International Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Perfect Match

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.</p

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity