Alessio Bernardo and Giacomo Ziffer, PhD candidates in Information Technology and members of Prof. Emanuele Della Valle’s research group from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, together with Veronika Merlin, alumna from the Department of Design of the Politecnico di Milano, won the 2050 Challenge with the motus.ml project. The prize consists of six months of incubation at the Piacenza UrbanHub and 3,000 euros to support the start-up launch.

The 2050 Challenge is a competition between business ideas organized by the Rotary 2050 District. It is meant for groups of young people interested in proposing innovative and / or knowledge-intensive business ideas that have an explicit impact on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

motus.ml proposes an IoT device to be placed side by side with existing sensors that can fully exploit the potential of the data they generate locally. Instead of the traditional Machine Learning techniques used to analyze data on the cloud, motus.ml solution uses innovative analytics techniques, called Streaming Machine Learning, that require minimal hardware specifications and integrate seamlessly into the network edge. By not having to transmit huge amounts of data to the cloud, bandwidth costs and, more generally, energy consumption are drastically reduced. In addition, because the data are analyzed on-premises, they are never shared over the network, lowering the risk of exposing sensitive information.