The workshop component of this activity is designed to introduce IT staff, engineers and scientists from Research and Education Networks (RENs) in the African region to operating a network-wide service for the scientific application of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and technology. The workshop includes hands-on sessions focused on how-to build, run and maintain various parts of the service pipeline from deployment of IoT sensors and gateways to data analysis.
 
The high-level meeting component aims to discuss and explore broader Euro-African participation in the AfricaConnect4 (AC4) initiative, focusing on developing and enhancing regional infrastructure for data acquisition and scientific computing. This half-day meeting will focus on exploring and developing opportunities in AC4 alongside relevant European/international stakeholders as part of the planning and implementation of the AC4 project.

Topics:

• Introduction to IoT: Choosing sensors, deploying sensors and gateways. Powering IoT devices (battery and solar powered solutions)
• Introduction to IoT communications network:  LoRAWAN gateway deployment (including redundant internet-link+power)
• Introduction to the MQTT protocol and setup of an Open-source/Community edition of an IoT platform for automatic archival of collected data
• Basic Data Science for IoT service pipeline: Working with CSV formatted data; removal of duplication; changing data resolution/scale); visualisation and graphing; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning  models; publishing and sharing data
• Addressing security related challenges (IoT sensors. gateways and data access)
• High Level Meeting:  AfricaConnect 4 and African-wide regional infrastructure for data acqusition, scientific research and High Performance Computing (HPC) centres.