News

New paper on smart service...

The paper entitled "A Multi-Agent System for Service Provisioning in an Internet-of-Things Smart Space Based on User Preferences​" was published in the open access journal Sensors, within the special issue Emerging IoT Technologies for Smart Environments. The authors of the paper are Katarina Mandarić, Ana Kešelj Dilberović and Gordan Ježić.

This paper presents a multi-agent system for service provisioning in an Internet of Things (IoT) smart space based on user preferences. While many existing solutions enhance user comfort and support in smart spaces, they typically cater to individual users, thereby limiting their functionality. The motivation for this work stems from the identified gap in solutions accommodating multiple users. To address this challenge, the authors propose a multi-agent system where context-aware software agents advocate for their users' preferences. User agents engage in negotiations to establish service settings that satisfy all users, considering the users' flexibility in their preference definition. The negotiation algorithm is exemplified through a case study on smart lighting, representing a service that impacts all users concurrently within a smart environment.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
IoT4us at the First Croatian...

IoT4us project coordinator Prof. Ivana Podnar Žarko gave a presentation on "Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things Devices" at the First Croatian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) on 21 November 2023.

She shared information about the research goals within the IoT4us project with the participants, among other things. The IoT4us project explores challenging topics, and among the research goals is the development of intelligent, cognitive solutions in the field of the Internet of Things. The aim is to develop advanced solutions that will improve the capabilities of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) through the implementation of advanced artificial intelligence algorithms.

The presentation (in Croatian) is available on the symposium website: https://www.hrui.org/program.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
New paper accepted and presented at...

At the 17th International Conference on Telecommunications - ConTEL 2023 held in Graz, Austria from 11 to 13 July 2023, the paper "Distributed Location-Aware IoT Device Control Based on Indoor Positioning" by Ivan Čilić, Dora Kreković, Ivana Podnar Žarko, and Mario Kušek was presented. The paper was accepted after an international review.

The work is the result of continued research in distributed IoT device management. An architecture for distributed and location-based IoT device control based on indoor positioning is proposed, which enables direct and edge-based interaction with IoT devices in the client's proximity based on its indoor location. Finally, a proof-of-concept implementation was presented, named CampusSphere, a platform for offering location-aware smart campus services built on top of the proposed architecture.

Author: Ivan Čilić

The paper entitled "Performance Evaluation of Container Orchestration Tools in Edge Computing Environments" is published in Sensors, an open-access journal by MDPI, within the Special Issue Edge and Fog Computing for Internet of Things Systems II. The authors of the paper are Ivan ČilićPetar KrivićIvana Podnar Žarko i Mario Kušek.

In this paper we present the results of comparative analysis of tools for the orchestration of containerized services in the edge computing environments. Four orchestration platforms were considered: Kubernetes, KubeEdge, K3s, and ioFog. The emphasis in the conducted evaluation was placed on the possibility of integrating nodes from different (private) networks into a common edge execution environment, and on the possibility of integrating specific scheduling algorithms within the considered platforms. Further details are provided in the paper.

 

Author: Petar Krivić
New paper accepted and presented at...

At the 16th KES International Conference, KES-AMSTA 2022, held in hybrid form from 20 to 22 June 2022 in Greece on the island of Rhodes, the paper "Negotiation-Based Multi-agent System for Ambient Conditions Control in Accordance with Multiple User Preferences" by Katarina Mandarić, Pavle Skočir, Gordan Ježić and Ignac Lovrek was presented. The paper was accepted after an international review.

The work is the result of continued research into the Cognitive Internet of Things Smart Home with a focus on intelligent personalized service provision to users. The paper describes a Multi-Agent System where each user is represented by its own agent in setting the device settings according to their preferences, with an emphasis on the problem of harmonizing the different preferences of multiple users who use the device/service at the same time.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Public presentation of the IoT4us...

On Thursday, June 30, 2022, we organized a public presentation of the IoT4us project, which was attended by numerous guests from the industry, the academic community, and students.

