Posts Tagged ‘IoT’

code4lib

Code4Lib Proposed Preconference Workshops

http://2017.code4lib.org/workshops/proposed-workshops.html

Introduction to functional programming principles, including immutability, higher-order functions, and recursion using the Clojure programming language. This workshop will cover getting started with the Clojure REPL, building programs through function composition, testing, and web-development using ClojureScript.

Proposed by: Sam Popowich

This workshop will do a deep dive into approaches and recommend best practices for customizing Blacklight applications. We will discuss a range of topics, including styling and theming, customizing discovery experiences, and working with Solr.

Proposed by: Chris Beer, Jessie Keck, and Jack Reed

We all encounter failure in our professional lives: failed projects, failed systems, failed organizations. We often think of failure as a negative, but it has intrinsic value — and since it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually experience failure ourselves, it’s important to know how to accept it, how to take lessons from it, and how to grow from it professionally. Fail4Lib, now in its 5th year, is the perennial Code4Lib preconference dedicated to discussing and coming to terms with the failures that we all face in our professional lives. It is a safe space for us to explore failure, to talk about our own experiences with failure, and to encourage enlightened risk taking. The goal of Fail4Lib is for participants to be adept at failing gracefully, so that when we do fail, we do so in a way that moves us forward. This half-day preconference will consist of case studies, round-table discussions, and, for those interested in sharing, lightning talks on failures we’ve dealt with in our own work.

Proposed by: Andreas Orphanides and Bret Davidson

Intro to programming in Ruby on Rails

Proposed by: Carolyn Cole and Laney McGlohon

Amazon Web Services currently offers 58 services ranging from the familiar compute and storage systems to game development and the internet of things. We will focus on the 20-some services that you should be aware of as you move your applications to their cloud.

The morning session will be mostly overview and the afternoon session will be more practical examples and discussion. This could be broken into two sessions.

Proposed by: Cary Gordon, t/b/d, and t/b/d

FOLIO is a library services platform — infrastructure that allows cooperating library apps to share data. This workshop is a hands-on introduction to FOLIO for developers of library apps. In this tutorial you will work with your own Vagrant image through a series of exercises designed to demonstrate how to install an app on the platform and use the data sources and design elements the platform provides.

REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed.

Proposed by: Peter Murray

Have an idea for an app? Want to work with FOLIO developers and others in the community on the FOLIO platform to make it happen. Come to this half-day hack-a-thon! Ideas for new developers will be posted in the project Jira, or bring your own concepts and work with others to make them reality.

REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed. Attending the FOLIO Tutorial is recommended, but not required.

Proposed by: Peter Murray

Google Apps script is a server-side implementation of JavaScript which supports API calls to Google Services. This can provide an excellent platform for developing simple library applications. The libraries at Georgetown University and the University of Dayton have successfully deployed applications built with Google App Script.

In this workshop, we will step through the various types of applications that can be built with Google Apps Script.
(1) Custom cell formulas
(2) Spreadsheet Add On Functions (menu items, time based triggers)
(3) Google Apps Script as a Web Service
(4) Google Apps Script Add-Ons that can be shared globally or by domain

In this workshop, we will build sample instances of each of these types of applications (wifi-permitting) and spend some time brainstorming additional applications that would be useful for the library community.

Sample Applications: http://georgetown-university-libraries.github.io/#google-sheets

Proposed by: Terry Brady and Craig Boman

Calls to mindfulness and self care can have mixed reception in our field. While some view this important work as navel-gazing or unnecessary, it is integral to being present and avoiding burnout. Often this skewed attention to output comes at the expense of our personal lives, our organizations, our health, our relationships, and our mental well-being. Learning to prioritize self-care is an ongoing project among those who perform emotional labor. While some view the work of mindfulness as self-indulgent, it has proven to keep many on the track of being present and avoiding burnout.*

The purpose of this preconference is to provide a short introduction to self care and mindfulness with practical work we can use regardless of setting. We’ll discuss microaggressions and allyship (microaggressions being the brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that marginalized people of various groups experience daily and allyship referring to the powerful role that individuals from privileged groups can play in supporting marginalized individuals). We will then transition to a modified unconference setting where participants can practice scenarios and learn practical solutions. Each of the presenters has different set of skills and experiences that allow for many techniques and strategies to be explored. Preconference attendees will participate in sessions like “Mentor Speed Dating” where they get to talk to and question potential mentors/mentees. They may be coached through a guided meditation or walked through a calming breathing exercise. For those looking to a more physical space, office yoga and stretching techniques may be shared depending on the outcomes of the unconference interest.

Foundational materials and articles will be shared with the registrants prior to the meeting with the option of further discussion at the workshop. An open access guide to all the resources and readings will be available after the preconference, and people will be encouraged to share additional their tools on a website.

Suggested Hashtag #c4lselfcare

* Abenavoli, R.M., Jennings, P.A., Greenberg, M.T., Harris, A.R., & Katz, D.A. (2013). The protective effects of mindfulness against burnout among educators. Psychology of Education Review, 37(2), 57-69

Proposed by: Carmen Mitchell, Lia Friedman, and Torie Quinonez

In this preconference, participants will be introduced to Virtual Reality uses in library settings, notably, by way of the VR Reading Room. Within the VR Reading Room prototype, users can collaboratively explore digital collections (e.g. HathiTrust) by way of VR headsets. Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to experience HTC Vive functionality. The system will be setup with a prototype e-book experiment in order to model several VR affordances. Once attendees have been introduced to the HTC Vive hardware and sample project, groups of participants will have an opportunity to further brainstorm novel uses cases.

Proposed by: Jim Hahn

Python[1] has become one of the dominant languages in scientific computing and is used by researchers around the world. Its popularity is due in large part to a rich set of libraries for data analysis like Pandas[2] and NumPy[3] and tools for exploring scientific code like Jupyter notebooks[4]. Join us for this half-day workshop on the basics of using Pandas within a Jupyter notebook. We will cover importing data, selecting and subsetting data, grouping data, and generating simple visualizations. All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended, e.g. the concepts covered in the Codecademy[5] or Google[6] Python courses.

[1] https://www.python.org/
[2] http://pandas.pydata.org/
[3] http://www.numpy.org/
[4] http://jupyter.org/
[5] https://www.codecademy.com/learn/python
[6] https://developers.google.com/edu/python/

Proposed by: Bret Davidson and Kevin Beswick

Learn about the features and capabilities of Sufia, a Hydra-based repository solution. Attendees will participate in a hand-on demonstration where they deposit content, edit metadata, create collections, and explore access control options. Attendees should bring laptops with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari installed. Please plan on bringing at least one image, document, or other digital content that you’re comfortable uploading and using for demo and experimentation purposes 🙂

Proposed by: Mark Bussey and Justin Coyne

The web can be a trove of openly accessible data, but it is not always readily available in a format that allows it to be downloaded for analysis and reuse. This workshop aims to introduce attendees to web scraping, a technique to automate extracting data from websites.

Part one of the workshop will use browser extensions and web tools to get started with web scraping quickly, give examples where this technique can be useful, and introduce how to use XPath queries to select elements on a page.

Part two will introduce how to write a spider in Python to follow hyperlinks and scrape several web pages using the Scrapy framework. We will conclude with an overview of the legal aspects of web scraping and an open discussion.

You don’t need to be a coder to enjoy this workshop! Anyone wishing to learn web scraping is welcome, although some familiarity with HTML will be helpful. Part two will require some experience with Python, attendees unfamiliar with this language are welcome to stay only for part one and still learn useful web scraping skills!

Proposed by: Thomas Guignard and Kim Pham

Paper prototyping is a low-cost, structured brainstorming technique that uses materials such as paper and pencils to better understand the way users interact with physical, visual, and textual information. It can help us learn how to better think through workflows, space design, and information architecture. Session attendees will learn about the ways low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing can be used to develop ideas, troubleshoot workflows, and improve learning and interaction.

In the first half of the workshop, participants will step through activities in icon design, persona development, and task development. In the second half they will develop a low fidelity prototype and step through a guerilla usability testing process with it.

Proposed by: Ekatarina (Eka) Grguric and Andreas Orphanides

IoT hack

My note:
I listened to the report in my car yesterday. It is another sober reminder for being proactive rather then reactive (or punitive). We must work toward digital literacy and go beyond that comfortably numb stage of information literacy.

An Experiment Shows How Quickly The Internet Of Things Can Be Hacked

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/01/500253637/an-experiment-shows-how-quickly-the-internet-of-things-can-be-hacked

We have basic security in place in modern devices that screen out the most obvious attacks. Really getting phished, if you will, is more of a problem where you are tricked in surrendering your password or username to a common service. If you plug in your webcam into your router or to your Wi-Fi, you’re relatively safe.

I think the biggest security concern for folks at home would be if their router actually is old, it might have an easily guessed password that someone could gain control. Most modern devices don’t have that problem, but that certainly is a concern for older devices.


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more on cybersecurity in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity

IoT for Product Managers

Internet of Things: A Primer for Product Managers

https://medium.com/@delizalde/internet-of-things-a-primer-for-product-managers-5b6bef0a8b9b#.aitrbiy0h

The first step to becoming an IoT Product Manager is to understand the 5 layers of the IoT technology stack.

