The TDX has analytics, statistics, machine learning and predictive algorithms for both investigation of data in real time and using information from many sources to inform smarter decision-making in a city. NQminds designed to support complex data sharing and it handles “super scale” data sets and real time IoT data in a single platform. It has support for secure data streaming and allows visualisation of data sets. It has an access control mechanism in which the owners of data can selectivity shared derived data in a secure way.
TDX is already being used by Hampshire County Council and Southampton City and will be soon be used by Cambridge and Liverpool Cities. It currently operates under a software-as-a-service model. The UK government has awarded NQminds the contract to provide the data integration platform for its Future City Solutions Program.
Professor AbuBakr S Bahaj, chief scientific officer for Southampton City Council said: “NquiringMinds’ sensor suite and data analytics platform has been key in allowing us to calculate the productivity gains that may be possible by carefully planning focussed housing refurbishment.”
Speaking at a pre-MWC briefing organized by UKTI, Paddy Byers, CTO and Founder of NquiringMinds said that that TDX is “being used for predicting demand for public services, we have IoT sensors in various government buildings, which are predicting energy demand, predicting refurbishment requirements, detecting anomalies in the equipment in the buildings, all sort of things. This is data that exists but the customers didn‘t even know the value of what was there until we integrated it and virtualised it”
Byers added that TDX is being used to help analyses and visualize homeless and housing affordability data in the UK.
INTERLINQ, NQminds’ secure IoT hub has been designed to allow cities to launch IoT services by enabling data security and interoperability between services. The platform is based on webinos: an open source technology, which in an independent review of 22 IoT middleware platforms was deemed to be the most secure. It has been designed to allow IoT devices to be secured connected to the Internet and acts as a bridge between the different technologies, such as Zigbee and LoRa, used to connect IoT devices.
The hub has been designed to be tamper-proof and all of the protocols, interfaces and APIs used in the device are openly specified.
“We have invested a lot of effort in making sure that these devices even though they may be parked out in a field somewhere are tamper-proof,” Byers said. “There’s hardware security, secure-boot, they have tamper-proof firmware on them so you can then reliably interconnect devices with it without the hub being a point of compromise.”
