Internet of Things and Agriculture: AIOTI Working Group 06

The Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) was initiated by the European Commission in 2015, with the aim to strengthen the dialogue and interaction among Internet of Things (IoT) players in Europe, and to contribute to the creation of a dynamic European IoT ecosystem to speed up the take up of IoT. It involves a high number of organizations from the public and private sector that join forces towards a common goal.

AIOTI is organized in 13 Working Groups that cover different areas of IoT applications; NEUROPUBLIC is a member of AIOTI and one of the contributors to its WG 06: Smart Farming and Food Security. We gladly accepted Gradiant's invitation (the organization leading the specific WG) and so I found myself in Brussels on Sunday afternoon, getting ready to represent NEUROPUBLIC in the meeting which was hosted by the Spanish Office of Science and Technology (or Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Spanish).

I was excited to be on the same table with people from organizations such as Bayer Crop Science, IBM, Siemens, CEMA (the voice of the EU agricultural machinery producers), COPA-COGECA (the voice of EU farmers and farmers' cooperatives) and Intracom Telecom, to name a few, and have the opportunity to discuss about the current status of implementation of new technologies and the IoT ecosystem in the agricultural context. I was also glad to meet old friend Christopher Brewster from TNO after quite a long time.

AIOTI WG06 activities (#smartfarming #foodsecurity) in 2017 kick off today with a face-to-face meeting in Brussels cc @Gradiant @AIOTI_EU pic.twitter.com/Pzbm8lLAxA

— Marcos Álvarez-Díaz (@madtuirer) January 30, 2017

During the meeting, GAIA Epicheirein was mentioned as one good use case of application of new technologies in agriculture; I was happy to provide some insights on how GAIA Epicheirein was established and the work done in the context of NEUROPUBLIC's smart farming project that takes place all over Greece. Our new H2020 project DataBio was also mentioned quite a few times during the meeting, as one of the projects that may help push things forward in the specific context (see e.g. the smart farming pilots that NEUROPUBLIC will be responsible for).

The Smart AKIS H2020 project was also presented during the meeting by Ivo Hostens from CEMA, as a project that could be of interest to the scope of the group; more specifically, the marketplace that the project aims to build could be adapted by the WG.

.@Gaia_Epixeirein presented as a use case of #SmartFarming during @AIOTI_EU WG06 meeting #IoT #InternetOfThings @Gaia_Brussels pic.twitter.com/JCppqyI398

— NEUROPUBLIC (@Neuropublic) January 30, 2017

The next steps of the Working Group were discussed during the meeting and there are still points to be addressed but this first face to face meeting of the Working Group gave a boost into the right direction (and also allowed the participants / members of the WG to get to know each other). I have the feeling that NEUROPUBLIC will be one of the important members of the group, due to its unique combination of technology/infrastructure, access to farmers (through GAIA Epicheirein) and application of its smart farming services under real conditions. :-)

Talking about data silos and data pools

Yesterday I was invited to participate and present in a meeting about networking projects about climate change. It was a meeting organized in the context of the OLIVE CLIMA - LIFE11 ENV/GR/000942 project and the participants (about 40 people) were mainly Greek agricultural researchers working in the same or related LIFE-funded projects, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Rural Development and Food and the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. The meeting was hosted at the lovely premises of the Forest Research Institute, at Ilisia, Athens, Greece located within a large hill park.

During the introduction to the meeting, my friend Dr. George Koubouris highlighted the fact that the audience consisted of researchers who are working in the same context, share the same or similar research interests but still they were not familiar with each other. This was one of the points that I would like to highlight in my presentation, focusing on efforts like the VOA3R portal for networking agricultural researchers and of course AgriVIVO. During the presentations made by the project partners, I also realized the need for a centralized repository to host all their research outcomes (at least the ones developed in the context of their projects) so that they could be more easily accessible by a wider audience.

