SmartSantander: Internet of Things research and innovation through citizen participation

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.Although only a few names appear in this paper’s list of authors, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-257992

Smart cities at the forefront of the future internet

Smart cities have been recently pointed out by M2M experts as an emerging market with enormous potential, which is expected to drive the digital economy forward in the coming years. However, most of the current city and urban developments are based on vertical ICT solutions leading to an unsustainable sea of systems and market islands. In this work we discuss how the recent vision of the Future Internet (FI), and its particular components, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform. Moreover, we present some results of generic implementations based on the ITU-T’s Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) model. The referenced platform model fulfills basic principles of open, federated and trusted platforms (FOTs) at two different levels: the infrastructure level (IoT to support the complexity of heterogeneous sensors deployed in urban spaces), and at the service level (IoS as a suit of open and standardized enablers to facilitate the composition of interoperable smart city services). We also discuss the need of infrastructures at the European level for a realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research, and present main principles of the unique-in-the-world experimental test facility under development within the SmartSantander EU project.Although only a few names appear on this paper, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of many people, particularly all the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project, partially funded by the EC under contract number FP7-ICT-257992

Smart city services over a future Internet platform based on Internet of Things and cloud: the smart parking case

Enhancing the effectiveness of city services and assisting on a more sustainable development of cities are two of the crucial drivers of the smart city concept. This paper portrays a field trial that leverages an internet of things (IoT) platform intended for bringing value to existing and future smart city infrastructures. The paper highlights how IoT creates the basis permitting integration of current vertical city services into an all-encompassing system, which opens new horizons for the progress of the effectiveness and sustainability of our cities. Additionally, the paper describes a field trial on provisioning of real time data about available parking places both indoor and outdoor. The trial has been carried out at Santander’s (Spain) downtown area. The trial takes advantage of both available open data sets as well as of a large-scale IoT infrastructure. The trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be created on top of the proposed architecture.This work has been partially funded by the research project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. This work has been supported by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE “Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios” (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

A solution for tracking visitors in Smart Shopping environments: A real platform implementation based on Raspberry Pi

In parallel to the explosion of the use of wireless technologies to connect devices, the scientific community is continually aiming to take advantage of such technologies to provide new services. In this sense, there have been many attempts to exploit the information provided by IEEE802.11 and Bluetooth interfaces, commonly found in most of the smartphones that are being used at the time of writing. In this paper we describe a novel deployment that fosters such approach. Furthermore, the measurements that are gathered are made available, thanks to its integration within the SmartSantander testbed, and to the federation with complementary testbeds. The federation platform and the described deployment are outcomes of the FESTIVAL collaborative project (Europe-Japan). Besides depicting the corresponding software architecture, the paper also discusses some preliminary results that are used to assess the feasibility of the proposed scheme.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVAL project (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement 643275, and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. This work has been also supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

Large-scale mobile sensing enabled internet-of-things testbed for smart city services

Smart cities are one of the key application domains for the Internet-of-Things paradigm. Extending the Web into the physical realm of a city, by means of the widespread deployment of spatially distributed Internet-addressable devices with sensing and/or actuation capabilities, allows improving efficiency of city services. Vehicles moving around the city become excellent probes when the objective is to gather information across the city in a cost effective manner. Public transportation fleets, taxis, or vehicles such as waste collection trucks cover most of the urban areas with a limited number of vehicles. This paper presents the deployment of a large scale Internet-of-Things testbed that has been carried out in the city of Santander. It extends previous descriptions by providing a specification of one of the unique features of the testbed, namely, the devices that have been installed on 140 buses, taxis, and vans that every day drive around the city. Besides the physical characteristics of the devices installed and the lessons learnt during the deployment, the paper introduces the three mobile sensing network strategies used for distributing the data gathered. Finally, the paper sketches some of smart city services which might be provided using the information coming from the mobile IoT devices.This work has been partially funded by Research Project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. The authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest of partners within the consortium leading to the results presented in this paper.The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the Spanish government for the funding in the following project: “Connectivity as a Service: Access for the Internet of the Future,” COSAIF (TEC2012-38574-C02- 01)

