Forecasting Air Temperature on Edge Devices with Embedded AI

With the advent of the Smart Agriculture, the joint utilization of Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning (ML) holds the promise to significantly improve agricultural production and sustainability. In this paper, the design of a Neural Network (NN)-based prediction model of a greenhouse’s internal air temperature, to be deployed and run on an edge device with constrained capabilities, is investigated. The model relies on a time series-oriented approach, taking as input variables the past and present values of the air temperature to forecast the future ones. In detail, we evaluate three different NN architecture types—namely, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, Recurrent NNs (RNNs) and Artificial NNs (ANNs)—with various values of the sliding window associated with input data. Experimental results show that the three best-performing models have a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) value in the range 0.289÷0.402°C, a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) in the range of 0.87÷1.04%, and a coefficient of determination (R2) not smaller than 0.997. The overall best performing model, based on an ANN, has a good prediction performance together with low computational and architectural complexities (evaluated on the basis of the NetScore metric), making its deployment on an edge device feasible

VegIoT Garden: a modular IoT Management Platform for Urban Vegetable Gardens

Nowadays, the agricultural sector is facing challenges especially because of an extensive range of grueling trends. In this context, new highly technological applications—such as Internet of Things (IoT), Precision Agriculture (PA), and blockchain—are enabling Smart Agriculture (SA), which holds the promise to support future needs. In this extended abstract, a low-cost, modular, and energy-efficient IoT platform for SA, denoted as VegIoT Garden, based on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices, adopting short- and long-range communication protocols (IEEE 802.11 and LoRa), and aiming at enhancing the management of vegetable gardens through the collection, monitoring, and analysis of sensor data, related to relevant parameters of growing plants (i.e., air and soil humidity and temperature), is presented. The infrastructure is completed with an Internet-enabled Home Node (HN) and an iOS-based mobile App, developed in order to simplify data visualization and plants’ status monitoring. The proposed IoT system has been validated in a real scenario (a vegetable garden) for more than a week: the collected data highlighted possible causes for a disease contracted by vegetables (namely, tomato’s blossom-end root), thus validating VegIoT Garden

AI at the Edge: a Smart Gateway for Greenhouse Air Temperature Forecasting

Controlling and forecasting environmental variables (e.g., air temperature) is usually a key and complex part in a greenhouse management architecture. Indeed, a greenhouse inner micro-climate, which is the result of an extensive set of inter-related environmental variables influenced by external weather conditions, has to be tightly monitored, regulated, and, some-times, forecast. Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Machine Learning (ML) are two of the most successful technologies to deal with this challenge. In this paper, we discuss how a Smart Gateway (GW), acting as a collector for sensor data coming from a WSN installed in a greenhouse, could be enriched with a Neural Network (NN)-based prediction model allowing to forecast a greenhouse’s inner air temperature. In the case of missing sensor data coming from the WSN, the proposed prediction algorithm, fed with meteorological open data (gathered from the DarkSky repository), is run on the GW in order to predict the missing values. Despite the model is especially designed to be lightweight and executable by a device with constrained capabilities, it can be adopted either at Cloud or at GW level to forecast future air temperature’s values, in order to support the management of a greenhouse. Experimental results show that the NN-based prediction algorithm can forecast greenhouse air temperature with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.50°C, a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 4.91%, and a R2 score of 0.965

LoRaFarM: A LoRaWAN-Based Smart Farming Modular IoT Architecture

Presently, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT)-related technologies in the Smart Farming domain is rapidly emerging. The ultimate goal is to collect, monitor, and effectively employ relevant data for agricultural processes, with the purpose of achieving an optimized and more environmentally sustainable agriculture. In this paper, a low-cost, modular, and Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN)-based IoT platform, denoted as "LoRaWAN-based Smart Farming Modular IoT Architecture" (LoRaFarM), and aimed at improving the management of generic farms in a highly customizable way, is presented. The platform, built around a core middleware, is easily extensible with ad-hoc low-level modules (feeding the middleware with data coming from the sensors deployed in the farm) or high-level modules (providing advanced functionalities to the farmer). The proposed platform has been evaluated in a real farm in Italy, collecting environmental data (air/soil temperature and humidity) related to the growth of farm products (namely grapes and greenhouse vegetables) over a period of three months. A web-based visualization tool for the collected data is also presented, to validate the LoRaFarM architecture

Mobility in Unsupervised Word Embeddings for Knowledge Extraction—The Scholars’ Trajectories across Research Topics

In the knowledge discovery field of the Big Data domain the analysis of geographic positioning and mobility information plays a key role. At the same time, in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain pre-trained models such as BERT and word embedding algorithms such as Word2Vec enabled a rich encoding of words that allows mapping textual data into points of an arbitrary multi-dimensional space, in which the notion of proximity reflects an association among terms or topics. The main contribution of this paper is to show how analytical tools, traditionally adopted to deal with geographic data to measure the mobility of an agent in a time interval, can also be effectively applied to extract knowledge in a semantic realm, such as a semantic space of words and topics, looking for latent trajectories that can benefit the properties of neural network latent representations. As a case study, the Scopus database was queried about works of highly cited researchers in recent years. On this basis, we performed a dynamic analysis, for measuring the Radius of Gyration as an index of the mobility of researchers across scientific topics. The semantic space is built from the automatic analysis of the paper abstracts of each author. In particular, we evaluated two different methodologies to build the semantic space and we found that Word2Vec embeddings perform better than the BERT ones for this task. Finally, The scholars’ trajectories show some latent properties of this model, which also represent new scientific contributions of this work. These properties include (i) the correlation between the scientific mobility and the achievement of scientific results, measured through the H-index; (ii) differences in the behavior of researchers working in different countries and subjects; and (iii) some interesting similarities between mobility patterns in this semantic realm and those typically observed in the case of human mobility

Mobility in Unsupervised Word Embeddings for Knowledge Extraction—The Scholars’ Trajectories across Research Topics

In the knowledge discovery field of the Big Data domain the analysis of geographic positioning and mobility information plays a key role. At the same time, in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain pre-trained models such as BERT and word embedding algorithms such as Word2Vec enabled a rich encoding of words that allows mapping textual data into points of an arbitrary multi-dimensional space, in which the notion of proximity reflects an association among terms or topics. The main contribution of this paper is to show how analytical tools, traditionally adopted to deal with geographic data to measure the mobility of an agent in a time interval, can also be effectively applied to extract knowledge in a semantic realm, such as a semantic space of words and topics, looking for latent trajectories that can benefit the properties of neural network latent representations. As a case study, the Scopus database was queried about works of highly cited researchers in recent years. On this basis, we performed a dynamic analysis, for measuring the Radius of Gyration as an index of the mobility of researchers across scientific topics. The semantic space is built from the automatic analysis of the paper abstracts of each author. In particular, we evaluated two different methodologies to build the semantic space and we found that Word2Vec embeddings perform better than the BERT ones for this task. Finally, The scholars’ trajectories show some latent properties of this model, which also represent new scientific contributions of this work. These properties include (i) the correlation between the scientific mobility and the achievement of scientific results, measured through the H-index; (ii) differences in the behavior of researchers working in different countries and subjects; and (iii) some interesting similarities between mobility patterns in this semantic realm and those typically observed in the case of human mobility