After the introductory words of the project manager, prof. Ivana Podnar Žarko, PhD, members of the research team presented their work and results. Postdoc Petar Krivić, PhD and research assistant Ivan Čilić presented a solution for the application of computing resources at the edge of the network (edge ​​computing) in the field of the Internet of Things. Then research assistant Katarina Mandarić presented the use of intelligent software agents in the Internet of Things Smart Space to set ambient conditions according to the preferences of all present users in the space. Assistant Karlo Slovenec gave a presentation on security, i.e. securing administrative interfaces of IoT devices. The event continued with the presentation of the assistant, Denis Salopek, PhD on fast and energy-efficient packet filtering, and this part of the event was closed by teaching assistant Federico Matteo Benčić with a presentation on adapting networks of distributed ledgers for environments with limited resources.

After the work lunch, the event continued at the Department of Telecommunications, where guests were welcomed by members of the IoTLab laboratory and students who demonstrated selected practical solutions developed within the IoTLab through bachelor and final theses, as well as projects in the Internet of Things course. We thank everyone for their participation!

Photos from the event are available below by selecting "More".

Author: Katarina Mandarić

At the Global IoT Summit - GIoTS 2022 Dublin held in Dublin, Ireland from 20 to 23 June 2022, the paper "Adaptive Data-Driven Routing for Edge-to-Cloud Continuum: A Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Approach" by Ivan Čilić and Ivana Podnar Žarko, was presented. The paper was accepted after an international review.

The work results from continued research in the field of data routing in the edge-to-cloud continuum. The paper presents an architecture for adaptive data-driven routing in the edge-to-cloud continuum with the aim of continuously preserving a high quality of service for IoT service clients. Additionally, the paper describes the implementation of the proposed architecture using a content-based publish/subscribe approach, which demonstrates the architecture's resistance to system failures and network changes.

Author: Ivan Čilić
Public presentation of the IoT4us...

The research team of the IoT4us project invites all interested parties to a public presentation of the project "IoT4us: Smart human-centric services in interoperable and decentralised IoT environments" including demonstrations of research and student solutions.

The presentation will be held on Thursday, June 30, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. Part of the presentation will be held in the Gray Hall, and part in the Internet of Things Laboratory at the Department of Telecommunications (8th floor of the C-building). The event willl be held in Croatian.

Register as soon as possible and secure your place! Applications are open until Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

Author: Ivan Čilić
Katarina Mandarić gave a lecture at...

Research assistant Katarina Mandarić, MSc, member of the project research team, gave a lecture at the conference "Ladies of AI Business" held on May 5, 2022 in the BIRD incubator. "Ladies of AI Business" is the AI edition of the long-standing conference "Ladies of New Business" organized by Netokracija and, as the name suggests, is dedicated to the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Katarina’s lecture focused on her doctoral research on multi-agent systems for providing services based on user preferences in the Smart Space of the Internet of Things. She explained with interesting examples how to use Software Agents to adapt the ambient conditions in the space to the preferences of users, without user intervention, even if it is necessary to meet the preferences of multiple users living in the same space. In addition, she presented the Laboratory for Internet of Things and the IoT field and IoT4us projects.

You can read more about the event, panels and lectures here (link in Croatian) and below.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Internal workshop

On Friday, April 29, 2022, members of the research team of the IoT4us project held an internal workshop.

After a regular review and analysis of the work and financial plan, doctoral students Ivan Čilić, Dora Kreković, Katarina Mandarić, Federico Matteo Benčić and Alen Hrga and professor Marin Vuković and Denis Salopek held presentations on their work so far within the project.

The presentations were accompanied by a constructive discussion on the developed and planned solutions, as well as new ideas.
Papers and results whose publication is expected in the coming period and the organization of a public workshop were discussed.

List of all presentations:

  • Ivan Čilić - Flexible data routing on the way from the edge of the network to the cloud
  • Dora Kreković - Review of existing solutions for reducing the amount of data in the IoT
  • Katarina Mandarić - Negotiating program agents in the smart space of the Internet of Things
  • Federico Matteo Benčić - Adapting Distributed General Ledger Networks for Resources with Limited Resources
  • Alen Hrga - Decentralized IoT platform for flexibility providers in the electricity system
  • Marin Vuković - Providing IoT device administration interfaces
  • Denis Salopek - Fast and energy efficient packet filtering

Photos from the workshop are available below (under "More...").

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Denis Salopek, a member of the...