5 layers of IoT

1. Devices

Devices constitute the “things” in the Internet of Things. They act as the interface between the real and digital worlds.

2. Embedded software

Embedded software is the part that turns a device into a “smart device”. This part of the IoT technology stack enables the concept of “software-defined hardware”, meaning that a particular hardware device can serve multiple applications depending on the embedded software it is running.

Embedded Operating System

The complexity of your IoT solution will determine the type of embedded Operating System (OS) you need. Some of the key considerations include whether your application needs a real-time OS, the type of I/O support you need, and whether you need support for the full TCP/IP stack.

Common examples of embedded OS include Linux, Brillo (scaled-down Android), Windows Embedded, and VxWorks, to name a few.

Embedded Applications

This is the application(s) that run on top of the embedded OS and provide the functionality that’s specific to your IoT solution.

3. Communications

Communications refers to all the different ways your device will exchange information with the rest of the world. This includes both physical networks and the protocols you will use.

4. Cloud Platform

The cloud platform is the backbone of your IoT solution. If you are familiar with managing SaaS offerings, then you are well aware of everything that is entailed here. Your infrastructure will serve as the platform for these key areas:

Data Collection and Management

Your smart devices will stream information to the cloud. As you define the requirements of your solution, you need to have a good idea of the type and amount of data you’ll be collecting on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.

Analytics

Analytics are one of they key components of any IoT solution. By analytics, I’m referring to the ability to crunch data, find patterns, perform forecasts, integrate machine learning, etc. It is the ability to find insights from your data and not the data alone that makes your solution valuable.

Cloud APIs

The Internet of Things is all about connecting devices and sharing data. This is usually done by exposing APIs at either the Cloud level or the device level. Cloud APIs allow your customers and partners to either interact with your devices or to exchange data. Remember that opening an API is not a technical decision, it’s a business decision.

Related post: The Business of APIs: What Product Managers Need to Plan For

5. Applications

This is the part of the stack that is most easily understood by Product teams and Executives. Your end-user applications are the part of the system that your customer will see and interact with. These applications will most likely be Web-based, and depending on your user needs, you might need separate apps for desktop, mobile, and even wearables.

The Bottom Line

As the Internet of Things continues to grow, the world will need an army of IoT-savvy Product Managers. And those Product Managers will need to understand each layer of the stack, and how they all fit together into a complete IoT solution.

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more on Internet of Things in this blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=internet+of+things

NISO Webinar IoT

Wednesday, October 19, 2016
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time)

About the Webinar

As the cost of sensors and the connectivity necessary to support those sensors has decreased, this has given rise to a network of interconnected devices.  This network is often described as the Internet of Things and it is providing a variety of information management challenges.  For the library and publishing communities, the internet of things presents opportunities and challenges around data gathering, organization and processing of the tremendous amounts of data which the internet of things is generating.  How will these data be incorporated into traditional publication, archiving and resource management systems?  Additionally, how will the internet of things impact resource management within our community?   In what ways will interconnected resources provide a better user experience for patrons and readers?  This session will introduce concepts and potential implications of the internet of things on the information management community.  It will also explore applications related to managing resources in a library environment that are being developed and implemented.

Education in the Internet of Things
Bryan Alexander, Consultant;

How will the Internet of Things shape education? We can explore this question by assessing current developments, looking for future trends in the first initial projects. In this talk I point to new concepts for classroom and campus spaces, examining attendant rises in data gathering and analysis. We address student life possibilities and curricular and professional niches. We conclude with notes on campus strategy, including privacy, network support, and futures-facing organizations.

What Does The Internet of Things Mean to a Museum?
Robert Weisberg, Senior Project Manager, Publications and Editorial Department; Metropolitan Museum of Art;

What does the Internet of Things mean to a museum? Museums have slowly been digitizing their collections for years, and have been replacing index cards with large (and costly, and labor-intensive) CMS’s long before that, but several factors have worked against adopting smart and scalable practices which could unleash data for the benefit of the institution, its collection, and its audiences. Challenges go beyond non-profit budgets in a very for-profit world and into the siloed behaviors learned from academia, practices borne of the uniqueness of museum collections, and the multi-faceted nature of modern museums which include not only curator, but conservators, educators, librarians, publishers, and increasing numbers of digital specialists. What have museums already done, what are they doing, and what are they preparing for, as big data becomes bigger and ever more-networked?
The Role of the Research Library in Unpacking The Internet of Things
Lauren di Monte, NCSU Libraries Fellow, Cyma Rubin Fellow, North Carolina State University

