Hacker students as micro-operators at COMNET 5G IoThon in May

During 3–5 May, 2019 the Aalto Campus will host a 48-hour open source IoT hackathon, the second in the IoThon series, for graduate students and developers. The theme for COMNET IoThon 2019 is 5G. Aalto University and the industrial partners will be providing 5G and IoT related platforms for the participants to innovate and co-create with.

The hackathon is being prepared by Aalto COMNET together with Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Telia and the EU Horizon 2020 project SOFIE. It is targeted to research students at both master’s and doctoral levels, with the anticipated participation of 100 students from Aalto University and elsewhere in Europe. The partnering universities include Freie Universität Berlin, HAW Hamburg, University of Basel, and Athens University of Economics and Business.

Each of the industrial partners will pose a specific challenge. There will be a prize for each challenge and one main prize for the best solution across all challenges. There is still limited place, for one or at most two industrial partners, to join! 

“We offer developers SIM cards and some NB-IoT sensors, together with the access to Virtual Machines where they can implement applications for processing the data received from the sensors through the mobile infrastructure. The developers can then implement own services based on the data from the sensors,” explains Jose Costa Requena, Staff Scientist at COMNET— the Department of Communications and Networking at Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering.  

The developers may also bring their own NB-IoT sensors, using the 700 Mhz frequency band, and with the SIM cards provided by COMNET they can connect those sensors to the mobile network and access their data for processing. COMNET is also exploring the possibilities for opening the recently granted 3.5 GHz frequency band to the participating hackers, potentially with full access to the COMNET open source 5G core.

The mobile network has full coverage within the Aalto main campus so that the developers can deploy their sensors in any location within Otaniemi. The application and services implemented by the developers, if successful, could be easily commercialised since the provided network is equivalent to existing infrastructure recently deployed by commercial mobile operators following 3GPP standards.

If you are interested to join as a corporate partner, please, contact Tatu Koljonen, Executive in Residence at Aalto University, for more information. 

Application is now open at iothon.io

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