HACKATHON “BUILDING OPTIMIZED IoT APPLICATIONS FOR DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS”

Organized in the framework of the Data & Web Science postgraduate programme

Activity description

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to change the way we monitor, understand, and interact with our physical world, bringing it closer to cyberspace. Data collected by and retrieved from IoT devices are essential in building online, delay-sensitive services in various application domains, such as health, transportation and industrial manufacturing. However, the number of IoT devices keeps increasing at a rigorous rate, and the amount of data generated outside traditional data centers significantly strain the IoT vision of responsive and low-latency services. This has made evident the need for IoT services to optimize as much as possible the use of compute and network resources along the Edge and Fog continuum before reaching the Cloud. This need poses many new challenges, especially in terms of efficient and effective data management, which are an active area of interest in ICT research and innovation. Moreover, developers are increasingly implementing applications by adopting containerization technologies, like the Docker platform, to quickly design, test, deploy, and update their applications. Docker containers are a lightweight virtualization solution, which thanks to their ability to run almost everywhere, even on IoT devices, are now established in many industrial IoT applications.

In this activity, we will introduce IoT technologies and respective IoT applications to the students. Participants will form groups of 2-4 members which will work together as a team. Then, we will provide a hands-on tutorial for the Docker ecosystem and how one can implement containerized applications. Our tutorial will provide information about docker image creation, lifecycle of a container including properties introduction like environmental variables, files and folders injection to the execution environment, network port forwarding, and a basic introduction of docker-compose files. In the first part of the hackathon, the participants will utilize an IoT application scenario concerning energy consumption data, in order to extend it and build the respective docker images. Then, the teams will deploy their IoT application in specially-prepared virtual machines running an advanced data management stack, such as the one developed by Data & Web Science Laboratory researchers in the RAINBOW H2020 project, to test the processing of the incoming data and to generate visualizations of the analysis results as the output of their solution. In the final phase each student team will present and demonstrate their solution. Based on the results of the demonstration and the quality of the developed solution we will announce the winning team and award the prizes.

The main challenge is that the developed solution should exploit the fog node resources in an optimum way and minimize the data exchange with the cloud service.

During the activity experienced researchers will support all of the participating student teams. The goal is to enable and encourage students into developing their own unique solutions by tackling any technical barriers after they have understood the scope and the potential of the offered tools and technologies. Students will benefit by being introduced to the complete pipeline of the development and deployment of modern IoT applications while getting themselves familiarized with the use of docker technology and an advanced data management stack for handling data processing in distributed topologies with limited resources, such as Fog networks.

Who can participate?

Students of the “Data and Web Science” MSc programme as well as undergraduate students and PhD candidates of the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In order to participate to this activity all students will need to bring their own laptops.

Prizes

All participants will receive a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a popular low-cost platform for IoT applications, while the winning team will get a full Raspberry Pi 400 kit! All students will also receive a digital certificate of participation signed by the “Data and Web Science” MSc programme director.

When and where?

The activity will take place on Saturday 3/12/2022 from 10:30 am to 16:00 pm at the premises of the Department of Informatics branch in Kalamaria.

Registration

Since the available seats are limited, registration is required. All interested students need to fill in the registration form before 30/11/2022: https://forms.gle/NbMC6KszpGgSektE8

Registered students will be notified via email prior to the activity if their participation is approved.

Agenda