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a deceptively simple umbrella term for a range of socio-technical tools and processes that are shaping our social and economic worlds. Indeed, IoT represents a new infrastructural layer that has the power to impact decision-making processes, resources distribution plans, information access, and much more. Understanding what IoT is, how “things” get networked, as well as how IoT devices and tools are constructed and deployed, are important and emerging facets of information literacy. Research libraries are uniquely positioned to help students, researchers, and other information professionals unpack IoT and understand its place within our knowledge infrastructures and digital cultures. By developing and modeling the use of IoT devices for space and program assessment, by teaching patrons how to work with IoT hardware and software, and by developing methods and infrastructures to collect IoT devices and data, we can help our patrons unlock the potential of IoT and harness the power of networked knowledge.

Lauren Di Monte is a Libraries Fellow at NC State. In this role she develops programs that facilitate critical and creative engagements with technologies and develops projects to bring physical and traditional computing into scholarship across the disciplines. Her current research explores the histories and futures of STEM knowledge practices.

What does the internet of things mean for education?

Bryan Alexander:

I’m not sure if the IoT will hit academic with the wave force of the Web in the 1990s, or become a minor tangent.  What do schools have to do with Twittering refrigerators?

Here are a few possible intersections.

  1. Changing up the campus technology space.  IT departments will face supporting more technology strata in a more complex ecosystem.  Help desks and CIOs alike will have to consider supporting sensors, embedded chips, and new devices.  Standards, storage, privacy, and other policy issues will ramify.
  2. Mutating the campus.  We’ve already adjusted campus spaces by adding wireless coverage, enabling users and visitors to connect from nearly everywhere.  What happens when benches are chipped, skateboards sport sensors, books carry RFID, and all sorts of new, mobile devices dot the quad?  One British school offers an early example.
  3. New forms of teaching and learning.  Some of these take preexisting forms and amplify them, like tagging animals in the wild or collecting data about urban centers.  The IoT lets us gather more information more easily and perform more work upon it.  Then we could also see really new ways of learning, like having students explore an environment (built or natural) by using embedded sensors, QR codes, and live datastreams from items and locations.  Instructors can build treasure hunts through campuses, nature preserves, museums, or cities.  Or even more creative enterprises.
  4. New forms of research.  As with #3, but at a higher level.  Researchers can gather and process data using networked swarms of devices.  Plus academics studying and developing the IoT in computer science and other disciplines.
  5. An environmental transformation.  People will increasingly come to campus with experiences of a truly interactive, data-rich world.  They will expect a growing proportion of objects to be at least addressable, if not communicative.  This population will become students, instructors, and support staff.  They will have a different sense of the boundaries between physical and digital than we now have in 2014. Will this transformed community alter a school’s educational mission or operations?

How the internet could evolve to 2026: responding to Pew Posted on

Alphabet Nest and Android

Alphabet is breaking up Nest, its standalone smart-home gadgets company, and moving Nest’s software group back into Google.

enerally speaking, Google has very limited interest in making hardware in the first place. The cost of building things is high, the margins are low, and Google’s real specialty is in web services like Gmail and search anyway.

Google started signaling that Android, the most popular operating system in the world, and Chrome OS, its more niche operating system for laptops, were going to get smashed together. The result, ideally, will be a version of Android that can extend its smartphone dominance to tablets and laptops…which is why Android 7.0, the most recent release, makes split-screen multitasking such a tentpole feature.

the real business opportunity for Google is to compel a broad range of companies to create gadgets and home appliances using its software. The hardware is secondary. In fact, building its own hardware can even work against Google: The more successful Google is at selling its own hardware, the less likely other hardware makers want to use its software, since they view Google as a competitor.

Putting all its efforts behind expanding and extending Android has made Google a top player in the smartphone market, even after its late start against Apple and the iPhone.

Smart Future: Knowledge Trends that will Change the World

As you may be aware that TERI is a global think-tank knowledge driven organisation working in the field of Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development. TERI is organising it’s one of the flagship event ICDL 2016 from

13 to 16 December, 2016 at India Habitat Center, Lodhi Road, New Delhi. The theme of the conference is “Smart Future: Knowledge Trends that will Change the World”. (URL: http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/)

 

As we understand that in the current scenario all enterprises are heading towards Digital Transformation, which derives business value for an effective decision making process. To be a part of this transformation strategy, all stakeholders at various levels should be aware of certain pertinent components, which are mentioned below. This conference is a unique platform to brainstorm and network with leading speakers and digital luminaries. Some of the major thrust areas to be covered are:

 

  1. Innovation and Knowledge Management
  2. Big Data and Analytics
  3. Social Media and Analytics
  4. Internet of Things (IoT)

 

To get yourself and your team to engage in one of these issues, we would request you to kindly share your skills, expertise and experiences with audiences in this thought provoking and stimulating interactive platform of ICDL 2016.