Denis Salopek successfully defended his doctoral dissertation "Hybrid hardware/software datapath for near real-time reconfigurable high-speed packet filtering" (Hibridna sklopovsko/programska podatkovna staza za brzo filtriranje paketa rekonfigurabilna u približno stvarnom vremenu) with honors (Magna Cum Laude). The defense was held on March 4, 2022 at FER.

Congratulations to our new Doctor of Science and we wish him all the best as he continues his career!

Author: Katarina Mandarić

At the 4th IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, held online from 6 to 8 December 2021, the paper "Decentralized IoT Platform for Flexibility Service Providers in Power Systems" by Alen Hrga, Tomislav Capuder, and Ivana Podnar Žarko was presented.

The paper proposes an architecture for the platform of the decentralized market of flexibility service providers in the power systems based on Internet-of-Things and distributed ledger technologies. The research and feasibility study of such a solution demonstrated on the IOTA network is described.

A. Hrga, T. Capuder, I. Podnar Žarko, "Decentralized IoT Platform for Flexibility Service Providers in Power Systems," in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), 2021, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00084.

Author: Alen Hrga

As part of the IoT4us project, new paper from our researchers has been accepted for publication and presentation following an international review at the conference Splitech 2021.

The authors of the paper are Ivan Čilić, MScProf. Ivana Podnar Žarko, PhD and Prof. Mario Kušek, PhD. The title of the paper is "Towards Service Orchestration for the Cloud-to-Thing Continuum", and the paper presents a general architecture for service orchestration in the cloud-to-thing continuum. The architecture is implemented using Eclipse ioFog orchestration tool and Imunes network emulator/simulator to demonstrate the QoS improvement.

The conference will be held in hybrid mode in Bol (Croatia) from September 8 through September 11, 2021.

Author: Ivan Čilić

As part of the IoT4us project, two more papers from our researchers were accepted for publication and presentation following an international review at the EAI FABULOUS 2021 and KES AMSTA 2021 conferences.

The authors of the paper accepted at the EAI FABULOUS conference are Dominik Ostroški, MSc, Assoc. Prof. Miljenko Mikuc, PhD and Assoc. Prof. Marin Vukovic, PhD. The title of the paper is "Categorizing IoT Services According to Security Risks", and the paper presents a model for categorization of existing and novel IoT services based on estimated security risks.

The authors of the paper accepted at the KES AMSTA conference are Katarina Mandarić, MSc, Asst. Prof. Pavle Skočir, PhD and Prof. Gordan Ježić, PhD. The title of the paper is "A Smart Lighting Context-aware Model based on Colored Petri Net". The paper presents a context-conscious model of a smart lighting system realized by a Petri net.

Both conferences will be held virtually. EAI FABULOUS will be held on May 6 and 7, 2021, and KES AMSTA from June 14 to 16, 2021.

Author: Katarina Mandarić

The promo video for the project IoT4us has been released.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Presentation by Pavle Skočir, PhD, at...

Member of the IoT4us project research team Pavle Skočir, PhD, participated in the workshop Smart technologies for sustainable agriculture organized as part of the conference SST 2020, Osijek.

At the workshop, he presented the paper "Survey on Low Power Wide Area Networks in IoT" by Damjan Katušić, Pavle Skočir, Mario Kušek and Igor Čavrak. The focus of the presentation was on communication technologies and their potential for application in agriculture, which is very important for the outcome of the IoT-field project.

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Significant achievement of our...

Denis Salopek, member of the IoT4us research team and FER doctoral student, participated in the recently completed Google Summer of Code cycle, during which he successfully completed a device driver development project at the core of the FreeBSD operating system for the NetFPGA SUME development board. We will use the aforementioned NetFPGA SUME driver and development board as part of the IoT4us project to research, design, and develop security and privacy mechanisms in Internet of Things environments.

Denis has successfully developed a suitable driver for the FreeBSD operating system, and it's an even bigger success that the developed driver will be included in the upcoming version of the FreeBSD 12.2 operating system. Congratulations to Denis for this significant achievement!

Author: Katarina Mandarić
Paper at the 14th KES International...

At the 14th KES International Conference, KES-AMSTA 2020, held online from 17 to 19 June 2020, the paper "Agent-Based Approach for User-Centric Smart Environments" by Katarina Mandarić, Pavle Skočir and Gordan Ježić was presented.

