The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has announced the launch of a new Internet of Things (IoT) research and teaching facility expected to help businesses improve decision-making, build organisational capacity, and apply streaming data analytics at the edge.
In partnership with SAS and Cisco, the IoT Innovation Lab will combine SAS analytics, Cisco hardware and software, and the university's expertise in data engineering to explore how to gather, store, and analyse the data potentially billions of IoT devices are going to generate.
Early research conducted in the UTS-SAS-Cisco IoT Innovation Lab will be in the areas of advanced manufacturing, agribusiness, and healthcare.
Initially, users of the lab will be researchers and students, where UTS academics will design and verify data processing models using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
It is expected industry partners will eventually jump on board to help Cisco, SAS, and UTS address the IoT-related challenges of problems they are experiencing, bringing their own data into the lab for processing and analysis, and to test solutions.
One of the first projects the lab will explore is centred on energy conservation and cost-reduction, with the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT to process the real-time data generated by the more than 3,000 IoT sensors throughout the faculty building and its Microgrid.
"The IoT Innovation Lab will be an exciting local and global IoT hub, where IoT innovation will deliver positive technological impacts on the environment, society, people, governments, and industries," Dr Gengfa Fang, Director of UTS-SAS-Cisco IoT Innovation Lab, Faculty of Engineering and IT, said.
"The volume of data already being generated will only increase but its value to society can only be fully realised if we are able to use it productively."