Bayes Centre

ICoT Conference 2020

On 27th February the IoT Service together with Bayes held our inaugural Intelligent Connected Things Conference (ICoT 2020) across Informatics Forum and the Bayes Centre. This was a very well attended event (170+) with a variety of attendees from academia, education, business and government communities.

Group photo of Primary School children who presented at ICoT Conference

We wanted to create a different type of conference event, an immersive experience providing hands-on access to working examples of IoT–“intelligent connected things” from the IoT Service here at the University of Edinburgh as part of our Smart Campus operations, as well as showcasing some of our local companies’ innovations here in our South East Scotland region.

Exhibits included our own occupancy monitoring and ParkLife bat detector; Design Informatics’ VizBlocks physical data visualisation and GeoPact blockchain enabled delivery lock box; RiverTrack with their community flood monitoring system; and Ziva Robotics with their outdoor autonomous surveillance robot.  Attendees could also elect to participate anonymously directly in our own development of conference attendee tracking using our prototype Smart Badges for the day – results from that experiment will be shared in due course.

Two of the major highlights of the day were of course our keynote speaker Olivia Gambelin, CEO of Ethical Intelligence, discussing the ethics of IoT solutions and with a very lively question and answer session; but the general opinion was the pupils from Roslin Primary School “stole the show”, having developed their IoT solutions for Data Town during the first part of the morning, each of the five groups then stood up and presented their inspired solutions to conference in the session before lunch.

Feedback from the event has been very positive.

  • Just wanted to say thanks for the invite to iCoT, it was great to see what you and the wider groups are doing. It is especially inspiring to see how education is being plugged in to all parts of the process. It is rare for any plans to outlast the funding or political cycle that enabled it.

     

  • Thank you for a great conference day yesterday! I found the sessions I was able to attend very interesting, and loved wandering around the stalls and talking to the organisations using IoT in fascinating ways.

     

  • Excellent conference yesterday and certainly made a welcome change from the norm. I really enjoyed the talk on ethics and the bat acoustics talk. Good to see the schools getting involved too.

     

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who worked so hard to make the event such a success: our speakers, exhibitors, the events team at Bayes, the caterers, the AV team, and of course the pupils and teachers of Roslin Primary School.

We plan to hold our second event, ICoT 2021, on Thursday 17th June 2021, by which time we are hopeful that COVID-19 restrictions will no longer apply – so don’t miss out and pop the date in your diary, we aim to make ICoT 2021 even more immersive, innovative and inspiring!

- Simon Chapple

Head of Data Technology ISG

DDI IoT Research & Innovation Service