Reforming the African Public Sector. Retrospect and Prospects: Retrospect and Prospects

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

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Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

As part of smart grid upgrades, traditional electricity meters are being replaced with smart meters that can improve accuracy, efficiency, and visibility in electrical energy consumption patterns and measurements. However, in most of the deployments, smart meters are only used to digitally measure the energy usage of consumer premises and transmit those data to the utility providers. Despite this, smart meter data can be leveraged into numerous potential applications such as demand side management and energy savings via consumer load identification and abnormality detection. Anyhow, these features are not enabled in most deployments due to high sampling rate requirements, lack of affordable communication bandwidth and resource constraints in analyzing a huge amount of data. This paper demonstrates the suitability of the embedded edge computing paradigm which not only enriches the functionalities but also overcome the limitations of smart meters. It achieves significant improvements in accuracy, latency and bandwidth requirement on smart grid applications via pushing the data analytics into the smart meters. Furthermore, this paper exposes the impact of sampling frequency and digitization resolution in the smart meter data analytics. The experiments are conducted using National Instruments (NI) embedded hardware and the results are reported.

Embedded Edge Computing for Real-time Smart Meter Data Analytics

Renewable energy sources from the perspective of blockchain integration: From theory to application

In recent years, research into blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly due to an increase in media coverage. Many different blockchain applications and platforms have been developed for different purposes, such as food safety monitoring, cryptocurrency exchange, and secure medical data sharing. However, blockchain platforms cannot store all the generated data. Therefore, they are supported with data warehouses, which in turn is called a hybrid blockchain platform. While several systems have been developed based on this idea, a current state-of-the-art systematic overview on the use of hybrid blockchain platforms is lacking. Therefore, a systematic literature review (SLR) study has been carried out by us to investigate the motivations for adopting them, the domains at which they were used, the adopted technologies that made this integration effective, and, finally, the challenges and possible solutions. This study shows that security, transparency, and efficiency are the top three motivations for adopting these platforms. The energy, agriculture, health, construction, manufacturing, and supply chain domains are the top domains. The most adopted technologies are cloud computing, fog computing, telecommunications, and edge computing. While there are several benefits of using hybrid blockchains, there are also several challenges reported in this study.

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Hybrid Blockchain Platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT): A Systematic Literature Review

Digitization and automation have engulfed every scope and sphere of life. Internet of Things (IoT) has been the main enabler of the revolution. There still exist challenges in IoT that need to be addressed such as the limited address space for the increasing number of devices when using IPv4 and IPv6 as well as key security issues such as vulnerable access control mechanisms. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has immense benefits such as enhanced security and traceability. Thus, blockchain can serve as a good foundation for applications based on transaction and interactions. IoT implementations and applications are by definition distributed. This means blockchain can help to solve most of the security vulnerabilities and traceability concerns of IoTs by using blockchain as a ledger that can keep track of how devices interact, in which state they are and how they transact with other IoT devices. IoT applications have been mainly implemented with technologies such as cloud and fog computing, and AI to help address some of its key challenges. The key implementation challenges and technical choices to consider in making a successful blockchain IoT (BIoT) project are clearly outlined in this paper. The security and privacy aspect of BIoT applications are also analyzed, and several relevant solutions to improve the scalability and throughput of such applications are proposed. The paper also reviews integration schemes and monitoring frameworks for BIoT applications. A hybrid blockchain IoT integration architecture that makes use of containerization is proposed.

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On Blockchain and IoT Integration Platforms: Current Implementation Challenges and Future Perspectives

trends of managing energy consumption have proved the smart metering system as an effective scheme. With its capability of transmitting energy usage information in real- time to parties that matter, such as power generation stations, transmission stations, distribution stations and customers, more qualitative decisions concerning generation, distribution and usage of power are made. This energy usage information helps to match demand with supply hence reducing cost of production, increasing profitability, reducing waste and higher customer satisfaction. Despite the many benefits offered by smart meters, most developing countries in Africa such as Ghana still hold on to standalone energy meters that offer less capabilities. This paper brings to light some important drawbacks of smart meters implemented in other parts of the world and suggest possible solutions. The paper also assays the possibility of implementing secured smart retrofitted electric energy meters in developing countries in Africa taking the suggested solutions into consideration. This implementation does not require the replacement of the old meters.