George Koubouris presenting

 My presentation was based on existing material developed for the dissemination purposes of agINFRA and was focused on the need for moving from the existing data silos (e.g. the individual and not (inter)connected web sites of the projects hosting the project's outcomes) to data pools (which would provide the opportunity for these outcomes to be reached by a much wider audience). There was also a short demonstration of the VOA3R portal, as a mean for Greek researchers to find a virtual space for sharing, creating their own community/communities and finding a common ground to for further collaboration. Unfortunately it had to be really short, it was the last one in the programme and there was already a significant delay in the original schedule.

The advantages of having the last presentation; your last slide remains there for longer!

The participants seemed to be interested in the contents of the presentation, as it was pointing exactly to their needs; I expect that to happen in each agINFRA presentation anyway, as the project is really promising. During the round table session, which was the last part of the meeting, agINFRA was proposed as the mean that they could use for making their collection publicly available in case they are interested. Specific questions were raised, mainly related to the licenses and rights that should be used for sharing their research outcomes, so CC Licenses as well as the existence of Data Exchange Agreements and Memorandi of Understanding.

Presenting the agINFRA approach on data pools

agINFRA users' meeting, 26-27/3/2013

AK hosted the agINFRA users' meeting in Athens, between 26 and 27 of March, 2013. The meeting was attended by the majority of the agINFRA data providers and gave the opportunity for discussion about the next steps in the context of WP5, which is related to data aggregation. I was really involved in this meeting, as it was an excellent opportunity for me to collect feedback on the D5.2 "agINFRA data integration methodology and workflow" and D5.3 "Conceptual specification of linked agricultural data integration layer", which were ongoing during this period but still there was input missing.

Hands-on session during the meeting

As regards D5.2, we had a great time with the data providers trying to depict their own (meta)data management workflows using flipchart sheets and markers and at the same time trying to see which of the collections we could use at this first metadata ingestion step. In D5.3 things were less fun, as we had to discuss about any type of Knowledge Organization System (KOS) such as controlled vocabularies, ontologies and thesauri which is used by the data providers for the classification of the resources but has not been published yet. This will be a challenging task, requiring a cloud-based installation of a KOS management tool and guidance of the partners in uploading their KOSs and linking to existing KOSs, which are already published, in order to facilitate the mapping between the different KOSs.

On top of that, we got to discuss about the tools which may be used for the uploading and puiblication of KOS as well as about the agINFRA integrated services from the users' point of view. As a user I found all discussions to be really useful :-)

The meeting was also an excellent opportunity for me to see again old friends like +Imma Subirats but mostly to meet new people like Davika, +Giovanni L'Abate, Ivana, David and +Valeria Pesce, with whom I have exchanged a lot of emails during the last months but never got to meet them in real life. Even though I was pretty ill during the two days of the meeting (high-fever, probably a flu), I got the chance to get to meet everyone slightly better. On the other hand I missed the opportunity to get to meet Guntram and Jane who did not finally make it to the meeting, people with whom we have exchanged a lot of emails but never had the chance to meet.

A big thank you goes to all those who got involved in the organization of the meeting (I know how hard it is) as well as to those who managed to travel to Athens and provided their feedback during the tow days of the meeting!

Organic.Lingua 4th project meeting @ Paris

The Organic.Lingua 4th project meeting took place between 18-20/9/2012 at Paris, France, at the premises of INRA. I knew that I had a lot of work to do for the meeting, since I had to present a wide variety of things, some of which were not exactly in the heart of what I am actually working on (e.g. the presentation of the Organic.Lingua online survey and the Evaluation & Validation plan of the project - there were colleagues of mine working on these topics).

The discussions during the meeting were mainly technical, focusing on the language components and the additions/improvements that are expected within the next months regarding the automated translations, enriched with some "lighter" sessions, like the project's vision session, content population plan and status, dissemination etc. I had the opportunity to present the AgLR (Agricultural Learning Repository) Tool, on which we have been working with the technical team of AK for quite some time now. We managed to identify some issues; however, we didn't have time for the planned hands-on session, which would also provide really useful feedback...

