TITLE: Internet-of-Urgent-Things (IoUT) and Real-time Big Data Analytics: R&D Opportunities and Challenges
Associate Professor Dr. Simon Fong
University of Macau, Macau SAR, China
Abstract:
Emergency control is a crucial part of smart city initiatives. Based on IoT technology, for example, fire disasters can be better managed if the sensing and analytics could be supported in real-time and in large scale. This type of networks must be scalable and the information transfer within, and the decision making at the backend must be fast enough for covering areas of various sizes, from a single room to a whole city, and even national-wide. In this talk, a new research project called Internet-of-Breath (IoB) which is a typical application scenario of IoUT is introduced as a solution to disaster control using Wireless Sensor Network, for enhancing fire-and-rescue operations with real-time information of the air quality (toxic gas) and human presence at the proximity of the fire-site. Though IoB can be useful in emergency scenario, IoB would be a useful tool in detecting human occupancy in a confined area. It can estimate approximate head-counts by inferring from the size of a room and the measured CO2 concentration level inside the room. Based on the previous experiences of SafetyNET (Ref: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/microsites/enterprise/safetynet) which is a successful project led by Loughborough University UK and Southern University of Science and Technology Shenzhen, IoB extends the capacity of the SafetyNET sensor with the additional capability of CO2 concentration measurement. With this new sensing capability, new information such as human occupancy can be measured. By knowing whether and how many people exist in a certain location and its nearby locations, extra intelligence can be obtained in addition to toxic gas, fire severity etc; this will greatly help FRS operations. With the human occupancy information, we are able to design and build prototypes of applications for different scenarios that can benefit from knowing the human occupancy in real-time, through the IoB wireless sensing network. Integration of this new information on existing WSN data and systems will be presented. R&D possibilities and challenges of new applications based on human occupancy detection will be discussed in this talk.
Biography
Simon Fong graduated from La Trobe University, Australia, with a 1st Class Honours BEng. Computer Systems degree and a PhD. Computer Science degree in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Simon is now working as an Associate Professor at the Computer and Information Science Department of the University of Macau. He is a co-founder of the Data Analytics and Collaborative Computing Research Group in the Faculty of Science and Technology. Prior to his academic career, Simon took up various managerial and technical posts, such as systems engineer, IT consultant and e-commerce director in Australia and Asia. Dr. Fong has published over 396 international conference and peer-reviewed journal papers, mostly in the areas of data mining, data stream mining, big data analytics, meta-heuristics optimization algorithms, and their applications. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Network and Computer Applications of Elsevier, IEEE IT Professional Magazine, and various special issues of SCIE-indexed journals.