Implementation of an experimental platform for the social internet of things

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with the social networking concepts has led to a new paradigm called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where the objects mimic the human behavior and create their own relationships based on the rules set by their owner. This is aimed at simplifying the complexity in handling the communications between billions of objects to the benefits of the humans. Whereas several IoT platforms are already available, the SIoT paradigm has represented only a field for pure research and simulations, until now. The aim of this paper is to present our implementation of a SIoT platform. We begin by analyzing the major IoT implementations, pointing out their common characteristics that could be re-used for our goal. We then discuss the major extensions we had to introduce on the existing platforms to introduce the functionalities of the SIoT. We also present the major functionalities of the proposed system: how to register a new social object to the platform, how the system manages the creation of new relationships, and how the devices create groups of members with similar characteristics. We conclude with the description of possible simple application scenarios

Bio-inspired speed detection and discrimination

In the field of computer vision, a crucial task is the detection of motion (also called optical flow extraction). This operation allows analysis such as 3D reconstruction, feature tracking, time-to-collision and novelty detection among others. Most of the optical flow extraction techniques work within a finite range of speeds. Usually, the range of detection is extended towards higher speeds by combining some multiscale information in a serial architecture. This serial multi-scale approach suffers from the problem of error propagation related to the number of scales used in the algorithm. On the other hand, biological experiments show that human motion perception seems to follow a parallel multiscale scheme. In this work we present a bio-inspired parallel architecture to perform detection of motion, providing a wide range of operation and avoiding error propagation associated with the serial architecture. To test our algorithm, we perform relative error comparisons between both classical and proposed techniques, showing that the parallel architecture is able to achieve motion detection with results similar to the serial approach

One dimensional model of a permeable reactive barrier for the remediation of groundwater polluted by acid mine drainage in mining sites

This study is conducted under the research grant “Borsa Giovani Ricercatori 2009” of the Sardinian Regional Authorities and the PhD Programme “Geoingegneria e tecnologie ambientali”(2009-2012) of the University of Cagliari. The work has been developed in collaboration with Giuditta Lecca (tutor) and Riccardo Biddau at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4) – Sector “Energy and Environment”, directed by Ernesto Bonomi.The current study was conducted to evaluate by mean of a reactive transport model a possible groundwater remediation with the use of PRB technology, in the mining area eastward of Montevecchio, located in the southwestern part of Sardinia, polluted by AMD. Reactive transport modeling represents an excellent tool to analyze and quantify the different reactions and their interactions in multi-component system during advective and dispersive transport. A one dimensional reactive transport model has been developed with the code PHREEQC (Parkhust and Appelo) to assess the efficiency in the short and in the long period of a PRB, composed by organic carbons, used for the treatment of the mine drainage in the specific site of study and to estimate its longevity. The model simulates the dissolved pollutants removal inside the reactive medium, taking into account degradation rates of organic matter, reduction of sulfate, media compositional changes, ion metal concentration, removal mechanisms of sulfates and heavy metals, precipitation-dissolution of reduced mineral phases that precipitate as reduced mineral phases and drop in reactivity due to precipitation of mineral phases and dissolution of organic matter. Four different simulations were performed varying the hydraulic conductivity of the reactive medium, in order to evaluate how the PRB efficiency varies in the short and in the long period, varying the reactive medium characteristics. The simulation results put in evidence the potential of an organic carbon PRB in removing inorganic contaminants contained in acidic leachates, generated at mining sites. The study introduce an application tool that elucidates the geochemical processes that occurs in preventing the contaminants transport in a site of interest by mean of a PRB. It could be an useful tool in the hypothesis of a future PRB installation in the site of Montevecchio to establish its best configuration

Embedded harmonic control for dynamic trajectory planning on

This paper presents a parallel hardware implementation of a well-known navigation control method on reconfigurable digital circuits. Trajectories are estimated after an iterated computation of the harmonic functions, given the goal and obstacle positions of the navigation problem. The proposed massively distributed implementation locally computes the direction to choose to get to the goal position at any point of the environment. Changes in this environment may be immediately taken into account, for example when obstacles are discovered during an on-line exploration. The implementation results show that the proposed architecture simultaneously improves speed, power consumption, precision, and environment size.

A LoRa-mesh based system for marine Social IoT

Recently in the world of boats we hear about "smart boats", or 3.0 connected boats. For many years, technology has entered the world of boats, especially as regards safety, some systems have become mandatory. With the spread of IoT systems, boats could be considered as sources of information for other boats in the same sea area or for the construction of coastal IoT services. In the marine context, measurements of environmental values such as sea water temperature, wave period and height or direction of currents, are carried out using buoys of considerable size and at a great distance from the coast. In this paper we want to present a Social Internet of Things system that allows the distribution of information between boaters and the integration with fixed IoT networks consisting of buoys and coastal stations. A preliminary LoRa mesh communication test is presented showing a stable mesh network in which each node is able to communicate in the sea with a radius of 5 Km