The meeting took longer than expected, so any plans for sightseeing were not applicable. Despite that fact, we managed to visit some really interesting places for dinner (Chez Paula was one of them). However, the hotel room was for once more rather disappointing...located in a not-so-safe-looking area, it has not been refurbished for quite a long time. Mold was all over the bathroom, while the furniture were badly treated in various cases. At least the mattress was unexpectedly comfortable! Breakfast was rather limited but a huge improvement compared to the really poor served in my previous stay in Paris.

All in all, the meeting was successfully completed, leaving some space for improvements in the next months. It left me with quite a lot of things to do within the next weeks, but I am quite sure that other obligations/deadlines etc. will make this quite impossible...

agINFRA technical meeting in Athens

A one-day meeting for the technical partners of the agINFRA project took places at the premises of Agro-Know on 21/6/2012. The meeting was attended by the majority of the technical partners of the project and since some parts of it were closely related to my work (such as the content population and the workflows that could be used during the project for the connection of new repositories), I took some time participating in it.

Nikos Manouselis presenting (photo by Jaakko)

It was a nice opportunity to meet colleagues from Serbia, Spain, Hungary etc., with whom we have never communicated in the past (since my tasks in the project are not exactly technically-oriented), but still it was nice watching these presentations and getting to know how (technical) things are moving in the project.

Short lunch break (photo by Jaakko)

Jaakko Lappalainen from UAH has already made a short blog post describing the event, which is really interesting (and contains more photos of the event)!

I.S.L.E. Professionalization Fair / 4th project meeting

Two different but closely related events of I.S.L.E. network , that took place in the premises of Instituto Superior de Agronomia of the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal between November 7-11, 2011

1. Professionalization Fair: It took place between 8-9/11. Almost all project partners, along with some additional stakeholders/companies, were allocated a space, which included a chair, a desk, power supply and internet connection, as well as enough space for 4 posters, in order to promote their work and meet potential stakeholders. Everything was really nicely organized and the Agro-Know team was happy to introduce the first ISLE project poster, as well as revised brochures of the project. Unfortunately, due to various reasons (including the bad weather), the participation from people outside the project was limited. However, it was still a nice opportunity for project partners to get to know each other even better and more specifically have a clearer image of what each project partner is working on.

The 2nd day of the Fair included a number of interesting presentations from organizations that are involved in the area of sustainable development as well as a substantial (but rather short) round table discussion, including various experts in the area of SD.

2. I.S.L.E. 4th project meeting: It took place between 10-11/11. The first day was dedicated to the current status of the ongoing tasks of the project, so each WP leader provided a brief overview about the status of the corresponding WP. In addition, Dr. Jad Najjar from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, was introduced as the new Belgian partner. Additional sessions in the evening were arranged, in order to discuss the next actions for each WP and set the corresponding deadlines.The second day included a technical visit to the Companhia das Lezírias, the largest agriculture, cattle and forest farmstead in Portugal, covering the marshlands of Vila Franca de Xira, Charneca do Infantado and Pauis (Belmonte, Lavouras and Magos), totalling about 18,000 hectares.

For once more we spent so much time together that it felt like a family reunion! From breakfast time in the morning to the dinner time in the evening, we were working in teams, discussing various things, exchanging opinions and having fun! Had to leave really early (about 07.00), but I was lucky enough to have a bus stop of a convenient bus right outside my hotel so I just had to wait for a few minutes before I entered the bus.

Looking forward to the next project meeting that will take place at the premises of Harper Adams University College in Newport, UK.

Preparing for the 4th project meeting of I.S.L.E.

On Monday I am flying to Lisbon, Portugal in order to participate to the I.S.L.E. 4th project meeting as well to the Professionalization fair, which will be collocated and organized by the School of Agronomy of the Technical University of Lisbon, as an ISLE partner.

