Abstract: A considerable part of recent research in smart cities and IoT has focused on achieving energy savings in buildings and supporting aspects related to sustainability. In this context, the educational community is one of the most important ones to consider, since school buildings constitute a large part of non-residential buildings, while also educating students on sustainability matters is an investment for the future. In this work, we discuss a methodology for achieving energy savings in schools based on the utilization of data produced by an IoT infrastructure installed inside school buildings and related educational scenarios. We present the steps comprising this methodology in detail, along with a set of tangible results achieved within the GAIA project. We also showcase how an IoT infrastructure can support activities in an educational setting and produce concrete outcomes, with typical levels of 20% energy savings.
Abstract: Raising awareness among young people on the
relevance of behaviour change for achieving energy savings is widely considered as a key approach towards long-term and costeffective energy efficiency policies. The GAIA Project aims to deliver a comprehensive solution for both increasing awareness on energy efficiency and achieving energy savings in school buildings. In this framework, we present a novel rule engine that, leveraging a resource-based graph model encoding relevant application domain knowledge, accesses IoT data for producing energy savings recommendations. The engine supports configurability, extensibility and ease-of-use requirements, to be easily applied and customized to different buildings. The paper introduces the main design and implementation details and presents a set of preliminary performance results.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with the time efficient
processing of spatiotemporal predicates, i.e. spatial
predicates associated with an exact temporal
constraint. A set of such predicates forms a buffer
query or a Spatio-temporal Pattern (STP) Query with
time. In the more general case of an STP query, the
temporal dimension is introduced via the relative order
of the spatial predicates (STP queries with order).
Therefore, the efficient processing of a spatiotemporal
predicate is crucial for the efficient implementation of
more complex queries of practical interest. We propose
an extension of a known approach, suitable for
processing spatial predicates, which has been used for
the efficient manipulation of STP queries with order.
The extended method is supported by efficient indexing
structures. We also provide experimental results that
show the efficiency of the technique.
Abstract: Energy consumption reserves a large portion of the budget for school buildings. At the same time, the students that use such facilities are the adults of the years to come and thus, should they embrace energy-aware behaviors, then sustainable results with respect to energy efficiency are anticipated. GAIA is a research project targeting this user domain, proposing a set of applications that a) aims at raising awareness, prompting action and fostering engagement in energy efficiency enhancement, and b) is adaptable to the needs of each facility/community. This application set relies on an IoT sensing infrastructure, as well as on the use of humans as sensors to create situational awareness.
Abstract: Smart cities are becoming a vibrant application domain for a number of science fields. As such, service providers and stakeholders are beginning to integrate co-creation aspects into current implementations to shape the future smart city solutions. In this context, holistic solutions are required to test such aspects in real city-scale IoT deployments, considering the complex city ecosystems. In this work, we discuss OrganiCity¢s implementation of an Experimentation-as-a-Service framework, presenting a toolset that allows developing, deploying and evaluating smart city solutions in a one-stop shop manner. This is the first time such an integrated toolset is offered in the context of a large-scale IoT infrastructure, which spans across multiple European cities. We discuss the design and implementation of the toolset, presenting our view on what Experimentation-as-a-Service should provide, and how it is implemented. We present initial feedback from 25 experimenter teams that have utilized this toolset in the OrganiCity project, along with a discussion on two detailed actual use cases to validate our approach. Learnings from all experiments are discussed as well as architectural considerations for platform scaling. Our feedback from experimenters indicates that Experimentation-as-a-Service is a viable and useful approach.
Abstract: The use of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies is currently being investigated in numerous and diverse application domains. In this work, we discuss the ways in which we are integrating AR into educational in-class activities for the GAIA project, aiming to enhance existing tools that target behavioral changes towards energy efficiency in schools. We combine real-time IoT data from a sensing infrastructure inside a fleet of school buildings with AR software running on tablets and smartphones, as companions to a set of educational lab activities aimed at promoting energy awareness in a STEM context. We also utilize this software as a means to ease access to IoT data and simplify device maintenance. We report on the design and current status of our implementation, describing functionality in the context of our target applications, while also relaying our experiences from the use of such technologies in this application domain.
