Stimulating Research Projects Through Teaching a Course on the Internet of Things

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to an emerging paradigm in which objects (things), that are not necessarily intelligent or traditionally part of the Internet, become highly connected and integrated in the Internet. With the appropriate sensor platform and actuators, these objects become constituents of intelligent IoT devices that collect a massive amount of data from the surrounding environments. This data will be further analyzed, locally or by a resourceful cloud server, for an appropriate action to be taken by the actuator circuit connected to the IoT device. The IoT paradigm paved the way for an enormous number of applications and systems to be built. Diverse research fields contributed to the emergence of the IoT concept. From wireless sensor networks, to embedded systems, to mobile computing, and not ending with semantic search engines. In a previous work, we proposed guidelines on how to teach an introductory course on IoT for both undergraduate and graduate students. In this paper, we shed the light on how teaching such a course becomes an opportunity to establish the basis for promising research projects and activities. We elaborate on the experiences gained from teaching the Introduction to the Internet of Things course at the American University of Kuwait, Kuwait, and show how undergraduate students can effectively launch research projects by learning about IoT platforms. Through presenting two case studies, we aim at sharing the achievements of undergraduate students who managed to use their knowledge in IoT systems to produce interesting research work.

I. Introduction

The developments in the design of intelligent sensor node platforms, effective web development frameworks, cloud computing systems and services, and communication and networking technologies, opened wide doors for the creation of interesting systems in which objects, or things, gained the ability to be active parts of the Internet. These things can collect a massive amount of data about a certain phenomenon from the surrounding environment or context. That data is then processed either locally or by a resourceful cloud server to produce an action. For the action to be appropriate, it should be based on the knowledge that the collected data reflects. This knowledge can be produced through intensive operations of filtering, processing, categorizing, condensing, and contextualizing of the data [1]. The paradigm in which smart things become connected to the Internet to inject data into it and perform actions based on the processing of that data is referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). Diverse disciplines of research contributed to the emergence of the concept of IoT like embedded systems, cloud computing, communication protocols, big data analytics, and wireless sensor networks [2].