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Flight delay is a significant problem that negatively impacts the aviation industry and costs billion of dollars each year. Most existing studies investigated this issue using various methods based on historical data. However, due to the highly dynamic environments of the aviation industry, relying only on historical datasets of flight delays may not be sufficient and applicable to forecast the future of flights. The purpose of this research is to study the flight delays from a new angle by utilising data generated from the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Our primary goal is to improve the understanding of the roots and signs of flight delays as well as discovering related factors. In this paper, we present a framework that aims at improving the flight delay problem. We consider the IoT data generated from distributed sensors that have not been considered in existing works in the analysis of flight delays, and for that purpose, an automatic tool is developed to collect IoT data from various data sources including flight, weather, and air quality index. Based on the heterogeneous data, an algorithm is developed to merge different features from diverse data sources. We adopt predictive modelling to study the factors that contribute to flight delays and to predict the flight delays in the future. The results of our work show a high correlation among the developed features. In particular, the results clearly demonstrate the association between the flight delays and the air quality index factor. In particular, our current prediction model achieves 85.74% in accuracy.

Over the past few years, activity recognition techniques have attracted unprecedented attentions. Along with the recent prevalence of pervasive e-Health in various applications such as smart homes, automatic activity recognition is being implemented increasingly for rehabilitation systems, chronic disease management, and monitoring the elderly for their personal well-being. In this paper, we present WITS, an end-to-end web-based in-home monitoring system for convenient and efficient care delivery. The system unifies the data- and knowledge-driven techniques to enable a real-time multi-level activity monitoring in a personalized smart home. The core components consist of a novel shared-structure dictionary learning approach combined with rule-based reasoning for continuous daily activity tracking and abnormal activities detection. WITS also exploits an Internet of Things middleware for the scalable and seamless management and learning of the information produced by ambient sensors. We further develop a user-friendly interface, which runs on both iOS and Andriod, as well as in Chrome, for the efficient customization of WITS monitoring services without programming efforts. This paper presents the architectural design of WITS, the core algorithms, along with our solutions to the technical challenges in the system implementation.

The Internet of Things (IoT), in general, is a compelling paradigm that aims to connect everyday objects to the Internet. Nowadays, IoT is considered as one of the main technologies which contribute towards reshaping our daily lives in the next decade. IoT unlocks many exciting new opportunities in a variety of applications in research and industry domains. However, many have complained about the absence of the real-world IoT data. Unsurprisingly, a common question that arises regularly nowadays is “Does the IoT already exist?”. So far, little has been known about the real-world situation on IoT, its attributes, the presentation of data, and user interests. To answer this question, in this work, we conduct an in-depth analytical investigation on real IoT data. More specifically, we identify IoT data sources over the Web and develop a crawler engine to collect large-scale real-world IoT data for the first time. We make the results of our work available to the public in order to assist the community in the future research. In particular, we collect the data of nearly two million Internet connected objects and study trends in IoT using a real-world query set from an IoT search engine. Based on the collected data and our analysis, we identify the typical characteristics of IoT data. The most intriguing finding of our study is that IoT data is mainly disseminated using Web Mapping while the emerging IoT solutions such as the Web of Things are currently not well adopted. On top of our findings, we further discuss future challenges and open research problems in the IoT area.