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A Smart Retrofitted Meter for Developing Countries

There are currently over 7.6 billion mobile phone connections in the world, which is approximately equivalent to the world’s population; as if to say that everyone in the world is hooked up to mobile telephony. By the next decade, it is estimated that the number of mobile phone subscribers would increase by a billion with 90% of this growth coming from developing countries. This exponential growth coupled with its ubiquity highlights its essentiality in all spheres of human endeavour. Despite the fact that many sectors in developing countries worldwide are embracing its usage as an effective tool, the Ghana Education Service (GES) has placed a ban on the use of mobile phones in senior high schools, technical and vocational institutions. Bearing in mind that most of these institutions provide boarding facilities for their students for long periods of time – spanning over several months; the teaching and learning experience is denied access to mobile phones over this long period. This study administered a survey to determine whether this denial has any impact on educational outcomes and what the impact would be if done otherwise. Using variations of selective and random sampling methods on a sample size of 150 respondents from the Nkoranza municipality, results from the study showed that the use of mobile phones in the Ghana educational system will have a positive impact on the teaching and learning process. Teachers and students would have easy access to up-to-date educational materials. However, the study recommends that for this to be effective and sustainable, proper usage supervision must be provided especially for students in order to avoid negative influence that stem from some social media.

Mobile Phone Usage Among Senior High and Technical School Students in Ghana and Its Impact on Academic Outcomes – A Case Study

The increase of the Internet of Things (IoT) calls for secure solutions for industrial applications. The security of IoT can be potentially improved by blockchain. However, blockchain technology suffers scalability issues which hinders integration with IoT. Solutions to blockchain’s scalability issues, such as minimizing the computational complexity of consensus algorithms or blockchain storage requirements, have received attention. However, to realize the full potential of blockchain in IoT, the inefficiencies of its inter-peer communication must also be addressed. For example, blockchain uses a flooding technique to share blocks, resulting in duplicates and inefficient bandwidth usage. Moreover, blockchain peers use a random neighbor selection (RNS) technique to decide on other peers with whom to exchange blockchain data. As a result, the peer-to-peer (P2P) topology formation limits the effective achievable throughput. This paper provides a survey on the state-of-the-art network structures and communication mechanisms used in blockchain and establishes the need for network-based optimization. Additionally, it discusses the blockchain architecture and its layers categorizes existing literature into the layers and provides a survey on the state-of-the-art optimization frameworks, analyzing their effectiveness and ability to scale. Finally, this paper presents recommendations for future work.

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A Survey on Network Optimization Techniques for Blockchain Systems

Facial emotion recognition (FER) forms part of affective computing, where computers are trained to recognize human emotion from human expressions. Facial Emotion Recognition is very necessary for bridging the communication gap between humans and computers because facial expressions are a form of communication that transmits 55% of a person's emotional and mental state in a total face-to-face communication spectrum. Breakthroughs in this field also make computer systems (robotic systems) better serve or interact with humans. Research has far advanced for this cause, and Deep learning is at its heart. This paper systematically discusses state-of-the-art deep learning architectures and algorithms for facial emotion detection and recognition. The paper also reveals the dominance of CNN architectures over other known architectures like RNNs and SVMs, highlighting the contributions, model performance, and limitations of the reviewed state-of-the-art. It further identifies available opportunities and open issues worth considering by various FER research in the future. This paper will also discover how computation power and availability of large facial emotion datasets have also limited the pace of progress.

Eliel Keelson

Papers

On Blockchain and IoT Integration Platforms: Current Implementation Challenges and Future Perspectives

A Smart Retrofitted Meter for Developing Countries

Mobile Phone Usage Among Senior High and Technical School Students in Ghana and Its Impact on Academic Outcomes – A Case Study

A Survey on Network Optimization Techniques for Blockchain Systems

A Survey on Deep Learning Algorithms in Facial Emotion Detection and Recognition