Alberto Serra

Indoor pedestrian navigation system using a modern smartphone

In this work we present a pedestrian navigation system for indoor environments based on the dead reckoning positioning method, 2D barcodes, and data from accelerometers and magnetometers. All the sensing and computing technologies of our solution are available in common smart phones. The need to create indoor navigation systems arises from the inaccessibility of the classic navigation systems, such as GPS, in indoor environments.

Humanizing the Internet of Things - Toward a Human-centered Internet-and-web of Things

This paper envisions how the Internet of Things (IoT) complements the Internet of People to build a humancentered Internet-and-Web of Things. The Internet of Things should go beyond the Machine-to-Machine paradigm and must include people in its foundation, resulting in a “Humanized Internet of Things (H-IoT)”. Starting from a relevant work of Fiske, this paper defines how the Human-centred Internet of Things can embed the Fiske patterns in this particular domain. An analysis of some of existing IoT platforms and projects is also presented with the aim to analyse how real implementations are in the same direction of such

Infrastructure-free indoor navigation: a case study

In this article, we describe a low-cost indoor navigation system, based on the capabilities of modern smartphones commonly equipped with accelerometer, gyroscope, camera and Internet connection. The main claim of this paper is that, relaxing the requirement of best accuracy, with an intelligent use of inertial sensors, digital maps, and ambient tagging, it is still possible to get good results. Our mobile application helps the user in retrieving directions and finding places in large indoor environments where the global positioning system (GPS) is not available, such as airports, hospitals, museums and so on. The goal is to get a system able to work without the use of any physical ad hoc infrastructure and without relying on any wearable device. We name our infrastructure-free system Roodin, and its features are as follows: user-friendly interface, quick install and calibration tool, point-of-interest search and guidance. All the features presented in this paper are designed and implemented, and the application has been evaluated with real users. A summary of user evaluation is reported in the paper.

SocIoTal — The development and architecture of a social IoT framework

This paper presents the development and architecture of the SocIoTal platform. SocIoTal is a European FP7 project which aims to create a socially-aware citizen-centric Internet of Things infrastructure. The aim of the project is to put trust, user-control and transparency at the heart of the system in order to gain the confidence of everyday users and developers. By providing adequate tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry, it will encourage citizen participation in the Internet of Things. This adds a novel and rich dimension to the emerging IoT ecosystem, providing a wealth of opportunities for the creation of new services and applications. These services and applications will be able to address the needs of society therefore improving the quality of life in cities and communities. In addition to technological innovation, the SocIoTal project sought to innovate the way in which users and developers interact and shape the direction of the project. The project worked on new formats in obtaining data, information and knowledge. The first step consisted of gaining input, feedback and information on IoT as a reality in business. This led to a validated iterative methodology which formed part of the SocIoTal toolkit and a best practices guide for local policy makers and cities.

Design and Implementation of a Cloud-Based Platform for Unleashing the Personal and Communal Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day’s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.

Scripting a Smart City: The CityScripts Experiment in Santander

This paper describes a work-in-progress programming experiment where the playground is an entire city. Based on the SmartSantander FIRE infrastructure, the City Script project is aimed at integrating and experimenting a Web of Things scenario in which sensors and actuators in the city have a digital counterpart and can eventually used to compose mashups with social networks and other digital online sources of data.

Using the Web of Data in Semantic Sensor Networks

In this paper we investigated new methods of effectively performing data modelling for making Internet of Things information accessible to humans and machines. In the current era of technology, we need efficient methods and solutions able to structure, annotate, share and make sense of the IoT data. We assumed that Things are basically active participants in information processes by exchanging data and information “sensed” about the environment. Semantics provide unambiguous machine-interpretable descriptions for data related to Things. In our methodology we proposed to encode sensor and observation data annotations through Semantic Web technologies and to embed them within devices. Moreover, we transformed such annotations to semantic descriptions, by using the cloud-based ThingSpeak middleware. The obtained descriptions are expected to compound a shared RDF Knowledge Base, useful to improve integration and communication processes between different networks.

Making Onlife Principles into Actionable Guidelines for Smart City Frameworks and #IoT Policies

The EU project SocIoTal research identified the following as main barriers to broad IoT adoption in ‘smart’ cities: (i) lack of understanding by SME’s and City Councils, (ii) lack of third-party trust providers and (iii) lack of involvement of end users in building use cases and developing new services. The project conceived the following measures to overcome them: meetups, to address the lack of understanding introducing research questions and listening to the local stakeholders, and co-creation workshops to involve citizens from the city of Novi Sad in Serbia together with researchers from University of Cantabria, Santander. These measures and solutions warrant an ethical framework to inform and educate decision-making regarding #IoT system architectural options, and the Onlife Manifesto and initiative of the European Commission might be relevant in this context.