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-worldInternet 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: The promises inherent in users coming together to form data
sharing network communities, bring to the foreground new problems formulated
over such dynamic, ever growing, computing, storage, and networking
infrastructures. A key open challenge is to harness these highly
distributed resources toward the development of an ultra scalable, efficient
search engine. From a technical viewpoint, any acceptable solution
must fully exploit all available resources dictating the removal of any
centralized points of control, which can also readily lead to performance
bottlenecks and reliability/availability problems. Equally importantly,
however, a highly distributed solution can also facilitate pluralism in informing
users about internet content, which is crucial in order to preclude
the formation of information-resource monopolies and the biased visibility
of content from economically-powerful sources. To meet these challenges,
the work described here puts forward MINERVA{\^a}{\"i}¿½{\"i}¿½, a novel search
engine architecture, designed for scalability and efficiency. MINERVA{\^a}{\"i}¿½{\"i}¿½
encompasses a suite of novel algorithms, including algorithms for creating
data networks of interest, placing data on network nodes, load balancing,
top-k algorithms for retrieving data at query time, and replication algorithms
for expediting top-k query processing. We have implemented the
proposed architecture and we report on our extensive experiments with
real-world, web-crawled, and synthetic data and queries, showcasing the
scalability and efficiency traits of MINERVA{\^a}{\"i}¿½{\"i}¿½.
Abstract: In this work, we explore context-aware application scenarios that become possible utilizing semantically-rich information derived from real-world mobility and presence traces. Traces produced by people carrying personal mobile devices, capturing social and contextual interactions, serve as enables for Future Internet applications. We discuss the fundamental concepts, technical issues and related research challenges. We propose a reference architecture for setting up a system that collects such traces in a Smart City environment. We present the algorithms used to process the traces and infer interactions and interests for the observed populations. We conduct two 3-day trial deployments: one in an office environment and the other in the context of a Smart Conference application. We discuss our findings regarding the system's capability to track interactions and the overall efficacy of the application.
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.
