Artificial intelligence applied to home energy production
Special buoy collects data for seaweed farm with Advanced sensorica
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AFM Cluster: Digitization Of Production Projects
How AI can help cities become more sustainable
In the Neolithic period, humans began to cultivate the land and breed animals. In this way, they began to have something like a steady diet, and sedentary human groups began to emerge, which led to the formation of the first fixed settlements. This was around 3,000 BC.
As time went by, the first cities in history began to emerge in very specific geographical areas with specific natural conditions. People who lived there were able to develop great agricultural and manufacturing activities with innovations in sowing and production (plough, lathe, wheel, a network of canalс etc.). Little by little, people began to specialise in order to achieve improvements in production and communications, which favoured trade, while the invention of writing allowed a better accounting of economic transactions.
Soon, the somewhat primitive and unsafe villages began to develop into real urban centres with stone buildings, avenues, etc. The appearance of these urban centres brought changes in the social and economic life of the people. In the same way, economic activities were also changing, commerce and industry began to develop… But apart from all these economic activities, the structuring of knowledge and technology has been fundamental in responding to the challenges of the urban transformation processes in which cities find themselves and which are known as Smart Cities.
It is in the 21st century, and especially in its second decade when the main transformations are taking place, at great speed, due to the exponential development of technologies, which are changing economic and social models.
In the face of these transformations, one of the objectives that we must define, and address is the preservation and improvement of the quality of life of living beings on the planet. Focusing on the case of people, the majority of us live in cities; cities that must expand with ethical and environmental criteria, respecting the commitments of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Both public and private agents must ensure the sustainability and resilience of cities in order to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants.
To this end, it will be essential to take advantage of renewable energy sources, to commit to sustainable electromobility, to the almost total elimination of emissions from energy generation, industry, transport… In this regard, there are several reports that are committed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an enabling technology to achieve this goal.
AI, and in particular machine learning, time series forecasting, data analytics, etc., have a crucial role to play in redesigning and rethinking cities so that people living there have a better quality of life.
For example, learning combined with neural networks can help us understand how buildings consume energy and recommend adjustments based on the behaviour of their occupants. In addition, it can help us to automatically control the management of the water cycle, achieving its optimisation and efficiency.
At GAIA, we have defined how it is possible to make the incorporation of AI into the different value chains of organisations a reality. Below, we present its outline:

However, cities need revolutionary methodologies and tools to optimise massive amounts of data from different sources (e.g. streetlights, traffic systems, sensors, etc.) and need to centralise data storage in complex global and often fragmented supply chains. This is where Big Data analytics and AI, in general, come into play, which is why DTAM sees the need to develop training content that trains students in these skills.
In conclusion, we can say that it will be crucial to have data and carry out in-depth analyses of it, but we will have to be able to learn from it because only then, we will be able to make the right decisions. With this, and with the appropriate use of AI, we will achieve a sustainable future with better living conditions for citizens and the planet. An end that unites us all.
Sources:
[1] National Geographic (2012) The first cities, the urban revolution in Mesopotamia
[2] Wikipedia (2021) Smart City
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Building the DTAM IoT Hub
If you’ve been following us for a while now, you already know we are aiming to build an entire training course dedicated to advanced manufacturing skills & competencies and in addition to that, a dedicated IoT Hub to facilitate training, learning, and collaboration amongst our future stakeholders. An ambitious initiative indeed, but we’ve already laid down the first steps.
The backbone of our DTAM IoT Hub i.e. its infrastructure will be provided by our partners from Saranet: one of the leading providers of internet solutions for businesses in Spain. Saranet specializes in offering integral and high-quality services to companies. It provides a full range of services including high speed, high availability connectivity services, high-end data center solutions with an extensive portfolio of hosting solutions, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Voice over IP (VoIP), mobile solutions, security solutions, and Industrial IoT.
That’s exactly why Saranet is charged with the responsibility to build the DTAM IoT Hub and provide the cloud infrastructure to install the IoT technologies and software. Simultaneously to building our training curriculum we are also taking steps towards that goal like testing the software installation in a staging area i.e. a test area in the Sarenet cloud. Sarenet brings support to the provision of the entire centralized architecture so that those responsible for teaching methodologies can model the dimensioning of a centralized working environment in the cloud.
DTAM cloud architecture will be implemented so that those responsible for technical knowledge, experts in enabling technologies, develop the start-up for the use of Big Data through open-source software located in the Sarenet data centers.
The cluster of several servers in the cloud, necessary for the proper functioning of the DTAM project, will be tied to a secure access control and with appropriate technologies, so that the target IoT teaching methods can be practiced with open source software added within a trusted environment.
Sarenet’s system engineering team accompanies DTAM in the correct use of communications and technologies for jobs in the cloud, together with monitored access to the centralized data storage.
Sounds exciting? That’s because it is. We invite you to sign up for our newsletter here and check our website regularly to make sure you don’t miss the bis announcement when we are ready to launch the DTAM IoT Hub. Is there a feature you would personally like to experience via our DTAM Training curriculum? Let us know on our social media channels.
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Humanity, Technology and Intelligence in the International Vocational Education and Training Congress
The International Vocational Education and Training Congress “VET in the face of the era of humanity, technology and intelligence” took place on November 10th and 11th in San Sebastián (Spain).
Local and national authorities attended the Congress in which high-level speakers from different fields participated. About 960 people physically attended the exhibitions in very diverse fields: from industry and technology to gastronomy, highlighting the educational field, all of them referring to the advance of the 4th Industrial Revolution and their involvement in Vocational Education and Training.
