Hi

> I am MSc candidate student in Computer Science (BSc in Electronic 
> Engineering) and I have to decide my Master Thesis. I specified some topics 
> before but I want to work on IoT so I am welcome for suggestions.

I am co-founder of ELL-i cooperative. Our aim is to have a full ecosystem of 
commercial, academic and hobbyist developers around Riot OS and ELL-i 
technologies, using the technologies as platform for building commercial 
products, research, teaching and just plain old having fun.


> I am newbie in IoT technologies so my imagination is a bit limited :)

Allow me to provide with some food for thought. Recently I started a project on 
making yet another IoT home automation system. My goal is to have a distributed 
system, much like KNX but with open source technologies. During my career I 
have seen that open standards have wider adoption and eventually win. Open 
source development models accelerate this and I am visioning that IoT systems 
might be the tripwire industry where open innovation dominates more or less 
from initial large scale adoption on.

Anyhow, recently I started a hobby project named Just Like Star Trek[1] for the 
goal is to have a home or office where the technology hides in the background 
and things like lights, heating, ventilation and everything mostly just works 
without anybody paying any attention to it. The project was started only 
recently and is on a slow burner as we are just now approaching the moment when 
we have most of the technological pieces in hand and can start putting them 
together as a system. I'm doing this as a hobby project but the application 
area is the single reason for which I originally founded ELL-i with Dr 
Nikander. There are still platform pieces to develop but the technology is 
enough mature that hard core nerds can create prototype devices and make small 
testbed systems.

In the presentation slide set[2] I show the architectural vision on page 4 with 
the rest being mostly images for inspiring us and the ELL-i Illuminati 
Hackathon attendees into thinking all the good and cool stuff our homes should 
do without us needing to constantly adjust things manually.

Basically IoT is redividing technological components, giving them all their own 
IP address and then reconnecting them using possibly a different physical 
topology. A big machine such as a cookie factory cookie oven now has a single 
centralized control system that is connected into its motors, heaters and 
sensors using minimum amounts of wire. The system may put on power for the belt 
motor and not realize if the motor is broken, the cookie belt broken, the speed 
sensor broken or a transmission belt slipping when the speed sensor registers 
no movement. Now with IoT, all of these individual elements will be just 
slightly smarter and can report their own health status to the control system.

Similarly in a home environment, the individual devices could report their 
health and instant power consumption and a holistic system status summary can 
be known. The devices can be logically reconnected in different configurations 
just by sending suitable control messages around and this can happen even 
multiple times a day.

The elements should not be more expensive than the traditional dumb devices and 
their reliability should also be similar. This puts heavy burden on the 
software for being small, maintainable and possibly validatable (which again 
puts more burden on being small).


> - I may work on new features or improvements for RIOT if needed.
>  - I may develop a commercial project via RIOT.
> - I may also work with a group.
> Note:I have professional experience over seven years and I am currently 
> working at Cypress Semiconductor as a Senior SW Engineer.

This all depends on if you do the thesis work for a hobby project, academia or 
for a company and is heavily dependent on who will finance it. The greatest 
freedom is if you can self-finance the work as you'll only have to convince you 
and the university supervisors that yours is a Really Good Idea to write a 
thesis on. That would basically mean that you'd write a thesis on your free 
time after work hours or decide you can afford to have a long unpaid leave from 
work to do the thesis. This is very rare in technical fields but could be 
possible depending on your personal finances.

ELL-i is currently taking part in several academic research projects ranging 
from Information Centric Networking (a world without IP addressess so we're 
looking past IPv6 rise and fall) to making a tailored-to-IoT generic control 
chip to build embedded devices with. We are investigating a spin-off company to 
be formed to commercialize on a smart shopping assistant system originally 
developed for a research project.

The Riot OS developer community has recently started to be really interesting 
with all kinds of companies joining and before the current influx of companies 
the list already had good representation from several universities and 
standards defining committees. I think this list an excellent place to ask for 
ideas for thesis work.


  [1]: https://github.com/temmihoo/just-like-star-trek
  [2]: 
https://github.com/temmihoo/just-like-star-trek/blob/master/JLST%20Draft.pdf?raw=true


 - t

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