Keio University’s collaboration with Leti started in 2013, with the Cloud of Things (ClouT) project, which was funded by the European Commission (EC) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan. According to Professor Yonezawa, “We knew Leti had very good experience and technical vision in the Smart City area. On top of that, they have very good management skills, respecting and maximizing each partners’ strength. These are the reasons we decided to join the team and start a partnership with Leti.

The goal of ClouT was to collect data in different cities from a variety of data sources, including IoT devices, social networks, and mobiles. Leti’s sensiNact software is an IoT platform that gathers data from IoT devices supporting variousIoT protocols and platforms; Keio University’s communication protocol bridge enriches the Leti’s sensiNact platform’s supported protocols catalogue. By integrating the two, the team was able to gather data from various European and Japanese cities, including Santander, Genova, Fujisawa and Mitaka, resulting in a unique and massive urban data platform.

The team succeeded in collecting data from more than 500 thousand physical and virtual data sources by integrating Leti’s sensiNact platform and Keio’s SOXFire XMPP protocol implementation.

In 2016, ClouT was completed, and a new project was kicked off. This new project, called Big Data meeting Cloud and IoT (or BigClouT), is jointly funded by the EC and NIST through 2019.

“Not only does Leti have strong technical skills, they are also very good at project management,” said Professor Yonezawa. “There are a number of cultural gaps between the different groups working on the project. Different academic teams, different cities, and different companies were involved. But Leti leads the project and is very open to discussion. Leti’s teams are very good at getting the diverse groups to work together.” The project has been more than just work. “I’ve made a lot of friends through our cooperation,” said Professor Yonezawa. “Sometimes we go to Grenoble to work with people from Leti—and I’ve always appreciated the warm welcome. Our cooperation has opened my mind in a number of ways.”