PETRAS Lancaster team wins an award from Google’s IoT initiative

PETRAS Lancaster team won an award from Google to help with the smart campuses work.  This was a gift of 250USD in cloud credits and (much more importantly) 250 Internet of Things (IoT) beacons for deployment on campus. This was in response to a call issued by Google – the Google IoT Technology Research Award Pilot:  https://research.googleblog.com/2016/02/announcing-google-internet-of-things.html.

The IoT beacons provided by Google will be used to help develop personalised content delivery on smart digital signage – enabling the content shown to reflect the needs and interests of the viewers who are passing by displays. More specifically, the project will help us achieve more precise localisation and, crucially, through the use of capabilities broadcast via the beacons a form of simple presence assurance. This will form part of our existing personalisation architecture enabling us to provide insights into how Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons (such as iBeacons and Eddystone) can be combined with other location technologies for secure IoT-based personalisation of pervasive computing spaces at different scales.