IoT-Based Acquisition of Research Data for Scientific Computing at ICTP

The workshop component of this activity is designed to introduce IT staff, engineers and scientists from Research and Education Networks (RENs) in the African region to operating a network-wide service for the scientific application of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and technology. The workshop includes hands-on sessions focused on how-to build, run and maintain various parts of the service pipeline from deployment of IoT sensors and gateways to data analysis.

The high-level meeting component aims to discuss and explore broader Euro-African participation in the AfricaConnect (AC) initiative, focusing on developing and enhancing regional infrastructure for data acquisition and scientific computing. This half-day meeting will focus on exploring and developing opportunities in AC alongside relevant European/international stakeholders as part of the planning and implementation of the AC project.

Topics:

• Introduction to IoT: Choosing sensors, deploying sensors and gateways. Powering IoT devices (battery and solar powered solutions)
• Introduction to IoT communications network:  LoRAWAN gateway deployment (including redundant internet-link+power)
• Introduction to the MQTT protocol and setup of an Open-source/Community edition of an IoT platform for automatic archival of collected data
• Basic Data Science for IoT service pipeline: Working with CSV formatted data; removal of duplication; changing data resolution/scale); visualisation and graphing; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning  models; publishing and sharing data
• Addressing security related challenges (IoT sensors. gateways and data access)
• High Level Meeting:  AfricaConnect and African-wide regional infrastructure for data acquisition, scientific research and High Performance Computing (HPC) centres.

Link to the event: https://indico.ictp.it/event/10787