Academic Achievements

Around this time of year, as the warm spring breezes blow through open classroom windows, students and faculty alike in colleges and universities around the world look forward to graduation and summer holidays. This time of anticipation is also a time to look back, and review the accomplishments of the past academic year.

Now is a good time to recognize some of the year’s outstanding achievements of Dr. Pascal Vrignat and groups of his students at the Polytechnic School of the University of Orleans in Chateauroux, France. Using Skkynet software, they have conducted several sophisticated research projects and studies related to industrial data communication and the Internet of Things.

Back in September last year Dr. Vrignat was the keynote speaker at ECAR2018, the International Conference on Electrical, Control, Automation and Robotics in Xiamen, China. This annual conference invites professors, doctoral students, and other scientists to present their latest research findings. Dr. Vrignat’s presentation, OPC UA: Examples of Digital Reporting Applications for Current Industrial Processes, showed how an OPC UA data feed connected to the Cogent DataHub can be shared among SCADA reporting tools and Excel spreadsheets, populate emails and SMS messages, and power Matlab OPC Toolbox diagnostics and analysis.

In December Dr. Vrignat made a similar presentation titled: Examples of technological building blocks in the context of an application, at the Journee Pedagogique GDR SoC2 Club EEA in Paris. Also at that event he presented two student projects. In the first of these, seven teams of Dr. Vrignat’s students competed in the contest: The Industry of the Future, Internet of Things, is Now! Their entry was a web-based control system of a plastic forming machine that was connected to the Cogent DataHub for integration with Excel, emails, and SMS messages. The second student project was for the international challenge: Xplore New Automation 2018, where Dr. Vrignat’s students were finalists in the Environment category for their IoT project that controlled the deployment of irrigation tubing remotely, by cell phone.

This past January, some student teams and Dr. Vrignat received awards in the category of Pedagogical Innovation at the PEPS Soumission 2019 – Passion for Teaching and Pedagogy in Higher Education. “Offering this challenge for the 1st time in this format has been a complete success in several ways: for the students, for external professionals, in the results achieved, and in student motivation,” said Dr. Vrignat. “We have seen a significant increase in individual and collective skills, and we have shown that ‘project’ and ‘active’ pedagogies can be a very good strategy in teaching.”

Skkynet congratulates Dr. Vrignat on the work he has done, the academic awards earned, and most important, on the valuable contributions he is making to the lives and future careers of his students. We are pleased that he has chosen the Cogent DataHub as a basis for secure, real-time data communications in his projects, and we look forward to supporting his work in the years to come.