497 research outputs found

    TCitySmartF: A comprehensive systematic framework for transforming cities into smart cities

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    A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK

    Internet of Things Enhanced User Experience for Smart Water and Energy Management

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    Smart environments can engage a wide range of end users with different interests and priorities, from corporate managers looking to improve the performance of their business to school children who want to explore and learn more about the world around them. Creating an effective user experience within a smart environment (from smart buildings to smart cities) is an important factor to success. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing Internet-of-Things-enabled applications within a smart home, school, office building, university, and airport, where the goal has been to engage a wide range of users (from building managers to business travelers) to increase water and energy awareness, management, and conservation

    Cyber-Agricultural Systems for Crop Breeding and Sustainable Production

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    The Cyber-Agricultural System (CAS) Represents an overarching Framework of Agriculture that Leverages Recent Advances in Ubiquitous Sensing, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Actuators, and Scalable Cyberinfrastructure (CI) in Both Breeding and Production Agriculture. We Discuss the Recent Progress and Perspective of the Three Fundamental Components of CAS – Sensing, Modeling, and Actuation – and the Emerging Concept of Agricultural Digital Twins (DTs). We Also Discuss How Scalable CI is Becoming a Key Enabler of Smart Agriculture. in This Review We Shed Light on the Significance of CAS in Revolutionizing Crop Breeding and Production by Enhancing Efficiency, Productivity, Sustainability, and Resilience to Changing Climate. Finally, We Identify Underexplored and Promising Future Directions for CAS Research and Development

    31th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

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    Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems.The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstractionlevels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases arecontinuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas ofinformation modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

    The Internet of Individuation

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    This thesis engages in a sustained reconsideration of a new and evolving technology - the Internet of Things - along social scientific and philosophical lines. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technical paradigm which connects 'things' in a way that allows them to collect and communicate sense data for analysis and action. IoT systems range from the everyday realm of smart home devices to government-backed agricultural management networks, massive industrial complexes spanning international supply chains and telecommunications networks themselves. The thesis does not seek to determine whether the Internet of Things' social effects are, or will be, progressive or regressive. Nor does it prescribe policy or other guidelines for its applications. Rather, the purpose of the thesis is to provide a critical engagement with the paradigmatic framing of the Internet of Things, to unpack the assumptions underpinning the practical accounts of its function, as well as the social scientific and popular evaluations that stem from these more common sense claims of the Internet of Things as a technological innovation. The thesis offers a more ontologically processual account of the Internet of Things, with an eye to grasping its participation in the ongoing production of novelty. To this end, the main body of this thesis rethinks each of the IoT's basic technical operations: communication, sensing, and actuation. Each of these operations are transformed so that their technical realities are shown to be compatible with social scientific thought. Communication can be seen as modulation, sensing as concretization, and actuation as transduction. Three empirical chapters furnish these transformations with qualitative interviews with IoT practitioners in Australia and abroad: student-run engineering labs in Canberra; the office of a smart building company bursting with dreams and tangles of wires; a watering system for a national Arboretum; a former IT consultant who runs a farm in Yass, NSW; and a smart city consulting agency in the UK that specializes in experimental and community-based IoT installations. These case studies are more than interesting instances of IoT systems; approached from a processual framework, they show how possible it is for social scientists to think about, write about, and interact with technical reality in more critical and productive ways. This thesis thus contributes an original analysis of the Internet of Things using a process ontology framework. Specifically, it uses the work of Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and their contemporaries to repose the 'problem' of the Internet of Things as an open problematic. Although studies in the sociology of technology have considered the IoT in general, there is not yet an extended analysis of the Internet of Things as a processual phenomenon in Australia or elsewhere. As such, this thesis provides additional insight into the Internet of Things as an object of study and a specific phenomenon unfolding in Australia and overseas, and discusses what new methods of problematizing that the social sciences might adopt to engage with it

    A collaborative approach for metadata management for Internet of Things: Linking micro tasks with physical objects

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    There has been considerable efforts in modelling the semantics of Internet of Things and their specific context. Acquiring and managing metadata related to the physical devices and their surrounding environment becomes challenging due to the dynamic nature of environment. This paper focuses on managing metadata for Internet of Things with the help of crowds. Specifically, the paper proposes a collaborative approach for collecting and maintaining metadata through micro tasks that can be performed using variety of platforms e.g. mobiles, laptops, kiosks, etc. The approach allows non-experts to contribute towards metadata management through micro tasks, therefore resulting in reduced cost and time. Applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a use case implementation for managing sensor metadata for energy management in small buildings

    MetaOmniCity: Towards urban metaverse cyberspaces using immersive smart city digital twins

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    The movie - The Matrix (1999) - boosted our imagination about how further we can be immersed within the cyber world, i.e., how further the cyber world can be indistinguishable from the real world with the metaverse space travel. Nobody had expected involving the creators that the aspirational fictional virtual worlds such as "ActiveWorlds (1995)", and ``Second Life (2003)'' with many urban experiences embedded into a rich featured 3D environment would impact the way of experiencing our real urban environments. Are we going to feel/become ourselves - our cyber-physical presence (e.g., our augmented avatars) - in other mirror worlds doing many other things? Are the created imaginary worlds becoming a part of the real worlds or vice versa? The recent once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has confirmed the importance of location and time-independent Digital Twins (DTs) (i.e., virtual scale models) of cities and their automated services that can provide everybody with equity and accessibility by democratising all types of services leading to increased Quality of Life (QoL). This study analyses how the metaverse (3D elevation of linear Internet), that aims to build high-fidelity virtual worlds with which to interact with the real world, can be engaged within the Smart City (SC) ecosystem with high immersive Quality of Experiences (QoE) and an urban metaverse ecosystem framework — MetaOmniCity — that is designed to demonstrate a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for policymakers, city planners and all other stakeholders about how to transform data-driven SCs with DTs into virtually inhabitable cities with a network of shared urban experiences from a metaverse point of view. MetaOmniCity, allowing the metaversification of cities with granular virtual societies, i.e., MetaSocieties, and eliminating the boundaries (e.g., time, space and language) between the real world and their virtual counterparts, can be shaped to the particular requirements and features of cities. This can pave the way for immersive globalisation with the bigger and richer metaverse of Country (MoC) and metaverse of World (MoW) being an immersive DT of the broader universe with digitally connected cities by removing physical borders. MetaOmniCity is expected to accelerate the building, deployment, and adoption of immersive urban metaverse worlds/networks for citizens to interface with as an extension of real urban social and individual experiences

    Slua: Towards semantic linking of users with actions in crowdsourcing

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    Recent advances in web technologies allow people to help solve complex problems by performing online tasks in return for money, learning, or fun. At present, human contribution is limited to the tasks defined on individual crowdsourcing platforms. Furthermore, there is a lack of tools and technologies that support matching of tasks with appropriate users, across multiple systems. A more explicit capture of the semantics of crowdsourcing tasks could enable the design and development of matchmaking services between users and tasks. The paper presents the SLUA ontology that aims to model users and tasks in crowdsourcing systems in terms of the relevant actions, capabilities, and rewards. This model describes different types of human tasks that help in solving complex problems using crowds. The paper provides examples of describing users and tasks in some real world systems, with SLUA ontology

    Learning Through Fictitious Play in a Game-Theoretic Model of Natural Resource Consumption

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    Understanding the emergence of sustainable behavior in dynamic models of resource consumption is essential for control of coupled human and natural systems. In this letter, we analyze a mathematical model of resource exploitation recently reported by the authors. The model incorporates the cognitive decision-making process of consumers and has previously been studied in a game-theoretic context as a static two-player game. In this letter, we extend the analysis by allowing the agents to adapt their psychological characteristics according to simple best-response learning dynamics. We show that, under the selected learning scheme, the Nash Equilibrium is reachable provided certain conditions on the psychological attributes of the consumers are fulfilled. Moreover, the equilibrium solution obtained is found to be sustainable in the sense that no players exhibit free-riding behavior, a phenomenon which occurs in the original open-loop system. In the process, via a Lyapunov-function based approach, we also provide a proof for the asymptotic global stability of the original system which was previously known to be only locally stable

    How does technological system design affect value creation? A systematic literature review of digital co-production

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    The existing studies on co-production display two research gaps. First, most studies focus on non-digital/offline co-production and value creation; little attention has been paid to value creation of digital/online co-production cases. Second, traditional co-production studies examine political, organizational, administrative, and personal factors that influence co-production. However, few studies investigate how technological factors will affect co-production in terms of value creation. To bridge the gaps, this article conducts a systematic literature review of 52 articles. The review results distill seven technological factors and five value categories from digital co-production cases. It further examines how these technological factors affect the creation of various value categories. Based on the review results, this article proposes a future research agenda on digital co-production
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