Moreover, the International Congress was followed around the world via streaming. Adding the number of people who attended the congress in person at the Kursaal Palace in San Sebastián to all those registered to follow the interventions online, the sum adds up to a total a little over 4200 people, from 156 countries on five continents.
The Congress highlighted the importance of technology not only in the near future but at the present time in the face of the 4th Industrial Revolution. The interventions underlined the importance of the human dimension since it is ultimately people who have to acquire the leading role in technological development.
Artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, automation or robotization are increasingly everyday realities that are changing society, the way of working, or the way of interacting with one another. In this context, technology must be an aid to the human being and not an end in itself. Because technology alone is not enough, it is key to prepare coming generations to work and live in this new environment. In this context, Vocational Education and Training becomes a key transforming agent: it trains the workers of the future, enables those who are active and the unemployed to upskill and reskill to the changes of the labor market, and allows companies to be competitive.
That is precisely one of our DTAM project goals i.e. to “grow a workforce of technicians capable of understanding, installing, configuring, monitoring, analyzing, transferring data and maintaining digital systems in advanced manufacturing environments so meeting a critical skills gap in EU Industry 4.0”.
We invite you to have a look at our official project presentation below to learn how we intend to achieve that.
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Big data benefits
During one of his keynotes, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella once spoke about data as today’s ‘electricity’ meaning it is the thing that drives innovation forwards, just like it was with steam, electrical power, and digital tech in the past three industrial revolutions.
There’s probably not a single business out there that does not recognize the value of data in general. However the usage of data has long passed the simple record-keeping threshold, it is literary so much more: much more complicated, with much higher velocity, variety, veracity and yes, much bigger volume. We live in the era of Big data.
Just in case you are stumbling upon this term for the first time, though we doubt that, Big data is about collecting and analyzing internal and external data to create actionable insights and improve decision making in an organisation.
Because of Big Data, companies are in a position of growing ability to target, collect and store information, then analyze it in order to create new revenue streams and even predict market trends and customer preferences. They can also use it to streamline their products, services and business processes.
Big Data matters since it is very often considered as the most vital and powerful asset of any existing enterprise. Understanding of data and how it can be used in the best possible way is crucial especially for the small and medium businesses which are constantly facing an increasingly competitive market. An investment in Big Data always pays off when the data gathered is (1) being analyzed in order to be able to take measures and (2) act purposefully on the received data i.e. create insights. Big Data helps gaining more complete answers on varoius matters and very often reveals “hidden” but otherwise valuble information. Having enough information means you are becoming more confident in decision making and therefore could lead to a completely different approach for tackling business problems.
While it is true that the best Big Data solution for your organization is the one that is comprised according to your needs, there are some benefits in general that apply to pretty much all businesses. Companies may utilize Big Data to also achieve other great business results and we put some of them in the below infographic, so let’s check it out:

Indeed, there’s a lot that Big data can do for a business. But then again, has everyone already started using it then? Well, the answer is no. That’s because there are certain challenges to be considered when talking about actual company use cases and implementation of a Big data strategy in a given business.
We will talk about that in one of our next posts so stay tuned.
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Big Data Analytics and Hadoop for Advanced Manufacturing
The European manufacturing industry needs revolutionary methodologies and tools to optimize operations, improve efficiency as well as product quality at a reduced production and distribution cost. Nowadays, many manufacturers collect massive amounts of data from different sources (e.g. machines, production lines, sensors, etc.) and they need to centralize storage of data across complex global and often fragmented supply chains. That’s where Big Data analytics and Apache Hadoop come in to cover these needs.
Apache Hadoop is an open-source distributed processing framework that manages data processing and storage for big data applications in scalable clusters of servers. Hadoop is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. The framework itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer rather than relying on hardware to deliver high availability. Hadoop aims to address the limitations of conventional Relational Database Management Systems in terms of storing large datasets, handling data of different formats and processing data at high speed.
But like any framework, Hadoop has both some advantages and disadvantages, and here’s a quick comparison of that:
| Hadoop advantages | Hadoop disadvantages |
|---|---|
| Quick processing of huge volume of data | Issue with small files |
| Supports a variety of data sources including structured and unstructured data | Vulnerable by nature |
| Fault tolerance | Processing overhead |
| Scalability and High throughput | Supports only batch processing |
In fact, Hadoop is a collection of multiple tools and frameworks for big data management, storage, processing and analysis. There a 3 major components of the Hadoop ecosystem:
- Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This is the storage unit of Hadoop. HDFS splits the data unit into smaller units that are called blocks and stores them in a distributed manner.
- Hadoop MapReduce. This is the processing unit of Hadoop allowing you to write applications for processing big data. MapReduce runs these applications in parallel on a cluster of low-end machines. It does so in a reliable and fault-tolerant manner.
- Hadoop Yet Another Resource Negotiator (YARN). This is the resource management unit of Hadoop. It allocates to applications RAM, and other resources depending on their requirements. The basic principle behind YARN is to separate resource management and job scheduling/monitoring function into separate daemons.
Are you interested in taking a course on Apache Hadoop for Big Data Analytics on Advanced Manufacturing? Follow our news section and also us on our social media to make sure you don’t miss the big news: we are currently developing the training courses of the DTAM project and we plan to finalize them at the beginning of 2022.
Resources:
[1] Apache Hadoop
[2] What Is Hadoop? | Simplilearn (YouTube video)
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