I am honored to be invited as one of the Keynote Speaker and also a judge for UniMAP’s Final Year’s Projects (Individual and Group) that are focused on Internet of Things on May 29, 2017, at School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Pauh Putra Campus in Perlis. The School shortlisted and displayed 26 IoT showcases.

The presentation slides can be seen and downloaded below:

Below are my short comments and review regarding the overall displays.

1. The projects covered various application scenarios such as health, aquaculture, smart home, car security, hazardous environment, garbage, environmental, parking, transportation, security, LoRa, forest, smart mirror, etc.
2. The students are very innovative and creative in developing the solutions. They have thought through various usage scenarios in detail.
3. All the projects displayed are complete working prototypes. Even though there are some hiccups with the Internet/WiFi connectivity, the students have made an effort is showing their recorded videos. There is a group even show a detailed video how their car surveillance works with some “actors”.
4. The mockups are displayed in such detail which amazed me how much effort and thoughts have been put into the project. These mockups really help the overall project presentation. Seeing a demo with mockup is far better than posters on the wall. Mockups such as parking lot, supermarket, wearable shirt, train, house, aquaponic, automated roof cooling system, smart bin, smart pillbox, smart mirror and much more.
5. It’s surprising to see how interests in IoT manage to bring about the energy, effort, commitment, and self-learning to the students. Integrating sensors, microcontrollers, GSM modems, GPS, connecting to the cloud using IoT middleware, building backend web solution and mobile app development by a single student deserve a big applause.
6. IoT is all about solving a business problem and the students with the help of their UniMAP lecturers understand this quite well. Defining the right problem statement is key to start developing IoT.

The Smart Partnership

A group of researchers from Advanced Telecommunication Technology Research Group (ATT), Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Edward Chan Kam Fai, Gan Yi Reng, Leow Tan Chun Kit and Dr. Kamaludin Mohamad Yusof aims to solve one of the most problematic issues in cities i.e. illegal parking! The researchers also wanted a better way to manage the sensors and develop applications, and thus, they chose FAVORIOT as the IoT platform.

The Issues of Illegal Double Parking

Illegal double parking is one of the primary cause of horrible traffic congestion in many city centers. A visit is conducted from StarMetro to hotspots like Taipan Business Centre, USJ 10, Subang Jaya shows that road user blatantly ignored the No Parking and Towing Zone signboards that aimed to prevent double parking. Although Subang Jaya Municipal Council (MPSJ) has issued a total of 25,270 compound notices at 2012, the problem still hasn’t come to cease. In a report, from World Bank 12th Malaysia Economic Monitor, Malaysian typically motorist in Kuala Lumpur spends more than 250 million hours per year in traffic congestion. Traffic congestion in Kuala Lumpur also cost over RM3,100 per motorist or over 1.1% of national GDP annually for the country. Of course, Malaysia is not sitting idly with respect to this situation.

For example, as Cyberjaya braces for the influx of population by 2018, we need to start resolving current city administration issues for better management of traffic flow. At the same time, the lack of parking space in open and public parking areas within Cyberjaya has resulted in teething congestion problems during peak hours. Lack of enforcement manpower by the local council and growing double parking problems is a common sight within Cyberjaya.  The City Innovation Council is actively discussing and reviewing ways to optimizing innovative technology to resolve teething city problems and increase the quality of life in Cyberjaya.

There are many initiatives by public and even private sectors to cope this problem. Building a robust public transport, encouraging cycling culture and introducing smart traffic light system, these are the efforts to alleviate the situation. Activation of smart social solutions by resolving city administration problems such as double parking using public empowerment, connected things, and communications technology. With more installation of sensors and smarter city applications in place, more opportunities for

We would like to see how technology can be designed to resolve a double parking problem by empowering the public, building management, and local council to cooperate by means of Internet of Things (IoT) or mobile smart devices. With more installation of sensors and smarter city applications in place, more opportunities for the smart city urban public services will be made available.

The Solution – ParkKing

This project experiments innovative smart city solutions to improve urban public services. The project aims for the public, building management, and local council to cooperate, by setting up an integrated information platform with multi-source data that works with devices/things that resolve a particular city problem as a service.