Abstract: The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies inside classrooms is spreading to an ever-increasing number of education and science fields. GAIA is a European research project focused on achieving behavior change for sustainability and energy awareness in schools. In this work, we report on how a large IoT deployment in a number of educational buildings and real-world data from this infrastructure, are utilized to support a “maker” lab kit activity inside the classroom. We also provide some insights to the integration of these activities in the school curriculum, along with a discussion on feedback produced through a series of workshop activities in a number of schools in Greece. Moreover, we discuss the application of the lab kit framework towards implementing an interactive installation. We also report on how the lab kit is paired with a serious game and an augmented reality app for smartphones and tablets, supporting the in-class activities. Our initial evaluation results show a very positive first reaction by the school community.
Abstract: Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage is key to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examines ways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizens¢ behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system¢s high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies and services in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer new app-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency of the building. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisioned here (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity.
Abstract: In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population
lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore,
a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets,
and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications.
Abstract: We have designed and implemented a platform that enables monitoring and actuation in multiple buildings, that has been utilised in the context of a research project in Greece, focusing on public school buildings. The Green Mindset project has installed IoT devices in 12 Greek public schools to monitor energy consumption, along with indoor and outdoor environmental parameters. We present the architecture and actual deployment of our system, along with a first set of findings.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss key findings, technological challenges and socioeconomic opportunities in Smart City era. Most of the conclusions were gathered during SmartSantander project, an EU project that is developing a city-scale testbed for IoT and Future Internet experimentation, providing an integrated framework for implementing Smart City services.
Abstract: The domain of smart cities is currently burgeoning, with a lot of potential for scientific and socio-economic innovation gradually being revealed. It is also becoming apparent that cross-discipline research will be instrumental in designing and building smarter cities, where IoT technology is becoming omnipresent. SmartSantander is an FP7 project that built a massive
city-scale IoT testbed aiming to provide both a tool for the research community and a functional system for the local government to implement operational city
services. In this work, we present key smart cities projects, main application domains and representative smart city frameworks that reflect the latest advances in the smart cities domain and our own experience through SmartSantander. The project has deployed 51.910 IoT endpoints, offering a massive infrastructure to the community, as well as functional system services and a number of end-user applications. Based on these aspects, we identify and
discuss a number of key scientific and technological challenges. We also present an overview of the developed system components and applications, and
discuss the ways that current smart city challenges were handled in the project.
Abstract: As the Internet of Things (IOT) arises, the use of
low-end devices on a daily basis increases. The wireless nature
of communication that these devices provide raises security and
privacy issues. For protecting a user’s privacy, cryptography
offers the tool of zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). In this
paper, we study well-established ZKP protocols based on the
discrete logarithm problem and we adapt them to the Elliptic
Curve Cryptography (ECC) setting, which consists an ideal
candidate for embedded implementations. Then, we implement
the proposed protocols on Wiselib, a generic and open source
algorithmic library. For the first time, we present a thorough
evaluation of the protocols on two popular hardware platforms
equipped with low end microcontrollers (Jennic JN5139, TI
MSP430) and 802.15.4 RF transceivers, in terms of code size,
execution time, message size and energy requirements. This
work’s results can be used from developers who wish to achieve
certain levels of privacy in their applications.
Abstract: Few IoT systems monitoring energy consumption in buildings have focused on the educational community. IoT in the educational domain can jump-start a process of sustainability awareness and behavioral change towards energy savings, as well as provide tangible financial savings. We present a real-world multi-site IoT deployment, comprising 19 school buildings, aiming at enabling IoT-based energy awareness and sustainability lectures, promoting energy-saving behaviors supported by IoT data. We discuss scenarios where IoT-enabled applications are integrated into school life, providing an engaging and hands-on approach, based on real data, generating value in terms of educational and energy savings outcomes. We also present a set of first results, based on the analysis of school-building data, which highlight potential ways to identify irregularities and inefficiencies.
