Students and hackers get together in Otaniemi for a 48h IoThon hackathon

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. It is organized by the Department of Communications and Networking (COMNET) at Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, together with Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Telia and RIOT.

Altogether 110 master and doctoral students as well as developers have signed up not only from Aalto University, but also from the universities of Helsinki, Turku and Tallinn, as well as from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

IoThon partner universities Freie Universität Berlin, HAW Hamburg, University of Basel and Athens University of Economics and Business are each sending a team to attend.  

Hackers creating IoT innovations enabled by 5G

5G mobile networks are tested and built all around the world and companies are looking for new business areas and service concepts enabled by 5G. The extremely fast download times and low latency of 5G will benefit for example industrial automation and self-driving cars.

Companies taking part in IoThon are looking for innovative solutions to their challenges that will be revealed in detail on Friday 3 May. The attendees have time until Sunday noon to come up with novel solutions. The solutions are presented to a panel of judges on Sunday afternoon and a winner chosen for each challenge. The best solution across all challenges will win the COMNET prize worth of 5000 Euros. The winner announcement ceremony on Sunday at 3-4pm is open to anyone interested. The venue is Open Innovation House, Maarintie 6.

Developers can deploy sensors in any location within Otaniemi

Aalto University and the industrial partners will be providing 5G and IoT related platforms for the participants to innovate and co-create with. Aalto COMNET offers the participants an uniquely open platform to access the internals of the Otaniemi campus 5G mobile network, including NB-IoT support.

“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 mobile network has in principal 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.

For more information, please visit iothon.io