Summer projects for Dept. of IT students in the summer 2015 Here are 7 possible summer project topics for students. If you are interested in any of them, contact the person associated with the project for more information. This list will be updated when necessary. Project 1: Sensors integration to Arduino for monitoring indoor air quality Indoor air quality (IAQ) is a major influence on the health, comfort and productivity of a building s occupants. IAQ can be affected by microbial contaminants (mold, fungus) which largely depend on temperature and humidity condition of a room, gaseous pollutants (including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and volatile organic compounds) and dust particles or aerosols. To avoid such adverse effects, an air quality monitoring system is essential. Task Description The goal of this project is to develop a low-cost wireless air quality monitoring system. The system consists of Arduino board, radio for the wireless communication and air quality sensors such as temperature, humidity, and particulate matter. The radio and sensors has to be integrated with the Arduino board. The Arduino board processes the sensed data and transmits to a PC wirelessly using the radio. It is preferable if the programming of the board is done using Contiki but the student can also use his/her own choice of program. The project requires programming skills and basic knowledge of embedded systems and wireless communication. Credit Up on completion of the project, the student can get ECTS study credits for the work. The actual course code and number of ECTS awarded is decided at the beginning of the project. Project 2: Sensors integration to Arduino for water quality monitoring Water quality monitoring is a very important to ensure safe and clean water being delivered to the end users especially in the developing world. It is essential in controlling physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water.
Task Description The goal of this project is to develop a low-cost water quality monitoring system. The system consists of Arduino board, radio for the wireless communication and water quality monitoring sensors such as temperature, turbidity, and conductivity. The radio and sensors has to be integrated with the Arduino board. The Arduino board processes the sensed data and transmits to a PC wirelessly using the radio. It is preferable if the programming of the board is done using Contiki but the student can also use his/her own choice of program. The project requires programming skills and basic knowledge of embedded systems and wireless communication. Credit Up on completion of the project, the student can get ECTS study credits for the work. The actual course code and number of ECTS awarded is decided at the beginning of the project. Project 3: Secure Communication for the Internet of Things (IoT) Novel Internet services are emerging based on sensors and actuators in our surroundings, commonly referred to as smart devices. Smart devices, which form the backbone of Internet of Things (IoT), enable alternative forms of user experience by means of automation, convenience, and efficiency. At the same time, new security and safety issues arise, given the Internet-connectivity and the interaction possibility of smart devices with humans proximate living space. Hence, security is a fundamental requirement of the IoT design to remain interoperable with the existing infrastructure. Student s role The goal of this project is to enable secure end-to-end communication for embedded resourceconstrained devices, while incorporating efficient and state-of-the-art cryptography solutions. To this end, the student should first identify the involved computational and communication overheads, while providing secure end-to-end communication on constrained devices. In the next step the student should integrates the required components on the software and preferably on hardware side. As for the software, we rely on the Contiki Operating System (OS), which is an open source OS for IoT devices. Contiki comes with a simulation tool named Cooja, which supports development and debugging. This project requires basic knowledge of security and interest in secure communication implementations for wireless sensor networks. The student is expected to have some basic experience in C/C++ programming and be interested in working with new tools (i.e. Contiki OS and Relic-toolkit cryptography library) and add end-to-end security features to the Contiki OS for embedded devices. Background in network security, communication and wireless sensor networks is
helpful but not mandatory. We expect our students to be highly motivated to work on this project and to cooperate with their supervisors regularly to discuss current progress and next phases. What we offer? and wireless communication research. To speed-up your learning, we will support you with tutorials. An interested student may also continue this project as his/her master s thesis. Also, he/she may propose their ideas or solutions regarding the project s work. Up on completion of the project, the student can get study credit for the work, and the amount of credit will be decided through discussion with the supervisor at the start of the project work. Project 4: Data Security in the Internet of Things (IoT) Novel Internet services are emerging based on sensors and actuators in our surroundings, commonly referred to as smart devices. Smart devices, which form the backbone of Internet of Things (IoT), enable alternative forms of user experience by means of automation, convenience, and efficiency. At the same time, new security and safety issues arise, given the Internet-connectivity and the interaction possibility of smart devices with humans proximate living space. Hence, security is a fundamental requirement of the IoT design to remain interoperable with the existing infrastructure. Student s role The goal of this project is to enable data security for the IoT while incorporating efficient and stateof-the-art cryptography solutions. To this end, the student should first identify the involved computational and communication overheads, while providing data security for the IoT devices. In the next step the student should integrates the required components on the software and preferably on hardware side. As for the software, we rely on the Contiki Operating System (OS), which is an open source OS for IoT devices. Contiki comes with a simulation tool named Cooja, which supports development and debugging. This project requires interest in security in wireless communication and familiarity with database systems. The student is expected to have some basic experience in C/C++ programming and be interested in working with new tools (i.e. Contiki OS and Relic-toolkit cryptography library) and add data security features to the Contiki OS for embedded devices. In addition, background in network security, communication and wireless sensor network is helpful but not mandatory. We expect students to be highly motivated to work on their topics and to cooperate with their supervisors regularly to discuss current progress and next phases. What we offer? and wireless communication research. To speed-up your learning, we will support you with tutorials. An interested student may also continue this project as his/her master s thesis. Also, he/she may
propose their ideas or solutions regarding the project s work. Up on completion of the project, the student can get study credit for the work, and the amount of credit will be decided through discussion with the supervisor at the start of the project work. Project 5: Dynamic security for the Internet of Things (IoT) The future internet will be substantially more than simply browsing web sites and communicating through social media. The development of technological paradigms such as cloud computing, big data, the introduction of smart devices (e.g. phones, tablets), and the ability to embed sensors and actuators to everyday objects (e.g. doors, appliances, clothes, cars) creates an environment where the idea of the Internet moves away from just a digital environment and becomes the Internet of Things (IoT), where 'everything' can communicate with 'everything'. IoT-enabled devices are growing at an exponential pace with wearable devices, kitchen appliances, connected cars or healthcare devices becoming more and more commonplace. While IoT creates huge business and societal opportunities, it raises new categories of threats and introduces new vulnerabilities for organizations and individuals. There is a plethora of challenges in making the IoT secure. On a technical side, the IoT raises concerns related to its dynamic nature and context. Security requirements and controls that are applicable to one IoT scenario do not necessarily work for different scenarios, or even the same scenario but different contexts. As devices enter or leave an IoT environment, or when contexts are changing, security requirements may change. Student s role This project aims to develop model-based dynamic security methods and mechanisms for the Internet of Things (IoTs), using requirements engineering theory and context-awareness techniques that increase security to an appropriate level, and allow a system to adapt to the dynamic changing conditions of the IoT. Yet, the current state of the art fails to provide evidence of appropriate approaches that supports dynamic security requirements analysis and reasoning in the context of IoT. Most approaches develop security models and mechanisms that are hard to change, reuse, and dynamically analyze. This results in inflexible infrastructures, lost investments, damages resulting from mechanisms not matching the threats. This project requires interest in security in wireless communication to develop a framework that supports specification, analysis and compliance of dynamic security requirements for the IoTs. The project needs to answer the following research questions: 1. What are the appropriate concepts required to enable dynamic security frameworks in the context of IoTs? 2. What computational and algorithmic theories are suitable, for management and optimization of dynamic security properties in the context of IoTs.