 

For your reference and further information about this event, please refer to 1. Brochure http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/pdf/Brochure.pdf

  1. Background paper

http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/pdf/ICDL_BackgroundPaper/

 

Do write back to us for further queries, if any.

For further Information Contact:

Mr V V S Parihar

ICDL 2016 Secretariat

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) India Habitat Centre Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003, India

Tel: +91 11 24682100 or 41504900

Fax: 24682144 Email: ICDL2016@teri.res.in, vijayvsp@teri.res.in

Website: http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl

denial of sleep attacks

Security Tops List of Trends That Will Impact the Internet of Things

By David Nage 02/25/16

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/02/25/security-tops-list-of-trends-that-will-impact-the-internet-of-things.aspx

Are you ready to deal with “denial of sleep” attacks? Those are attacks using malicious code, propagated through the Internet of Things, aimed at draining the batteries of your devices by keeping them awake.

  1. Security. threats extend well beyond denial of sleep: “The IoT introduces a wide range of new security risks and challenges to the IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating systems, their communications, and even the systems to which they’re connected.
  2. Analytics. IoT will require a new approach to analytics. “New analytic tools and algorithms are needed now, but as data volumes increase through 2021, the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics,” according to Gartner.
  3. Device (Thing) Management. IoT things that are not ephemeral — that will be around for a while — will require management like every other device (firmware updates, software updates, etc.), and that introduces problems of scale.
  4. Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks. Short-range networks connecting IT devices will be convoluted. There will not be a single common infrastructure connecting devices.
  5. Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks. Current solutions are proprietary, but standards will come to dominate.
  6. Processors and Architecture. Designing devices with an understanding of those devices’ needs will require “deep technical skills.”
  7. Operating Systems. There’s a wide range of systems out there that have been designed for specific purposes.
  8. Event Stream Processing.  “Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that must be analyzed in real time.
  9. Platforms. “IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product.
  10. Standards and Ecosystems. as IoT devices proliferate, new ecosystems will emerge, and there will be “commercial and technical battles between these ecosystems” that “will dominate areas such as the smart home, the smart city and healthcare.

Disruptive Tech Trends

5 Disruptive Tech Trends That Could Dominate in 2016

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/26/5-disruptive-tech-trends-that-could-dominate-in-20.aspx

Andres Cardenal (IoT). The Internet of Things

Tim Brugger (Big Data): In part because the world around us is becoming “connected” through a growing number of IoT sensors, mobile devices, and the world’s affinity for the Internet, the sheer volume of information available is already staggering.

Daniel B. Kline (endless payment): While subscriptions have always been a factor on the enterprise side of the software business, they’re now moving into the consumer end of things. The leader has been Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which has managed to move a large part of its Office customer base into a subscription model. 

Tim Green (budget smartphones): Zenfone 2 from Asus and the Moto G from Motorola.

The 6 Technologies That Will Change the Face of Education

Will students be wearing their tech in virtual classrooms in five years? Wearable devices, adaptive technologies, and the Internet of Things are just some of the new tech researchers say is shaping the near future of higher education.

In 1 Year or Less: BYOD and the flipped classroom.

“Employers and higher education institutions are finding that when given the opportunity to choose their device, users are saved from the effort and time needed to get accustomed to new devices and can therefore accomplish tasks with more ease and efficiency.”

“Flipped learning is seen as especially suited for higher education because the rearranging of class time gives students in large introductory lecture courses more opportunity to engage and interact with their peers.”

In 2-3 Years: Makerspaces and wearable devices.

Makerspaces have the “benefit of engaging learners in creative, higher-order problem solving through hands-on design, construction and iteration.”

“Wearable technology is poised to see significant growth in the coming years, spurring experimentation in higher education because the demand for wearables is seen to be coming in large part from college-aged students.”

In 4-5 Years: Adaptive technologies and the Internet of Things.

“Adaptive technology is seen as a means to break free of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education and is suited well for online and hybrid learning environments, “where student activities are conducted virtually and can be monitored by software and tracking applications.”

The Internet of Things pushes information to learners from their surroundings. “For instance, a learner exploring a city with a rich historical past can explore their environment through an architectural, political, or biological lens, depending on how the surroundings are equipped.”

From the NMC Horizon Report 2015: Higher Education Edition

http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2015/02/11/The-6-Technologies-That-Will-Change-the-Face-of-Education.aspx?Page=1

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