Managing large amounts of data generated by a Smart City internet of things deployment

The Smart City concept is being developed from a lot of different axes encompassing multiple areas of social and technical sciences. However, something that is common to all these approaches is the central role that the capacity of sharing information has. Hence, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are seen as key enablers for the transformation of urban regions into Smart Cities. Two of these technologies, namely Internet of Things and Big Data, have a predominant position among them. The capacity to "sense the city" and access all this information and provide added-value services based on knowledge derived from it are critical to achieving the Smart City vision. This paper reports on the specification and implementation of a software platform enabling the management and exposure of the large amount of information that is continuously generated by the IoT deployment in the city of Santander.This work has been partially funded by the research project SmartSantander, under FP7- ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the Spanish government for the funding in the following project: "Connectivity as a Service: Access for the Internet of the Future", COSAIF (TEC2012-38574-C02-01)

A study of Be/X-ray binaries in the SMC and the Milky Way

This thesis presents the results of monitoring of 14 Be/X-ray binary systems in the Galaxy over ~9 years with the BATSE instrument on-board CGRO, and 46 in the SMC over ~8 years using PCA-RXTEdata from a weekly survey program.  The reduction pipeline for these data we perfected and new code was written to analyse the products.  A technique is presented for subtracting the contribution of pulsations to a light curve, enabling the cleaning of power spectra with many sources and the precise measurement of power for all the harmonic components of a pulsar’s profile.  application of these techniques has permitted the production of pulse amplitude light curves for the SMC systems, timing analysis of which has returned a large number of orbital ephemeredes, which in turn has allowed for a better estimate of the spin/orbit relationship parameters.  Two new quantities are defined for transient outburst systems: δorb is the difference between the predicted and actual orbital periods expressed as a percentage, and is found to be inversely proportional to the magnetic fields of the pulsars in the SMC, but no such relation is seen for the Galactic systems.  Xod is the number of outbursts per orbit, which we find to be strongly correlated with the orbital period for both galaxies.  Based on the distribution of Xod we propose a classification scheme that would categorize Be/X-ray binary systems as Class Ia, Ib or II.  A dependence of the X-ray luminosity on Xod is also found for SMC systems, but is weaker for Galactic ones.  We present 21 possible new pulsars in the SMC for which orbital ephemerides have also been calculated.  A multi-set technique for folding light curves is discussed and used to create pulse profiles for all the SMC pulsars, qualitatively showing that in most cases both fan and pencil beams are required together in order to explain the observed shapes.  Lastly, two pulsars: SXP46.4 and SXP165 were found to be misidentifications of SXP46.6 and SXP169 respectively.</p

Aneurismas coronarios no asociados a estenosis en las arterias coronarias: Tratamiento conservador y evolución en un registro de 6 casos

Los aneurismas coronarios son una patología relativamente infrecuente, con una incidencia anual del 1-2%. La causa más frecuente es la ateroesclerosis coronaria y en este caso se suelen asociar a estenosis en las arterias coronarias. Revisamos todos los estudios angiográficos realizados en los últimos 7 años y recogimos los casos de 6 pacientes ingresados por síndrome coronario agudo a los que se realizó coronariografía, demostrando dilataciones aneurismáticas en las arterias coronarias sin relación con estenosis proximales o distales. A pesar de la ausencia de estenosis coronarias, pensamos que la enfermedad ateroesclerótica podría ser la causa mediante: lesión del endotelio y la elástica interna con el depósito de lípidos, células musculares lisas, colágeno, macrófagos y linfocitos T, con afectación final de las capas media y adventicia, y neoformación de vasa-vasorum. Se desconoce la evolución de los aneurismas coronarios sin estenosis significativas asociadas y sin otra causa etiológica tratable. A tenor de la escasa literatura publicada al respecto y con nuestra experiencia creemos que el tratamiento médico conservador podría ser una buena opción en estos casos. En el seguimiento a medio-largo plazo no se registraron eventos cardíacos mayores en ningún paciente