Projects

Carbon Footprint for Google Maps

2015-02-18T13:34:43+00:00

"Carbon Footprint for Google Maps" is a browser extension for Google Chrome that aims at raising awareness of users w.r.t. the problem of air pollution caused by cars. Whenever the user asks Google Maps for driving directions, this browser extension automatically estimates and shows to the user the total CO2 emission for driving on the route suggested by Google Maps. "Carbon Footprint for Google Maps" is currently used by 20000 users and is installed by 20 new users every day.

Carbon Footprint for Google Maps in the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/carbon-footprint-for-goog/ednfpjleaanokkjcgljbmamhlbkddcgh
Github repository: https://github.com/OiWorld/CarbonFootprintGoogleMaps
GSoC Instructions: https://github.com/OiWorld/MindTheWord/blob/master/GoogleSummerOfCode.md

Members: Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo, Ekaterina Lebedeva

Colibri – Smart Building Energy Management

2016-02-08T12:46:41+00:00

Intelligent control strategies for efficient operation of residential as well as commercial buildings regarding energy demand become more and more important as buildings are responsible for a high amount of global energy consumption. Colibri (French for “hummingbird”) is an open source software project that aims at providing an agile and flexible building energy management. Colibri extensively uses semantically enriched information about the building (e.g. structure, physical characteristics), its building automation systems (e.g. sensors, actuators, and controllers), other energy-consuming equipment and devices (e.g. lighting system), and surrounding systems (e.g. smart grid agents, weather service providers). This information that is represented by means of common Semantic Web technologies (e.g. OWL, RDF, RDFS, and RIF) is part of the Colibri semantic core. The Colibri optimization component uses this information to identify appropriate control strategies in consideration of all relevant internal and external influences. Building automation systems as link to the physical processes are utilized to implement the elaborated measures within the building. For this purpose, connectors for different building automation technologies (e.g. KNX, EnOcean) are developed as separate Colibri integration components. In summary, Colibri is placed at the interface of emerging smart grids, building automation systems, and the Semantic Web in order to enable energy-efficient and dynamic management of buildings.

Colibri project was launched in 2016 by the Automation Systems Group at TU Wien. The development of this smart building energy management system is, amongst others, intended to act as proof-of-concept prototype within several research projects.

Members: Andreas Fernbach, Thomas Frühwirth, Wolfgang Kastner, Daniel Schachinger

IoTSyS – Internet of Things integration middleware

2013-03-13T12:27:56+00:00

IoTSyS is an integration middleware for the Internet of Things. It provides a communication stack for embedded devices based on IPv6, Web services, and OBIX to establish interoperable interfaces for smart objects. Using 6LoWPAN for constrained wireless networks and the Constrained Application Protocol together with Efficient XML Interchange, a powerful stack is provided in order to enable usage of interoperable Web technologies in the field of sensor and actuator networks and systems while efficiency regarding transmission message size remains nearly the same as in existing automation systems. The IoTSyS middleware aims at providing a gateway concept for existing sensor and actuator systems found in nowadays home and building automation systems (e.g. KNX, BACnet, ZigBee, or Wireless M-Bus) and a stack that can be deployed directly on embedded 6LoWPAN devices. Furthermore, it addresses security, discovery, and scalability issues.

IoTSyS consists of multiple projects that are currently evolving and are acting as proof-of-concept prototypes within several research projects of the Automation Systems Group at TU Wien.

Members: Andreas Fernbach, Daniel Schachinger

Mind The Word

2013-02-26T07:34:47+00:00

"Mind the Word" is a Google Chrome extension that provides language immersion while the user browses the internet. In every webpage visited by the user, it randomly translates a few words into the target language specified by the user. Because the translated words are kept in context, it is easy to infer and memorize their meanings. Therefore, the user easily learns new vocabulary and improve his/her language skills. "Mind the Word" is currently used by 13500 users and is installed by 40 new users every day.

Mind the Word in the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mindtheword/fabjlaokbhaoehejcoblhahcekmogbom
Github repository: https://github.com/OiWorld/MindTheWord
GSoC Instructions: https://github.com/OiWorld/MindTheWord/blob/master/GoogleSummerOfCode.md

Members: Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo, Ekaterina Lebedeva, Omesh Pandita

nomacs

2013-02-26T07:37:32+00:00

nomacs is a free image viewer for windows, linux and mac, which is licensed under the GNU Public License v3. nomacs is small, fast and able to handle the most common image formats including RAW images. Additionally it is possible to synchronize multiple viewers. Simple image editing tasks include image conversion, resizing and cropping.

The software is written in C++ and uses Qt which allows for a platform independent user interface.

Members: Markus Diem, Stefan Fiel, Florian Kleber

OpenEngSB

2013-02-25T13:31:41+00:00

The OpenEngSB is a technical integration platform for software tools. It applies successful concepts of the Enterprise Service Bus in business software engineering to software tools in the engineering process. The integration approach is vendor neutral and allows the integration of existing tools in an engineering environment.

The need for the OpenEngSB arises due to the increasing complexity and flexibility of engineering processes for developing modern software-intensive systems which require the systematic integration of software tools across engineering disciplines (such as mechanical, electrical, and software engineering). Technical and semantic gaps between software tools and engineering models in the development of automation systems hinder the correct and efficient communication across tool and system boundaries, leading to development delays and risks for system operation. The development of automation systems and also business software development is a group effort of engineering teams that are typically working at distributed locations. The integration of communication and collaboration tools into modern agile engineering workflows is therefore a particularly relevant goal.

