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1. Building Smart and Accessible Transportation Hubs with Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, and Affective Computing

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784481219.012  

   Gong, Jie; Feeley, Cecilia; Tang, Hao; Olmschenk, Greg; Nair, Vishnu; Zhou, Zixiang; Yu, Yi; Yamamoto, Ken; Zhu, Zhigang (October 2017, International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure 2017)

   Large transportation hubs are difficult to navigate, especially for people with special needs such as those with visual impairment, Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or simply those with navigation challenges. The primary objective of this research is to design and develop a novel cyber-physical infrastructure that can effectively and efficiently transform existing transportation hubs into smart facilities capable of providing better location-aware services. We investigated the integration of a number of Internet of Things (IoT) elements, including video analytics, Bluetooth beacons, mobile computing, and facility semantic models, to provide reliable indoor navigation services to people with special needs, yet requiring minimum infrastructure changes. Our pilot tests with people with special needs at a multi-floor building in New York City has demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed framework. 

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2. Predicting Floor-Level for 911 Calls with Neural Networks and Smartphone Sensor Data

   Falcon, William; Schulzrinne, Henning (April 2018, Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations)

   null (Ed.)

   In cities with tall buildings, emergency responders need an accurate floor level location to find 911 callers quickly. We introduce a system to estimate a victim's floor level via their mobile device's sensor data in a two-step process. First, we train a neural network to determine when a smartphone enters or exits a building via GPS signal changes. Second, we use a barometer equipped smartphone to measure the change in barometric pressure from the entrance of the building to the victim's indoor location. Unlike impractical previous approaches, our system is the first that does not require the use of beacons, prior knowledge of the building infrastructure, or knowledge of user behavior. We demonstrate real-world feasibility through 63 experiments across five different tall buildings throughout New York City where our system predicted the correct floor level with 100% accuracy. 

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3. InSight: A Bluetooth Beacon-based Ad-hoc Emergency Alert System for Smart Cities

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC49032.2021.9369621  

   Hasan, Raiful; Hasan, Ragib; Islam, Tanveer (January 2021, 2021 IEEE 18th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC),)

   null (Ed.)

   The purpose of alerts and warnings is to provide necessary information to the public that will lead to their safety in emergencies. The nation’s alerting capabilities need to evolve and progress with the extensive use of smartphones, and newer technologies become available, especially to be more precisely targeted to sub-populations at risk. Historically, this has been a challenge as the delivery of alerts and warning messages to the public is primarily through broadcast media and signs. However, deploying such signs takes time and may not be visible to people imminent of natural hazards. Especially for road closing, marking hazards, emergency evacuation, etc., it would be beneficial to have an easy-to-deploy and automated alert/warning system that requires no line of sight. To this end, we have developed Insight – a Bluetooth beacon-based system that uses a smartphone application to sense signals from beacons marking hazard zones. The system does not require any Internet or communication infrastructure and therefore, it is resilient to breakdowns in communications during disasters. To demonstrate the feasibility of Insight, we conducted a study in an urban university campus location. The system demonstrated adequate usability and feasibility. 

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4. BeaCloud: A Generic Architecture for Sustainable Smart City using Bluetooth Beacons

   https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCC-SmartCity-DSS50907.2020.00149  

   Hasan, Raiful; Hasan, Ragib (December 2020, IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC))

   null (Ed.)

   In recent years, Bluetooth beacons have been widely used in numerous application domains, including smart cities, assistive technologies, and intelligent transportation management. Researchers or developers associated with these domains frequently require diverse systems to implement or test their prototype related innovations. They need to deploy beacons for the specific environment every time; such customized systems typically cannot often be reused. Hence, the cost of implementation increases, and multiple systems generate redundant data. In this paper, we propose BeaCloud - an architecture which provides a common platform of multiple beacon-based systems. BeaCloud enables inter-system communication and allows easy and secure access to data for the system administrators. The proposed architecture presents a cost-effective model that offers reduced cost and hardware. Also, BeaCloud reduces the data redundancy by up to 40%. To demonstrate the feasibility of BeaCloud, we implemented a testbed of three testing sites and evaluated the system's performance. 

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5. Authorization Framework for Secure Cloud Assisted Connected Cars and Vehicular Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3205977.3205994  

   Gupta, Maanak; Sandhu, Ravi (June 2018, Proceedings of 23rd ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT’18))

   Internet of Things has become a predominant phenomenon in every sphere of smart life. Connected Cars and Vehicular Internet of Things, which involves communication and data exchange between vehicles, traffic infrastructure or other entities are pivotal to realize the vision of smart city and intelligent transportation. Vehicular Cloud offers a promising architecture wherein storage and processing capabilities of smart objects are utilized to provide on-the-fly fog platform. Researchers have demonstrated vulnerabilities in this emerging vehicular IoT ecosystem, where data has been stolen from critical sensors and smart vehicles controlled remotely. Security and privacy is important in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) where access to electronic control units, applications and data in connected cars should only be authorized to legitimate users, sensors or vehicles. In this paper, we propose an authorization framework to secure this dynamic system where interactions among entities is not pre-defined. We provide an extended access control oriented (E-ACO) architecture relevant to IoV and discuss the need of vehicular clouds in this time and location sensitive environment. We outline approaches to different access control models which can be enforced at various layers of E-ACO architecture and in the authorization framework. Finally, we discuss use cases to illustrate access control requirements in our vision of cloud assisted connected cars and vehicular IoT, and discuss possible research directions. 

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