Clipped from: voa3r.cc.uah.es (share this clip)

This time we have a lot of things to present to the project meeting, and not limited to the dissemination activities that we are responsible for: New project brochure and poster, almost ready-to-send newsletters, a new platform for providing the ISLE project partners a place to meet, share and discuss, revised course management platform and handbooks etc. It is a good thing that almost all these activities were supported by my colleague Andreas, who devoted a significant amount of time for them.

The Professionalization fair will provide us (as Agro-Know) with the opportunity to present our work in various projects related to the area covered by I.S.L.E. I have already packed my suitcase with posters, brochures and leaflets from these projects, while I have a number of slides presenting these projects, that will be played back and forth in my netbook during the Fair. It sounds like a really big event and I am really anxious to see what it's going to be like.

An I.S.L.E project meeting is different than any other project meeting as it always looks like a big family reunion: It is so nice to see people from all over Europe, younger and older, really friendly and full of ideas and share all these days with them not only working but also enjoying the limited free time. Just imagine a consortium consisting of about 39 institutions coming from about 30 different countries - the gathering is just amazing! It is always a pleasure working with this big family and provide as much as possible to the consortium.

VOA3R 4th project meeting

Having breakfast at Movenpick Hotel

The meeting is hosted in Izmir, Turkey collocating with the MTSR 2011 Conference in the premises of the Yasar University. The room provided for the meeting looks like a cinema hall, being really comfortable and suitable for presentations at the same time. However, the lack of power outlets created a significant problem regarding the charging of laptops. This was an issue, since the use of laptops was really necessary in some sessions.


It seems that there were a lot of open issues to discuss, including the progress of the tasks and the next steps of the WP5 - Content Population, to which more than half a day was dedicated. The WP5 session was really interesting as it contained presentations on the content part as well as on the more technical part (e.g. the presentation of the VOA3R metadata AP), along with a special presentation by Nikos Palavitsinis from GRNET, who shared his experience on the Metadata Quality Evaluation during the Organic.Edunet project.

VOA3R Family Photo. Izmir, 12/10/2011

In addition, on Wednesday evening the VOA3R Controlled experiment on reviewing lifecycle services will be realized, as the papers submitted to both the 4th International Workshop on Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment and the VOA3R Controlled experiment will be presented by the authors. I have already dedicated a lot of time and effort to this experiment so I really hope that everything will be ok in the end and the feedback received will be more than adequate.


UPDATE: The controlled experiment went pretty well, despite the difficulties. Almost all papers were presented (I had to make my presentation on the next day) but the hardest part will be to get some valuable feedback about the process followed in this experiment, from both the authors and the participants. In addition, since some of the presentations took longer than expected, so I had to reallocate my presentation to the session of the next morning, just before flying back to Athens! 

I.S.L.E. Summer School - 3rd project meeting

I just got back home from the 4-day (4-8/7/2011) Summer School/ 3rd Project Meeting of ISLE Network. The whole trip was interesting, as it made me understand how far can Malta be from Greece, depending on the flights available...

The meeting, in my opinion, was really successful, as it included not only interesting key-note speeches from people outside the network (e.g. Dr. Niko Roorda from the Netherlands talking about AISHE: Assessment Instrument for Sustainability in Higher Education - really relevant to our project) but a nice overview of the status of our work described by each WP leader. There was also a session dedicated to the next project meeting, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal and will be collocated with the Professionalization Fair (including companies involved in the area of Sustainable Development)

In addition, there were some additional tools/methods introduced to the project partners, such as the Problem-Based Learning, presented by the Slovenian team (Dr. Marija Lesnik) and our favorite Learning Scenarios, presented by the Agro-Know team (well, specifically Vassilis and Andreas). Since the time allocated to scenarios was rather limited, after we presented the methodology and templates, we asked project partners to work on their own scenarios and develop a number of them, that could be used later for developing a nice handbook on the implementation of learning scenarios in this specific field. We really hope that partners will correspond to that task...