What we offer? and wireless communication research. To speed-up your learning, we will support you with tutorials. An interested student may also continue this project as his/her master s thesis. Also, he/she may propose their ideas or solutions regarding the project s work. Up on completion of the project, the student can get study credit for the work. Project 6: Internet of Things (IoT) Monitoring and Analysis System The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be more and more present in our everyday lives. Objects are progressively becoming smart objects: smarttvs, smartphones, smartwatches, etc. These heterogeneous objects have more computing power, and have the ability to collect data, to communicate with each other, and to access the Internet. Mobile cloud computing leverages the unique advantages of heterogeneous devices in the IoT, sharing their computing power and collected data to locally collaborate in processing tasks they could not achieve individually, and create an ambient intelligence. Examples of applications found in the literature include distributed image processing, crowd sourcing and computing, sensor data sharing, social networking, or context recognition. Sensors embedded in smart objects can generate a large amount of data, this Big Data has to be stored, potentially remotely in a cloud. To communicate with each other, the basic model is envisioned to be client-server, i.e., each IoT device acts as a data server, and transmits the data to another device acting as a client, which can in its turn act as a server of that data. Computational offloading, also known as cyber foraging, has greatly evolved over the last few years. Recent examples of research works include making devices offload code to remote cloud resources and to other devices. Student role The goal of this project includes: i) compiling a survey on available tools and approaches to share data and computational tasks. ii) Setting up a simple experimental network of smart objects and implement an efficient data collection and monitoring architecture using Contiki Operating System (OS), which is an open source OS for IoT devices. Contiki comes with a simulation tool named Cooja, which supports development and debugging. iii) Exploring context recognition and collaborative mechanisms. This project requires interest in security in wireless communication. The student is expected to have some basic experience in C/C++ programming and be interested in working with new tools (i.e. Contiki OS). In addition basic background in communication and wireless sensor network is helpful but not mandatory. We expect our students to be highly motivated to work on their topics and to cooperate with their supervisors regularly to discuss current progress and next phases.
What we offer? and wireless communication research. To speed-up your learning, we will support you with tutorials and how-tos. We offer you credits (ECTS), and a great work atmosphere which is both casual and challenging with motivated advisors. An interested student may also continue this project as his/her master s thesis. Also, he/she may propose their ideas or solutions regarding the project s work. Project 7: Electrocardiogram (ECG) through Internet of Things-enabled Healthcare The recent year has witnessed a significant surge of interest in sensing and monitoring in healthcare. The monitoring and acquisition of patients physiological information are quite crucial for the early detection of medical disorders and further treatments. Many patients can benefit from continuous monitoring as a part of a diagnostic procedure, optimal maintenance of a chronic condition or during supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure. Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a promising technology for various applications. One of the potential deployments is in the form of IoT-enabled healthcare for wirelessly monitoring patients physiological signals, i.e. Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Electroencephalography (EEG), using tiny medical sensors. Medical Sensor Networks (MSNs), unlike wired monitoring systems, allows unobtrusive ubiquitous monitoring of patients physiological states and can generate early warnings if received signals deviate from predefined personalized ranges. Student role This project will target the realization of a comprehensive system for a real-time ECG through sensor nodes. The work will include: i) The analysis of proper compression techniques for ECG samples ii) The realization of proper transmissions techniques to deliver the collected sensors remotely to a caregiver (i.e. doctor or nurse). iii) The realization of an application to provide ECG feedback to the caregiver. This project requires interest in wireless sensor networks. The student is expected to have some basic experience in Matlab to test sample acquisition and compression techniques and be interested in working with new tools (i.e. Contiki OS) to implement/simulate the detection techniques on sensor nodes. Also, background in wireless networking, signal processing, and C/C++ programming language is helpful. We expect our students to be highly motivated to work on their topics and to cooperate with their supervisors regularly to discuss current progress and next phases. What we offer? and wireless communication research. To speed-up your learning, we will support you with tutorials and how-tos. We offer you credits (ECTS), and a great work atmosphere which is both casual and
challenging with motivated advisors. An interested student may also continue this project as his/her master s thesis. Also, he/she may propose their ideas or solutions regarding the project s work.