The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has set up an IoT Innovation Lab in partnership with analytics software company SAS and networking giant Cisco.

The lab will use the Cisco SAS Edge-to-Enterprise IoT Analytics Platform that combines SAS event stream processing and Cisco’s networking edge and data centre infrastructure technologies.

It is claimed to be the first global deployment of the platform, which was launched at the SAS Global Forum in Orlando in April 2017, and to be underpinned by the Cisco Kinetic IoT data fabric.

According to UTS, the lab will create a ‘three tier’ approach “to explore how the huge volumes of data generated by massive numbers of IoT devices and sensors can be gathered, stored and analysed to help businesses improve decision-making, build their organisational capacity and apply streaming data analytics at the edge to meet new challenges of IoT.”

UTS says researchers, students and eventually industry partners from all sectors will work with SAS, Cisco and UTS’ streaming analytics and visualisation technologies to address the complex challenges of an exponentially connected world.

“UTS academics will design and verify data processing models using machine learning and artificial intelligence; both theoretically, and applied as, in time, industry clients are identified for collaboration on specific projects, bringing real-world problems and their own data to the Lab for processing and analysis and to test solutions,” the university says.

Early research will be in the areas of advanced manufacturing, agribusiness and healthcare and an immediate practical application for the lab will be to analyse data generated by the more than 3,000 IoT sensors throughout the Faculty of Engineering and IT building and its microgrid. This data will be analysed in real time to improve energy conservation and reduce costs.

The lab’s director Dr Gengfa Fang said the lab would deliver positive technological impacts on the environment, society, people, governments and industries. The volume of data already being generated will only increase but its value to society can only be fully realised if we are able to use it productively.”

Reg Johnson, general manager, education at Cisco Australia & New Zealand, said the lab would look to make the energy sector more sustainable by creating a real time IoT energy brokerage.