Abstract: Raising awareness among young people, and especially students, on the relevance of behavior change for achieving energy savings is increasingly being considered as a key enabler towards long-term and cost-effective energy efficiency policies. However, the way to successfully apply educational interventions focused on such targets inside schools is still an open question. In this paper, we present our approach for enabling IoT-based energy savings and sustainability awareness lectures and promoting data-driven energy-saving behaviors focused on a high school audience. We present our experiences toward the successful application of sets of educational tools and software over a real-world Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. We discuss the use of gamification and competition as a very effective end-user engagement mechanism for school audiences. We also present the design of an IoT-based hands-on lab activity, integrated within a high school computer science curriculum utilizing IoT devices and data produced inside the school building, along with the Node-RED platform. We describe the tools used, the organization of the educational activities and related goals. We report on the experience carried out in both directions in a high school in Italy and conclude by discussing the results in terms of achieved energy savings within an observation period.
Abstract: Several networking technologies targeting the IoT application space currently compete within the smart city domain, both in outdoor and indoor deployments. However, up till now, there is no clear winner, and results from real-world deployments have only recently started to surface. In this paper, we present a comparative study of 2 popular IoT networking technologies, LoRa and IEEE 802.15.4, within the context of a research-oriented IoT deployment inside school buildings in Europe, targeting energy efficiency in education. We evaluate the actual performance of these two technologies in real-world settings, presenting a comparative study on the effect of parameters like the built environment, network quality, or data rate. Our results indicate that both technologies have their advantages, and while in certain cases both are perfectly adequate, in our use case LoRa exhibits a more robust behavior. Moreover, LoRa¢s characteristics make it a very good choice for indoor IoT deployments such as in educational buildings, and especially in cases where there are low bandwidth requirements.
Abstract: Educational buildings constitute 17% of the non-residential building stock in the EU [1], while recent work shows that a focus on energy use in schools can potentially yield an array of rewards, in concert with educational excellence and a healthy learning environment [2].
Having these in mind, GAIA1, a Horizon2020 EC-funded project, is developing an IoT platform
that combines sensing, web-based and gamification elements, in order to address the
educational community. Its primary aim is to increase awareness about energy consumption
and sustainability, based on real sensor data produced by the school buildings where students and teachers live and work, while also lead towards behavior change in terms of energy efficiency.
Abstract: A number of infrastructures are being deployed for Future Internet experimentation purposes, providing access to large-scale IoT resources to researchers and industry. SmartSantander is among the largest ones, deployed at the city center of Santander. We discuss SmartSantander¢s augmentation using smartphones provided by volunteers, in order to increase sensing resources and ubiquity. Our system allows developers to write code for Android and automatically deploy their experiments to Android devices, alongside the SmartSantander platform. Initial results produced by experiments with a small number of volunteers show that the system provides meaningful extensions to the existing platform.
Abstract: Abstract— Numerous smart city testbeds and system deployments have surfaced around the world, aiming to provide services over unified large heterogeneous IoT infrastructures. Although we have achieved new scales in smart city installations and systems, so far the focus has been to provide diverse sources of data to smart city services consumers, while neglecting to provide ways to simplify making good use of them. We believe that knowledge creation in smart cities through data annotation, supported in both an automated and a crowdsourced manner, is an aspect that will bring additional value to smart cities. We present here our approach, aiming to utilize an existing smart city deployment and the OrganiCity software ecosystem. We discuss key challenges along with characteristic use cases, and report on our design and implementation, along with preliminary results.
Abstract: Internet of Things technologies are considered the next big
step in Smart Building installations. Although such technologies have
been widely studied in simulation and experimental scenarios it is not so
obvious how problems of real world installations should be dealt with. In
this work we deploy IoT devices for sensing and control in a multi-office
space and employ technologies such as CoAP, RESTful interfaces and
Semantic Descriptions to integrate them with the Web. We report our
research goals, the challenges we faced, the decisions we made and the
experience gained from the design, deployment and operation of all the
hardware and software components that compose our system.