We (as Agro-Know), in the context of Good Practices in Education of SD, also presented the I.S.L.E. MOLE Course Management Platform, in which we plan to ask partners to upload a full course on SD, as it is delivered in their University (e.g. Presentation, additional relevant files, references, notes, slides etc.) and create a collection/curriculum of topics on SD that will expose differences in the approach of teaching relevant topics in different universities around Europe. We will have to work intensively on that, since it will take time and coordination to achieve a good result.

As WP8 - Dissemination WP leaders, we received a number of comments/suggestions about dissemination options, the use of existing tools and future plans on this issue. We will have to work on some of these ideas (e.g. ISLE newsletter, brochure) and revise some others (e.g. leaflet, ISLE poster and website) in order to meet the needs of the project. We presented revisions in the web site, new links page and the new workspace for the ISLE project, to store Deliverables and related documents.

It was really nice to see people from the previous project meeting in Teramo as well as to meet new faces (e.g. Vanessa from Austria, Manu from Luxemburg, Vesna & Marija from Slovenia, Magdalena from Slovakia etc.). We had a nice time during the meeting and a really interesting time during the joint events (including visits to archaeological sites, museums and traditional restaurants as well!). These were 4 full days of work and social events and a big thanks should go to Louise, Everaldo and Adrian for organizing all these for so many people (more than 40 participants this time!).

Still got lots of work to do and we'll present/discuss more during the Lisbon meeting.

Organic.Balkanet 4th meeting - Day 2

Day 2 of the 4th Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting is now over... it was a really exhausting day!
Since I had not slept well last night, it was not easy to get up in the morning, but the worst thing is that despite the efforts and temp accounts created for us, we still didn't have internet access in the meeting room.

I started with my "offline" presentations about Pedagogy (Developing a training course & Implementation of participative techniques, the last one being really hard!). Among the attendants there were four Slovenian OA advisors, which seemed rather interested to the topics. After that, I made a demonstration of the Organic.Balkanet MOLE portal and then a hands-on exercise, including the registration of new users, creating a course, uploading new material and working with metadata in the MOLE platform. We faced some issues with the platform but in the end we managed to end successfully the course.

A really nice and full lunch followed in the "Novi Svet" restaurant (what a coincidence!), where we had fish among others (yeap, sometimes I eat fish!) and a nice shrimp soup. It's a good thing that returning to the meeting room we had a coffee break, so we got revitalized, even though temporary.

The meeting continued with a presentation of the progress of each WP and I had the opportunity to add another presentation to my record, this time about the Dissemination activities, as GRNET is the WP5 leader. The meeting ended at about 19.00 and left us all exhausted... just a quick walk with some of the partners to visit the oldest vine in the world and a quick pass by the Lent festival by the river Drava.

Now I am trying to catch up with my emails (too many to handle, due to my lack of connectivity all day) and work on some stuff about the forthcoming 3rd ISLE project meeting/Summer School in Malta. I have to start packing as well, as tomorrow I am leaving Maribor and I have an early train to catch!

Organic.Balkanet 4th meeting - Day 1

Day 1 of the meeting was really interesting: I had the opportunity to meet the rest of the project partners, some of them for the first time. There were also two officers from the Romanian National Agency, that would monitor the progress of the project and discuss some issues with us.

Unfortunately there was no internet access in the meeting room, so we had to make some re-arrangements in the schedule: All of my presentations were moved to day 2 of the meeting! This presentation marathon to follow reminded me of the first two days of the CerOrganic ToT School  some weeks ago.

Apart from that, we enjoyed a very tasty lunch in a classy restaurant really close to Hotel Orel (to which I am staying), which included a variety of dishes, an excellent dessert and a tasty local cold wine. The meeting was resumed with a little delay, but we managed to go on and attend a number of presentations that were originally going to take place on Thursday.