Members: Richard Mordinyi, Stefan Scheiber, Marta Sabou, Dietmar Winkler

openKB4BMS – A Semantic BMS Server

2016-02-08T12:47:49+00:00

openKB4BMS is an open source knowledge base (KB) acting as a building management application with Apache Jena as its core. The overall system architecture is shown in the figure above. openKB4BMS sits on top of an integration layer established by oBIX or OPC UA. Alternatively, it can directly connect to IoT devices via a Webservice interface. A Web ontology language (OWL) framework is used for representing the static information about a building and its technical equipment (geometry, building physics, network topologies and devices) as well as the current dynamic state. This includes temperature and humidity values, presence states and blind positions but also the state of building automation systems. This way, openKB4BMS represents a holistic knowledge base of a building and its components.

Analogously to SQL for databases, there exists a query language for knowledge bases called SPARQL. Via this interface, semantic queries on a building management system can be executed. Examples for possible queries to openKB4BMS include but are clearly not limited to:

Are every switching and dimming actuators of a distinct floor in “off” state?
Which lamps in a building have exceeded a distinct operating time?
Which lamps in a building are broken?
How many rooms of a building are occupied?
Which unoccupied rooms at the southern or western front of the building have their shutters in “down” position?

The SPARQL interface answers with boolean values or with the respective positive instances. On the other hand, it is also possible to update property values in the openKB4BMS by SPARQL statements:

Perform a “central full open” to all shades of a distinct building part.
Reset all cycle counters exceeding a distinct value.
Activate or deactivate, respectively, proper electricity consumers for demand side management or flexibility trading purposes.

The changes performed on the openKB4BMS knowledge base are propagated to the underlying automation networks in order to update actual runtime datapoints.

Members: Andreas Fernbach, Thomas Frühwirth

OpenPixi

2013-02-25T13:36:08+00:00

OpenPixi is an open Colored-Particle-In-Cell (CPIC) simulator. It simulates the motion of a large number of color-charged particles in a chromo-electro-magnetic background goverened by strong interaction. This can be used to simulate the early stages of heavy-ion collisions which are performed at particle colliders like the Large Hardon Collider at CERN. The simulation is based on real-time lattice gauge theory.

OpenPixi is being developed in Java, with an educational aspect in mind. As such, it is possible to interact with the plasma in a live Java applet. Please try out the live version.

Members: Andreas Ipp, David Müller, Daniil Gelfand

R/Privacy

2013-03-13T12:27:56+00:00

Data privacy has become one of the hot topics in society, but also in reseach. In the light of data available to the public or to researchers, data privacy should ensure that individuals cannot be identified.
The state-of-the art software tools for data anonymization of complex and big data are open-source: the R package sdcMicro for data anonymization, and the R package simPop for simulating synthetic confidential data.
These software tools are used by various national and international institutions. The aim of this project is to raise the code quality of these anonymization software products. To do so, integrated test should be implemented also to ensure to avoid bugs when changing parts of a code. The integrated test battery should automatically test every
modular part of the code. The code itself should possible be further split into smaller modular parts for better testing and to increase the code quality.

ViennaMesh

2013-02-25T13:44:03+00:00

To provide applications with the utmost flexibility in the generation and adaptation of meshes, the generic and high-quality meshing library ViennaMesh has been developed. ViennaMesh provides a unified interface for various mesh related tools. These tools cover mesh generation, adaptation, and classification of multi-segmented (aka. multi-material) meshes and geometries for unstructured two- and three-dimensional meshes. The goal is to provide applications with an additional back-end layer for mesh generation, allowing to seamlessly exchange mesh tools, for example, mesh generation kernels. Highlights are:

A generic library providing a unified access to mesh generation, adaptation, and classification tools for multi-segment meshing in 2D/3D by CGAL, Triangle, Tetgen, and Netgen.
A hull mesh adaptation tool for high-quality mesh adaptation.
A mesh classification tool for evaluating the mesh quality.
A prototype mesh orientation tool for repairing the orientation of hull mesh elements

Members: Florian Rudolf, Josef Weinbub

Visual Aids for WEKA

2013-03-14T14:02:15+00:00

The WEKA Environment for Knowledge Analysis has emerged as the mainstream open-source data mining software, maintained by Waikato University of Waikato.
WEKA features a multitiude of algorithm implementations that support a variety of general-purpose data mining tasks such as:

classification
clustering
regression
feature selection

In contrast to other data mining environments such as R, WEKA features advanced user interfaces that allow data mining experts to develop and test their algorithms interactively.
Visualization has been a major part of WEKA, and is often used by data mining experts to analyze their the characteristics of their data features.
This projects aims to empower WEKA with advanced interactive visualization techniques.
Besides the current possibilities to analyze data features, the projects aims to

provide intuitive visualizations of the results of data mining algorithms
enable advanced performance analysis, in terms of result accuracy, to allow investigating possible sources of erroneous results
provide interactive means to adjust or extend the algorithms, and to test the improvements

Members: Bilal Alsallakh, Ahmad Bisher Tarakji, Emmanuelle Beauxis-Aussalet