Abstract: The adoption of technologies like the IoT in urban environments, together with the intensive use of smartphones, is driving transformation towards smart cities. Under this perspective, Experimentation-as-a-Service within OrganiCity aims to create an experimental facility with technologies, services, and applications that simplify innovation within urban ecosystems. We discuss here tools that facilitate experimentation, implementing ways to organize, execute, and administer experimentation campaigns in a smart city context. We discuss the benefits of our framework, presenting some preliminary results. This is the first time such tools are paired with large-scale smart city infrastructures, enabling both city-scale experimentation and cross-site experimentation.
Abstract: We briefly present the design and architecture of a system that aims to simplify the process of organizing, executing and administering crowdsensing campaigns in a smart city context over smartphones volunteered by citizens. We built our system on top of an Android app substrate on the end-user level, which enables us to utilize smartphone resources. Our system allows researchers and other developers to manage and distribute their “mini” smart city applications, gather data and publish their results through the Organicity smart city platform. We believe this is the first time such a tool is paired with a large scale IoT
infrastructure, to enable truly city-scale IoT and smart city experimentation.
Abstract: One oft-cited strategy towards sustainability is improving energy efficiency inside public buildings. In this context, the educational buildings sector presents a very interesting and important case for the monitoring and management of buildings, since it addresses both energy and educational issues. In this work, we present and discuss the hardware IoT infrastructure substrate that provides real-time monitoring in multiple school buildings. We believe that such a system needs to follow an open design approach: rely on hardware-agnostic components that communicate over well-defined open interfaces. We present in detail the design of our hardware components, while also providing insights to the overall system design and a first set of results on their operation. The presented hardware components are utilized as the core hardware devices for GAIA, an EU research project aimed at the educational community. As our system has been deployed and tested in several public school buildings in Greece, we also report on its validation.
Abstract: Raising awareness among young people and changing their behavior and habits concerning energy usage and the environment is key to achieving a sustainable planet. The goal to address the global climate problem requires informing the population on their roles in mitigation actions and adaptation of sustainable behaviors. Addressing climate change and achieve ambitious energy and climate targets requires a change in citizen behavior and consumption practices. IoT sensing and related scenario and practices, which address school children via discovery, gamification, and educational activities, are examined in this paper. Use of seawater sensors in STEM education, that has not previously been addressed, is included in these educational scenaria.
Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of capturing and pro-
cessing certain spatiotemporal, social characteristics of hu-
man interactions with the use of Wireless Sensor Networks.
Using TelosB motes, we basically monitor the binary prox-
imity within a group of people. The collected data give an
insight of how people interact with each other (how often,
for how much time, in which room) and provide a novel tool
(which can be further enhanced) to study (quantitatively, in
an automated manner) human social networks.
Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of capturing and pro-
cessing certain spatiotemporal, social characteristics of hu-
man interactions with the use of Wireless Sensor Networks.
Using TelosB motes, we basically monitor the binary prox-
imity within a group of people. The collected data give an
insight of how people interact with each other (how often,
for how much time, in which room) and provide a novel tool
(which can be further enhanced) to study (quantitatively, in
an automated manner) human social networks.
Abstract: Today¢s students are the citizens of tomorrow, and they should have the skills and tools to understand and respond to climate change. Green Awareness in Action (GAIA) has built an IoT infrastructure within 25 schools in Europe, in order to enable lectures that target sustainability and energy efficiency, based on data produced inside school buildings. The school community has reacted very positively to this approach and has reduced energy consumption as a consequence.
Abstract: A lot of activity is being devoted to studying issues related to energy consumption and efficiency in our buildings, and especially on public buildings. In this context, the educational public buildings should bean important part of the equation. At the same time, there is an evident need for open datasets, which should be publicly available for researchers to use. We have implemented a real-world multi-site Inter-net of Things (IoT) deployment, comprising 25 school buildings across Europe, primarily designed as a foundation for enabling IoT-based energy awareness and sustainability lectures and promoting data-driven energy-saving behaviors. In this work, we present some of the basic aspects to producing datasets from this deployment and discuss its potential uses. We also provide a brief discussion on data derived from a preliminary analysis of thermal comfort-related data produced from this infrastructure.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the integration of Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN) and smart objects with the Web. We present a set of research challenges which we believe are the most important ones rising from this integration and propose a prototype system, Uberdust, which addresses such challenges. Uberdust is a brokerage web service for connecting smart objects to the Internet of Things, providing storage, sharing and discovery of real-time and historical data from smart objects, devices & building installations around the world via the Web. Our system provides high-level language-independent APIs so IoT application developers may choose their favorite programming or scripting languages.