After the end of the meeting we had a mini-meeting with Salvador, Prof. Roman and Maria, for a quick dinner at "Novi Svet" restaurant. It is a really nice restaurant, mostly with fish and rather large portions. The Adriatic Calamari was splendid!

Last thing I did was to return late to my room, exhausted and spent more than two hours revising my presentations for tomorrow...

Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting - Day 0

Despite the general strikes of the public means of transportation in Greece (the Athens Airport was only reachable by taxis - and I hate taxis!) as well as the strike of the air-traffic controllers starting at 08.00 this morning, I managed to fly to Vienna from where I am going to continue my trip to Maribor for the Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting.

The preparations for the meeting have been really extensive, as we have worked on various different tasks:

• Dissemination: The project website was updated with the latest news and events. The project brochure was revised and a newsletter including news and references to the project was prepared. We have also worked on disseminating the Training Course, which is supported by the Organic.Balkanet project and will take place in Mesta village, Chios island Greece in October 2011. Two papers were prepared by the GRNET team, concerning the project and they will be presented during the EFITA 2011 Conference and the 2011 VOA3R Workshop.
• Content: About 10 courses classified in 3 different training modules (Pedagogy, ICT and Training Scenarios) have been prepared and revised, in order to be a part of the Organic.Balkanet training curriculum. The templates for their descriptions and presentation have been prepared and sent to partners a long time ago. A handbook for the implementation of training scenarios has been developed for the project and will be enriched with the scenarios developed during the training events.. 
• ICT: We have adapted the MOLE platform in order to fit the specific purposes of the Organic.Balkanet project. Our courses have already been uploaded there and everything seems to be ready for the rest of the project partners. Two handbooks have been adopted for use by the trainers and trainees of the Organic.Balkanet training events respectively.
• Evaluation: We have designed and developed questionnaires for the evaluation of both the content and the training scenarios developed by the project.

I met Prof. Roman (the project coordinator) & Maria Toader from USAMVB in the Maribor train station (we took the same train - me for just one stop... what a coincidence!) and it was a really nice surprise. It is always nice meeting friends, especially when you are far from home. We arranged an unofficial meeting in the evening, to visit the premises of the University of Maribor (where the meeting will take place) and go sightseeing (apparently while discussing project issues...).

1st OPAL meeting for 2011 & the power of Web 2.0 tools

I was relaxing at home, browsing the news through internet channels and watching TV at the same time. While checking my Facebook account, I saw a post from EFQUEL about the 1st OPAL Consultative Group Meeting for 2011 (OPAL stands for Open Educational Quality Initiative) and since I am actively involved (even a little bit) in OER, I was immediately drawn to it.

The meeting was held online using the Adobe Presenter platform, and the participants had the chance to see live video, watch the presentation slides, chat by typing messages as well as use their webcams and microphones and participate in the discussion.

A Twitter backchannel (#opal-oer) was setup by the organizers for the communication of the event and I managed to see a couple of tweets during the meeting.

It was the first time I watched Ulf Ehlers making a presentation (ok, I have watched a couple of his recorded presentations which he prepared for the CerOrganic Training of OA Trainers Summer School in Chania, Crete a week ago) and I was really amazed this time, too. Interesting presentation, fluency in English and straight to the point notes. It is really strange that we have worked for the same EU projects twice (Organic.Edunet & CerOrganic) but we never had the chance to meet. Among others, I was excited to listen to Wayne Macintosh, for whom I have heard a lot and read some more, about his contribution to the OER initiative. His contribution was really substantial, too and he was really into it.

This thing tonight reminded me of some last-minute meetings with friends, to which at first you are reluctant to participate but in the end you feel so glad that you followed the stream and had such a good time! That's what happened tonight, this event really dragged me out of my couch and let me stand in front of my laptop, excited by this unexpected night event.