The paper describes a Cognitive Internet of Things system in a smart home on the example of intelligent lighting management realized through two different approaches: an agent approach and a centralized approach. In both approaches, feed-forward artificial neural networks are trained under supervision and used to adjust the lighting conditions to the specific user.

Mandaric K., Skocir P., Jezic G. (2020) Agent-Based Approach for User-Centric Smart Environments. In: Jezic G., Chen-Burger J., Kusek M., Sperka R., Howlett R., Jain L. (eds) Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications 2020. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 186. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5764-4_4

Author: Katarina Mandarić

We are looking for a new young researcher who wants to become a doctor of science in the field of technical sciences, computing, in the next four years! Doctoral research will be performed within the context of the project IoT4us where the research topic is relates to decentralized and interoperable IoT environments that make optimal use of edge/for resources and in 5G networks with a goal to efficiently provide new types of IoT services.

The official position is named Research assistant in the area of technical sciences, field of computing and is available at the Department of Telecommunications to carry out research relevant the research project “Pametne usluge usmjerene čovjeku u interoperabilnim i decentraliziranim okolinama Interneta stvari – IoT4us.” The application is open until August 17th, 2020 and further details are available at the following link.

Prospective candidates are kindly asked to send an email with their CV and motivating letter to the project PI Prof. Ivana Podnar Žarko prior to formal application for the position.

Author: Ivana Podnar Žarko

A new review paper has just been published in the open access journal IEEE Access which provides an overview of the applications of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the energy sector. The paper reviews the advantages and limitations of DLT and identifies major technical challenges that need to be addressed to enable a widespread usage of DLT in energy systems. In addition, suggestions and guidelines are provided to identify specific DLT solutions suitable for different categories of use cases in the energy sector.

Hrga, Alen; Capuder, Tomislav; Podnar Žarko, Ivana. Demystifying Distributed Ledger Technologies: Limits, Challenges and Potentials in the Energy Sector // IEEE Access, 8 (2020), 126149-126163 doi:10.1109/access.2020.3007935

Congratulations to Alen on this significant achievement!

Author: Ivana Podnar Žarko

The beginning of this year has marked the start of a new project in the Internet of Things Lab, "IoT4us: Human-centric (smart) services in interoperable and decentralised IoT environments". The project is funded under the "Research Projects" program of the Croatian Science Foundation (CSF) for the period of 4 years, until 31.12.2023. The project leader is Prof. Ivana Podnar-Zarko. The research group is currently composed of 10 researchers from UNIZG-FER, both professors and doctoral students, and we expect to expand the team with two additional PhD students and one postdoc during the project lifetime.

The IoT4us project is adopting and building upon cutting-edge results of the H2020 symbIoTe project which has developed an open source middleware for IoT interoperability and established an initial ecosystem of interoperable IoT platforms steering a new wave of innovative IoT applications and services across domains and platforms. IoT4us will evolve this ecosystem further to create decentralised, dynamic, secure and privacy-preserving IoT environments that, in addition to cloud resources, also rely on edge (and fog) computing resources. IoT4us will enable human-centric, autonomous and cognitive IoT services within such environments to facilitate either knowledge creation from heterogeneous IoT data sets or to initiate actions based on user preferences and past behaviour. The performed research will contribute to the emergence of next-generation IoT solutions adequate to be incorporated into 5G networks with a primarily goal to offer usable, intelligent, secure and privacy-preserving applications and services for end users. Through its research objectives, the project will investigate the following challenging topics: dynamic, decentralized and interoperable IoT ecosystems with secure communication mechanisms, communication protocols for efficient data transmission in Low-Power Wide-Area networks, intelligent and cognitive services for interoperable IoT ecosystems, Blockchain technology and privacy-preserving mechanisms for IoT.

The first project meeting was held on February 17, 2020. A public presentation of the project was planned to be held on March 25, 2020 in the Gray Hall at UNIZG-FER as a part of the presentations of all new projects funded by the Croatian Science Foundation which are lead by UNIZG-FER, but it was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

IoT4us Team (from left to right): Denis Salopek, Marin Vuković, Igor Čavrak, Pavle Skočir, Federico-Matteo Benčić, Alen Hrga, Ivana Podnar Žarko, Gordan Ježić, Mario Kušek, Miljenko Mikuc

Author: Katarina Mandarić