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Location: Integrated Innovation Hub (I² Hub), CITC and FOCS Laboratories, Block B, TAR UC Main Campus

i. Objectives

Centre for Internet of Things is established as:

• An ecosystem provide a common platform and infrastructure to support academic and research activities.
• A testbed for creative and innovative ideas to be tested and able to provide proof-of-concept.
• Encouraging multidisciplinary teams that leverage unique strengths of different departments, faculties and campuses.
• Building high quality education programmes for an emerging sectors and fulfill the industries needs.
• Reinforcing the partnership with local government, private sectors and communities
• An proven model scalable for solving the bigger and more complex societal problems in a city or nation.

ii. Vision Statement

To build an IoT enabled Smart Campus to improve services, integrate information, enrich teaching and learning.

iii. Rationale and Research Plan

TAR UC is taking initiative to transform the campus into a smart campus. The smart campus is not only able to provide the effective and efficient services, but also able to foster the soft and hard skills of the academics and students. There are many projects and activities which need coordination to ensure their successful implementation in the smart campus by the Centre for Internet of Things (CIOT).

The CIOT is responsible to coordinate the smart campus development projects for I² Hub, campus community, administration processes, academic services and applied and fundamental research projects on cyber physical system and others related to IoT. CIOT also support the technical aspect of IoT products with potential of commercialization.

The CIOT physical working space will be set up in I² Hub at Cyber Centre, to accommodate with the IoT platform and networking infrastructure for the testing and deployment of products developed by students and academics.

iv. Research Centre

Research Centre Leader – Associate Professor Dr Lee Wah Pheng

There are 3 research groups within CIOT:

(a) Smart Education System Group

Project topics include adaptive learning system that enables learning environment for programming class with adapted materials to learners’ pace and performance, educational revision quiz games, intelligent classroom system that develop an interactive classroom using Internet of Things technology, Robot Tutor and Mobile IELTS Listening Test to allow english listening test to be conducted using mobile phone.

(b) Intelligent Community Service Group

Community services consist of administrative automation system (e.g., online form and report builder, data exchanges between online community with authentication), urban mobility improvement (e.g., bus riding system, parking space system, drone live monitoring and campus route map), security and emergency response (e.g., virtual guard system, panic notification and emergency support system). Besides that, the hospitality and event services (e.g., community webcast system, hiring and lodging service system, stuff selling and catering service system, chatbot system for community and inquiry purpose) and electronic commerce with payment gateway features are a part of community service group.

(c) Infrastructure and Platform Group

Several infrastructures are required to facilitate the IOT platform, based on a centralized architecture design. Message Queue Transport Telemetry (MQTT) protocol is explored and examined to provide community grouping engine, worked with all IOT projects management system. Each of the access to this platform requires registration, authentication, continuous software and firmware supports and updates, and visualization via dashboard monitoring at I² Hub.

The infrastructure and platform group supports two university college initiatives, namely:

• Smart Agricultural - Collaboration in between Computing and Information Technology, Applied Science, Engineering and Technology faculties to set up intelligent farming at TAR UC two farm sites: Ginger Farm and Herbal Farm.

More details, please refer to < LINK >

• Smart Manufacturing - Collaboration with industrial partners, with the support of postgraduate students team on assisting local company and establishing Industry 4.0 implementation.

More details, please refer to < LINK >

v. Achievement in the past 10 years

• Collaborate with the industries and all faculties of TAR UC to develop applications that are going to be hosted by I² Hub, which is the heart of all the integrated innovation projects and the projection of the visualization of data via dashboards.
• Launch of I² Hub on 1st Aug 2018, showcasing the existing research and industrial projects related to Internet of Things.