Salamanca City Council promotes the development of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence

Salamanca Tech, the initiative that seeks to promote innovation and technological development in the city, has the Center for the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence as one of its technological pillars. Promoted by the Salamanca City Council and managed by Air Institute, this center aims to create an information society through the development of intelligent systems and advances in the field of computer science.

To this end, it develops scientific research projects in AI and computer science, technological innovation, business consulting, and technological and training activities.

As part of their agenda in the city of Salamanca, the Leaders visited this center and met with Marta Crespo, from the Human Resources Department, and David Franco, from the DIGIS3 project coordination team.

The first part of the visit took the Leaders to the 3D and Metaverse Department, where one of its technicians explained how it works. “We create 3D visualizations and develop applications using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (…) Among our projects, we developed VR Pass, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) simulator. The idea was to create a UAV environment to train pilots before controlling the real machine.”

This project particularly interested the Leaders whose startups are based on the use of drones: Caerobotics, DronaMaps, and Predulive Labs. They asked about the drone control system within the simulator, the map generation algorithms, the development time, and so on.

Another project from this team was for the currency exchange company Global Exchange. “The idea of ​​this project was to create a virtual reality simulator to train employees in the operational part of the exchange. But also to train them how to deal with customers. Because sometimes the rates aren't the best. And sometimes customers have missed their flight, are angry, tired…”

The Center is developing other virtual reality projects, such as Metaverbum, for learning Spanish, or GoMusic, for learning music theory. “To be honest, right now we're mainly focused on virtual reality. And we also make 3D visualizations.”

One of the advantages of the Center for the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence is that it has teams from different areas: “We are the 3D Metaverse team, but we also have many teams from different areas: cybersecurity, blockchain, biology… We focus on different areas. And since we're the same business, we can combine them.”

Another important project developed at this center is Unamuno Digital: a replica of the famous writer that uses his image and voice to hold conversations. “We only had five minutes of audio, and with those minutes, we were able to replicate his voice so we could speak to him in a more realistic way.”

The Leaders then visited the Electronics and Hardware department, where they saw projects such as temperature sensors for grain silos, air quality meters, smart crutches that measure the weight applied, and a blood sample analysis device to detect diseases.

This last device also interested the Leaders, who noted that it could be useful, especially in mountainous areas, where blood samples are transported by drones for analysis. “There are real-life use cases, at least in India, I can attest to that. We work with our clients, who make daily drone deliveries of blood samples. And they've been looking for solutions to detect tropical diseases, which are the biggest threat.”

“I'm a doctor and I work with a variety of technologies,” Ruchi Saxena said. “I'm working on drones, data, IoT, and robotics. And I'm bringing these technologies to the field of public health. This could be a game changer.”

The visit continued with a presentation by the cybersecurity department, which uses Artificial Intelligence for anomaly detection. “We seek to develop solutions with real-time vulnerability indicators worldwide, which monitor and enhance our products.”

The Center for the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence collaborates with other industries—automotive, hydrogen, and wind energy—to detect events in AI models and develop other services, such as the development of specialized solutions. “The added value of our products lies in AI. We use AI to detect anomalies and patterns in events, thus enabling the detection of zero-day attacks.” These attacks exploit vulnerabilities that are unknown to the software vendor.

To achieve this goal, “we utilize global information on attacks and new cybercriminal strategies to implement them in our company. We monitor all of our company's devices and services, as well as our infrastructure, to share it with all devices and compare it with current threat intelligence.”

The visit to the Center for the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence concluded with further questions from the leaders about potential applications in India of the technologies developed in Salamanca and the exchange of data to maintain contact in the near future.

Meeting attendees:

▪️ Marta Crespo, Human Resources Department, Air Institute

▪️ David Franco, DIGIS3 project coordinator, Air Institute

VIII edition activity summary