On October 12, Red Hat announced details of an exciting collaboration with FIWARE, a non-profit foundation in Berlin, Germany, that developed an open source platform for smart solutions across a range of domains including cities, utilities, agriculture, and more. FIWARE’s context broker ingests data from many sources, normalizes it, and makes it available for developers to build applications to inform and enable better decision making for citizens, city officials, and their partners and stakeholders. This platform creates opportunities for researchers at Red Hat to nurture and encourage the use of data and innovative software to build more sustainable communities, including smart city and smart village projects
Red Hat Research became involved in a smart village project in Veberöd, Sweden, at the suggestion of Alexandra Machado, who leads Red Hat’s social innovation program. Machado suggested that the project might be a good fit for the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University (BU), a partnership that drives research collaboration between BU and Red Hat. In December 2021, the project “Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village” was a recipient of a Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubuation Award. (Read more about the genesis of this project in RHRQ 4:2, Can streaming data and machine learning build better communities?)
Chris Tate, Red Hat Principal Consultant, is a member of the “Real-life smart village” project team. Chris was a speaker at the 2022 FIWARE Summit held September 14-15 in Gran Canaria, Spain, where he discussed the role of Red Hat Research in the project’s infrastructure design and data strategy. The team has built automation that allows the project to deploy on Red Hat OpenShift from start to finish, giving it the availability, security, and scalability necessary to cover many IoT devices and allow open access for a broad range of researchers.
Stay tuned for a blog from Chris that will discuss how this partnership is advancing open source social innovation projects in the cloud and making IoT data available for social sustainability research. Contact Chris with any questions.
