A data-science-driven sustainability project supported by Red Hat Research was recognized as a FIWARE iHub at the 2023 FIWARE Summit in Vienna, Austria. Based on the SmartaByar smart village in Sweden, the project was a recipient of the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Research Incubation Award in 2022 and 2023. FIWARE describes iHubs as centers for accelerated growth that support companies, cities, and developers in their innovation and digitalization journey by offering easy access to open source technologies, business development support, and community building.
Red Hat Principal Consultant Christopher Tate of Red Hat Research presented the iHub’s primary goals at the FIWARE Summit:
- Using FIWARE open source standards for IoT device smart model data
- Allowing easy deployment and registration of apps and devices with Kubernetes Operators
- Developing AI/ML capabilities to enable data science microservice deployment on the edge
SmartaByar is led by CEO Jan Malmgren, who launched a smart village project in his hometown of Veberöd, Sweden. The project aims to use data collected via IoT devices to guide the creation of more sustainable communities. In 2021 Malmgren reached out to Red Hat Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager Jim Craig with the hope of partnering with Red Hat to scale up the project.
Craig, in turn, came to Red Hat Research to develop a proposal for the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University, partnering with BU Distinguished Professor of Engineering Christos Cassandras. The project has recently begun its second year with a research team including BU professors Mayank Varia, Vasia Kalavri, and John Liagouris, Alexandra Machado of Red Hat’s Social Innovation program, Jim Craig, Chris Tate, and BU PhD students Yingqing Chen, Anna Li, Andres Chavez, and Kaiuan Xu. Since launching, project team members have given invited presentations and keynotes at technology conferences in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Philippe Cases, Salim Bendris, Christopher Tate, Marcus Scheiber, Jonathan Reichental
While at the FIWARE Summit, Chris delivered the technical presentations “Smart Village k8s Operator sets up Orion-LD, IoT Agent, and devices for easy OpenShift Data Science,” “Options for visualization of IoT data: Wirecloud, QuantumLeap, Grafana, GeoJSON (GIS),“ and “Recipes for deployment of IoT components on Kubernetes.” He also delivered a mini hackathon, allowing participants to run Smart Village Operator components on their laptops and deploy FIWARE components for the first time on various operating systems. Chris reports: “Since attending the FIWARE Summit, our Red Hat team of participants has made strong connections with at least 11 organizations worldwide interested in working with FIWARE architecture for IoT/edge devices.”
Learn more about the SmartaByar project at the Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University:
- Read Jim Craig’s article “Can streaming data and machine learning build better communities?” in the Red Hat Research Quarterly
- Visit the project page on the Red Hat Research website: Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village
- Email Christopher Tate
