Gil De Sousa

Birds can cause substantial damage to crops, directly affecting farmers’ productivity and profitability. As a result, detecting bird presence in crop fields is crucial for effective crop management. Traditional agricultural practices have used various tools and techniques to deter pest birds, while digital agriculture has advanced these efforts through Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. With recent advancements in hardware and processing chips, connected devices can now utilize deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for on-field image classification. However, training these models can be energy-intensive, especially when large amounts of data, such as images, need to be transmitted for centralized model training. Federated learning (FL) offers a solution by enabling local training on edge devices, reducing data transmission costs and energy demands while also preserving data privacy and achieving shared model knowledge across connected devices. This paper proposes a low-energy federated learning framework for a compact smart camera network designed to perform simple image classification for bird detection in crop fields. The results demonstrate that this decentralized approach achieves performance comparable to a centrally trained model while consuming at least 8 times less energy. Further efficiency improvements, with a minimal tradeoff in performance reduction, are explored through early stopping.

One of the challenges of deploying Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) at large scale is to operate for prolonged periods of time relying on the limited amounts of energy stored in its nodes. Generally, data communication is the main factor of draining energy. Consequently, reducing the amount of transmitted data by the nodes is of great interest. At the same time, reducing data to be transmitted should not decrease the quality of the deduced information. Solving this problematic is what we call in this article "Ensuring the Quality of Information Service (QoIS)". This document provides a state-of-the-art for the QoIS regarding WSNs. At first, we give a quick overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the WSN technologies in order to understand how data is gathered and used in these networks. Also, we introduce a novel concept: QoIS, in contrast with classic QoS. Then, it is expected a summary of criteria that asses the QoIS in WSNs plus some techniques to improve it. In this article, we will focus on data management techniques. These techniques can improve raw data, information and/or knowledge quality in energy-constrained WSNs. Finally, we give some conclusions and a glimpse about our future work.

Climate change is having an increasingly rapid impact on ecosystems and particularly on the issue of water resources. The Internet of Things and communication technologies have now reached a level of maturity that allows sensors to be deployed more easily on sites to monitor them. The communicating node based on LoRaWAN technology presented in this article is open and allows the interfacing of numerous sensors for designing long-term environmental monitoring systems of isolated sites. The data integration in the cloud is ensured by a workflow driving the storage and indexing of data, allowing a simple and efficient use of the data for different users (scientists, administration, citizens) through specific dashboards and extractions. This article presents this infrastructure through environmental monitoring use cases related to water resources.