paper offers suggestions for future research

Fostering IoT service replicability in interoperable urban ecosystems

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen's quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certi cate for smart cities. To assess the bene ts of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus con rming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme [SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond)] under Grant 732240, and in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, MINECO-FEDER) through the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00