Papers for Smart Farms and Smart Factories land awards in China

Lecturer Dr Hussain Al-Aqrabi (left) and recent graduate Daniel Clarke win research awards at China’s International Conference on Smart City and Informatization

DIGITAL technology is leading to major efficiency gains in industry, with the development of the Smart Factory.  Now, a University of Huddersfield student and his lecturers have shown how agriculture too can benefit from cloud computing and the Internet of Things – meaning the advent of the Smart Farm.

The research, focussing on the development of an automatic irrigation system leading to more efficient water use and increased food production, was presented at an international conference held in China and has now been selected for publication in a volume of its best contributions.

The paper is titled Implementing a lightweight cloud-based process monitoring system for smart agriculture and the lead author is Daniel Clarke, who has now graduated with First Class Honours from his BSc degree in computing.  For his final-year special project, he investigates the use of small, affordable Raspberry-Pi computers as part of a monitoring system for agriculture and horticulture.

Daniel was supervised by Dr Hussain Al-Aqrabi, a Lecturer and Research Fellow in University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Industrial Analytics.

Dr Al-Aqrabi was a co-author of the smart agriculture paper, which was selected for presentation at the 7th International Conference on Smart City and Informatization (iSCI 2019), which took place at Guangzhou University in China.

He is also lead author of a paper titled A multi-level security model for 5G-enabled Industrial Internet of Things and this was chosen by judges for the prestigious conference’s Best Paper Award.

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Read more: Dr Al-Aqrabi's award-winning paper - A multi-level security model for 5G-enabled Industrial Internet of Things
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It investigates the need for secure communications between devices installed in business that have 5G networks, so that privacy is maintained and intellectual property rights are not jeopardised.  Dr Hussain co-wrote this paper with his University of Huddersfield colleagues Head of Computer Science Professor Richard Hill, Senior Lecturer in Electronic Engineering and Embedded Systems Dr Anju Johnson, Professor of Communication Systems Engineering Phil Lane and Professor Lu Liu of the University of Leicester.

The award-winning paper now appears in the book Smart City and Informatization, which assembles the best 52 papers out of the 139 submitted to iSCI 2019.  The volume also contains Daniel Clarke’s smart agriculture paper.  The co-authors of this are Dr Al-Aqrabi, Professor Hill, Professor Lane and Research Fellow Dr Pritesh Mistry.