Dear CALMeteers,
Welcome to our online session “Online Experimentation - Emerging Technologies & the Internet Of Things (IoT)”!
I always thought that having to deal with meteorological hardware is something that prevents us from offering our curricula entirely online. Indeed, one needs to feel the instruments, try them out with their own hands, to be able to work as a meteorologist. On the other hand, many sensors these days gone digital, and having them connected to LMS to do simple exercises when learning meteorology is a logical step forward. This was one of the ideas behind our recent EU project proposal, aimed to link smart sensors to Personal Learning Environment (PLE) to allow students to use real-time data for certain experiments. The project concept was developed by Dr Alexey Umnov from Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod (UNN), Russia. Alexey is associate professor at UNN Department of electrodynamics and also the Head of Laboratory of physical basis and technologies of wireless communication. His expertise is in the field of wireless communication, sensor networks, mobile technologies and related services, Internet of Things, cognitive educational technology. His Introduction to online experiment and the Internet of Things starts our online session.
As our project kicked off, we met some like-minded people at EU conference for project representatives held in Brussels, Belgium. They were mainly in engineering education and worked on a system called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality, or VISIR. The system allows you to connect the workbench normally used in electronic experiments through the Internet to the switching matrix at some remote lab. This allows to remotely control real electronic scheme located at the lab. Having a cohort of remote labs worldwide may lead to development of MOOLs - massive open online laboratories. A colleague from this engineering group brought us in contact with Dr Ricardo Costa, Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, School of Engineering (ISEP) at the Electrical Department (DEE). Ricardo holds a PhD. in Information Science and Technology from University of Coimbra, his research interests are in remote laboratories, and he kindly agreed to run a Demonstration on Remote Laboratory experiment, the live session that will be hosted on Tuesday 4 October 09:30 UTC. Don't miss it!
My colleague at the Russian State Hydrometeorological University, Dr Vladimir Chukin, was the first to fully accept the concept of our new EU project; for the last few years, he led a group of students into the smart sensor world, trying to find IoT-based solutions in meteorology. Vladimir is associate professor at RSHU Department of Experimental Physics of the Atmosphere, his expertise is in the field of aerosol and cloud physics, remote sensing, satellite data processing, Linux software and network technologies. He introduces a short video on the topic developed by his students, followed by a PPT presentation on the use of Smart Sensors in Meteorological Education.
My name is Eduard Podgaiskii. I’ve been involved in CALMet activities for almost 10 years now, both offline and online, often looking for some new and innovative ideas to share with the CALMet community. Being currently the ECOIMPACT project local coordinator at the Russian State Hydrometeorological University, I was interested to bring this project to your attention (you can find the project summary at the session webpage) and to discuss with you any potential uses of multiple and networked smart sensors in meteorological education and in business applications. The project is going to consider 5 areas of economic activities - agriculture, transport, energy, city management and health care - as potential areas where IoT-based meteorological services could increase profits or prevent losses, but sky is the limit for more innovations and applications, and I hope we could come up to some new ideas in our follow-up Discussion. So feel free to subscribe to the Online Experimentation Forum if you have your say. Looking forward to meeting you at CALMet Online!
Enjoy the session,
Eduard Podgaiskii, on behalf of the session facilitators