The Winter School in Ahvaz, as part of the IoTrain project (D2.4) was organized by Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz from January 28 to 31, 2023. The school held on SCU campus in Ahvaz, attracted nearly 50 participants from industry and academia, and included a variety of activities such as project report, keynote speeches, discussion of course contents, industry demos, hands-on workshop, and industrial plant visit. The meeting was held in the Faculty of Letters and Humanities building.

In the opening ceremony, the university and local officials talked about the importance of IoT and smartification in economy and education. Then Dr. Rashti from SCU presented a report on the IoTrain project and the winter school program. His talk was followed by a keynote speech on IoT and Digital Economy by Dr. Lotfi from Iran’s Science and Technology vice presidency.

The presentation and discussion of IoT program courses and their content started on the same day. Professors from Iranian partner universities involved in preparation and review of the course content (i.e., SCU, USB, IAU and IBS) presented and discussed the slides prepared for the courses. Beside course content discussions, two local IoT startup companies presented technical details of their products, providing some practical hints on product development to IoT enthusiasts among the school participants.

After the course content and startup presentations, the group visited a PLC-controlled industrial plant designed and manufactured by SCU professors and engineers. At the plant, the school participants became familiar with the smartification methods of the AI-based PLC control software.

The last day of the school was dedicated to a hands-on IoT workshop, where the participants, mostly students, were guided to create a complete IoT solution on Arduino-based boxes built by the SCU team. The workshop was conducted by the SCU-based WiniApp group and included experiments with hardware, IoT platform setup, data acquisition and programming.

At the end of the winter school, an equipment tendering meeting was held by the PMB from Iranian partners. In this meeting, the board members discussed potential roadmaps to the proposed joint-tendering method led by IBS.