The project is called Smart Parking with Automated Double Park Detection System (ParkKing) system with the objective to solve the problem of double parking (Figure 1). Apart from this, ParkKing also helps the drivers to locate the nearest available empty parking lot surround them. This will indirectly avoid the problem of double parking where drivers can find the empty parking nearby and park their vehicles properly.

In existing solution, the car detector is located at the center of the parking lot. However, ParkKing has its car detector sensor located 30cm inside from the boundary of the parking lot as shown in Figure 2. This is so that it can detect whether there is an available parking in the lot or there is a car double-parked outside. Next, there is a transceiver gateway installed at the lamp post which can connect up to 20 car detectors of parking lots. When it detect a presence of a car either it is in the parking lot or double-parked car, it will send the data to the control server of the system. For the drivers, there will be a smartphone application which will locate the nearest empty parking lot. When the ParkKing system detects a double-parked car, it will send to the FAVORIOT platform and notify the authority to tow the vehicle away.

We believe that the integration of ParkKing system with the existing smart traffic light system and intelligent parking system will bring us a smart management transport system for a smart city.

With the presence of our ParkKing system, we can have an automated double parking detector to ease the management or the local authority of Cyberjaya. Next, we also show the road users in Cyberjaya to the nearest available parking lot available. Thus, they will not simply double-park their car. Besides, after notifying the authority, they can tow the double parked car to warn the drivers and other road users not to double park next time. This is very significant because when there are cars double-parked, it causes traffic congestion. When traffic jam, actually government is spending more money to subsidize the petrol since traffic jam causes a higher petrol consumption.

Future Plans

Apart from what have been mentioned above, we do consider the future development of this project. In future, we can install a camera at the lamp post so that to identify the double-park car’s number plate and match with the data in Jabatan Pengangkutan Jalan Malaysia (JPJ) database using OpenCV for object recognition system. Then, it will send a penalty to the car owner. Besides, we also think of to obtain the car parking data like the period of parking. Typically, customers would want to park at the nearest space to shop. So, to help to reduce the problem of insufficient parking space, we plan to have a car park for those who wish to park extended period and limit the time of parking on the street. This can be done by obtaining the time of parking using our ParkKing system. With this, users will have a better customer experience where they get to find parking easily and bring business opportunity to the shops nearby. In our future plan, we also want to integrate our ParkKing system with an automated parking fee payment system to replace the current parking coupon system. This ParkKing system will also be a liability for the management, but we can generate income by co-operating with the shop or company nearby not only to cover the maintenance fees but become a passive income as well! For future development, this ParkKing system can contribute to traffic flow prediction by using the big data concept. By having traffic flow forecasting, we can definitely have a well thought-out town planning.

FAVORIOT offered a very affordable pricing plan as shown below:

The Beginner Plan is very suitable for University students who have been assigned or chose IoT project as their Final Year Project. A single device such as Raspberry Pi or Arduino that collects from several connected sensors can stream to the IoT platform. A simple dashboard is provided to visualize the measurements. This plan is also suitable for an individual developer or hobbyist that would like to familiarize with IoT platform, conduct self-learning or participate in IoT Hackathons. At RM 8.33 (or less than USD 2.00) per month, you can become the next Generation-IoT and on your way to be one of the rare talents in the job market today!

The Startup Plan is perfect for Freelancers or SMEs or Startups to provide IoT solution for a medium size project up to 150 devices. In fact, they can also create multiple projects or applications but limited to the total number of 150 devices.

The Business Plan is great for developing big commercial IoT project. It can support up to 300 devices for many smart applications.

However, if a company requires connecting thousands of devices, they may contact/email their customized requirements to sales@favoriot.com

CLICK HERE to Subscribe/Request for Quotation.

Check out the COMPLETE Tutorial How to connect an Arduino to FAVORIOT Platform. You can also download a STEP-by-STEP Tutorial –  TUTORIAL – Cytron Uno with FAVORIOT Platform (60 downloads)

I must confess that I have seen many applicants fumbled during the day of their presentations. What has been written in the proposal is the same during the presentation. Most likely they have prepared the proposal much earlier without much thought. And the day of the presentation is likely to be months later whereby they have gathered more information, and at times it can override their original ideas.

Herewith, I attached 14 tips which most presenters always ignore and did not do the proper homework. Hopefully, in future presentations, you can do a better justice to all parties – yourself, your organizations and your evaluators.

Click HERE for the tips.