Senzations 2014 IoT school and City Karma

I recently was lucky enough to attend Technical track of Senzations 2014 Summer School hosted in Biograd na Moru, Croatia.  It was an incredible experience traveling to Croatia, without taking merits to the event itself, one of the things I enjoyed the most was the City experience, and of course the Boat trip to the National Park Kornati.

The lecturers were great and gave plenty of insights on both Wireless Sensor Networks, M2M and IoT,and shared their current work on the field, most of the slides are available at the Program website, but I though about sharing some of the presentation links below:

• Building Internet of Things applications with COMPOSE and JavaScript - Charalampos Doukas from CREATE-NET
• EAR-IT, Acoustic Sensing in Smart Environment: a case for audio streaming with low-resource IoT devices - Congduc Pham, LIUPPA lab
• Hunting investors - Richard Brandt, Lacocca Institute
• Semantic Technologies for the Internet of Things - Payam Barnaghi, University of Surrey
• Experiences in ‘Crowd Sensing’ for environmental monitoring - D K Arvind, Univ. of Edinburgh
• Tutorial Galileo and IoT - Alex Gluhak, Intel Labs, and Michele Nati, University of Surrey 

As Intel was supporting the event, there were plenty of Intel Galileo development kits to use to prototype our very own IoT-driven applications, the core of the event: divide into teams and create an IoT application from the prototype to the business plan.  Here's mine with plenty of Grove sensors from SeeedStudio attached in the prototype phase.

Our team, the DreamTeam, scored big time and was one of the winners of the 4-days Hackaton with our project: City Karma, which had its own dorky video as well! The main idea was to target the lack of social awareness in cities, and City Karma was born:

A big shout to the DreamTeam: Berta Jadro, Adela Sockovic, Bruno Dunaj, Nikola Paic, Ivan Jokic, Stevan Jokic

The application was implemented using a Python script running in the Galileo Board, monitoring 3 types of events: loud scream for help, emergency button and assistance button, then posting a Twitter message indicating the location of the event, type and date, with a randomly generated Karma Code.  A person following the #CityKarma hashtag or the CityKarma twitter account then could see the new event, and could reply the Twitter message to inform the person in distress that help its on its way.

A mobile application would also allow to flash this alert to the screen, by monitoring the City Karma feed and using the user location to see if the user is nearby.

Then the helping hand would get Karma Points, plenty useful to show off and maybe get a free expresso or a discount in affiliated partners, maybe a nice tax reduction? what would it take for you to go out of your way and help a stranger?  Could you ignore a person nearby you asking for help? Let's hope the people frequenting this blog are natural Karma sponges, if not remember this:

When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel. - Harold Kushner

The application was powered by MQTT over WiFI/GPRS, using a local Node-RED server to receive the help message, parse and post it to Twitter, and also to track the Twitter feed for responses, posting an update on the MQTT topic to notify the person in distress that his help request has been answered, by means of a LED notification.

If you want to take a peep at the code it is uploaded in my Github, keep in mind this is not production-ready code and was done only as a proof-of-concept.

To wrap this up, I'm really looking forward to next year event, I hope I can assist as both a participant or a lecturer, it was an incredible gathering of talent and knowledge, and a fun crowd to hang out.  A big thanks to Srdjan Krco (DunavNET) for organizing the event, Alex Gluhak (Intel Labs) for rolling out the hackaton and providing the equipment and tech support, and Charalampos Doukas/Jan Pernecky for the memories.

The presentation videos are available at Senzations YouTube channel