Abstract: For the Internet of Things to finally become a reality, obstacles on different levels need to be overcome. This is especially true for the upcoming challenge of leaving the domain of technical experts and scientists. Devices need to connect to the Internet and be able to offer services. They have to announce and describe these services in machine understandable ways so that user-facing systems are able to find and utilize them. They have to learn about their physical surroundings, so that they can serve sensing or acting purposes without explicit configuration or programming. Finally, it must be possible to include IoT devices in complex systems that combine local and remote data, from different sources, in novel and surprising ways.
We show how all of that is possible today. Our solution uses open standards and state-of-the art protocols to achieve this. It is based on 6LowPAN and CoAP for the communications part, semantic web technologies for meaningful data exchange, autonomous sensor correlation to learn about the environment, and software built around the Linked Data principles to be open for novel and unforeseen applications.
Abstract: The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies inside classrooms is spreading in an increasing number of education and science fields. GAIA is a European research project focused on achieving behavior change for sustainability and energy awareness in schools. In this work, we report on how a large IoT deployment in a number of educational buildings and real-world data from this infrastructure, are utilized to support a "maker" lab kit activity inside the classroom, together with a serious game. We also provide some insights to the integration of these activities in the school curriculum, along with a discussion on our feedback so far from a series of workshop activities in a number of schools. Our initial results show strong acceptance by the school community.
Abstract: Recent activity in the field of Internet-of-Things experimentation has focused on the federation of discrete testbeds, thus placing less effort in the integration of other related technologies, such as smartphones; also, while it is gradually moving to more application-oriented paths, such as urban settings, it has not dealt in large with applications having social networking features. We argue here that current IoT infrastructure, testbeds and related software technologies should be used in such a context, capturing real-world human mobility and social networking interactions, for use in evaluating and fine-tuning realistic mobility models and designing human-centric applications. We discuss a system for producing traces for a new generation of human-centric applications, utilizing technologies such as Bluetooth and focusing on human interactions. We describe the architecture for this system and the respective implementation details presenting two distinct deployments; one in an office environment and another in an exhibition/conference event (FET'11, The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition) with 103 active participants combined, thus covering two popular scenarios for human centric applications. Our system provides online, almost real-time, feedback and statistics and its implementation allows for rapid and robust deployment, utilizing mainstream technologies and components.
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities are two of the most popular directions the research community is pursuing very actively. But although we have made great progress in many fields, we are still trying to figure out how we can utilize our smart city and IoT infrastructures, in order to produce reliable, economically sustainable solutions that create public value, and even more so in the field of education.
GAIA1, a Horizon2020 EC-funded project, has developed an IoT infrastructure across school buildings in Europe. Its primary aim has been to raise awareness about energy consumption and sustainability, based on real-world sensor data produced inside the school buildings where students and teachers live and work. Today's students are the citizens of tomorrow, and they should have the skills to understand and respond to challenges like climate change. Currently, 25 educational building sites participate in GAIA, located in Sweden, Italy, and Greece. An IoT infrastructure [1] is installed in these buildings, monitoring in real-time their power consumption, as well as several indoor and outdoor environmental parameters.
Abstract: The utilization of IoT in the educational domain so far has trailed other more commercial application domains. In this chapter, we study a number of aspects that are
based on big data produced by a large-scale infrastructure deployed inside a fleet of educational buildings in Europe. We discuss how this infrastructure essentially enables a set of different applications, complemented by a detailed discussion regarding both performance aspects of the implementation of this IoT platform, as well as results that provide insights to its actual application in real life, both from an educational and business standpoint.