TIPPERS

TIPPERS is an IoT data management middleware that manages IoT smart spaces by collecting sensor data, inferring semantically meaningful information from it, and offering such inferences to developers to create smart applications. Sensor data collection, processing, and sharing leads to potential violations of people’s privacy given the sensitivity of the data and the inferences that can be extracted from it. TIPPERS integrates different Privacy Enhancing Technologies (e.g., policy-based access control, differential privacy, secure computing, etc.) to deal with privacy issues in IoT data management.

TIPPERS has been deployed in several IoT smart spaces. The main deployment is at the UC Irvine campus where it handles IoT data from more than 20 buildings. Based on such data (including connectivity logs from WiFi APs, HVAC data, video footage, etc.) TIPPERS generates inferences such as location of people and occupancy of spaces. We have developed several smart applications which use those inferences to offer personalized services to the campus inhabitants. In particular, we have recently developed COVID-19 regulation monitoring tools to assess the adherence of the community to occupancy regulations. TIPPERS has also been successfully deployed in two US Navy ships as part of the Trident Warrior 2019 and 2020 excersice.

Useful links and references

• TIPPERS is funded by DARPA as part of the Brandeis program.
• TIPPERS in the news:
  • The Washington Post: “The Technology 202: Tech to contain coronavirus on college campuses sparks fresh privacy concerns”, 2020
  • Health IT Analytics: “UCI Uses Campus Wi-Fi to Test COVID-19 Contact Tracing App”, 2020
  • UCI news: “Test bed for COVID-19 contact tracing system”, 2020
  • Defense Visual Information Distribution Service: “NAVWAR Assesses New Tracking Technology for COVID-19 Mitigation”, 2020
  • Military News: “Navy tests experimental technology at Trident Warrior 2019”, 2019
  • UCI CS News: “IoT Hackathon Apps Coming Soon”, 2018
  • UCI CS News: “ICS launches IoT Hackathon to discover student talent who can develop a UCI ‘smart’ campus”, 2017