The digital skin of cities: urban theory and research in the age of the sensored and metered city, ubiquitous computing and big data

A ‘digital skin’ of the city is coming into being. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. The urban world is becoming a platform for generating data on the workings of human society, human interactions with the physical environment and manifold economic, political and social processes. The advent of the digital skin opens up many questions for urban theory and research, and many new issues for public and urban policy, which are explored in this article

Valuing Adjuncts as Liaisons for University Excellence (VALUE) Program

Adjuncts are increasingly becoming more important in higher education and make up nearly onethird of VCU’s teaching faculty. While VCU has made strides in increasing the number of tenuretrack and term professors, the size and needs of certain departments will always make adjunct instructors necessary. A number of schools on both the Monroe Park and MCV campuses utilize professionals from the Richmond community to enhance experiential learning, thereby making a university investment in adjunct faculty a means by which to elevate VCU’s strategic mission. Adjuncts often provide a community perspective that comes from the professional work they do outside of the university setting and as a whole are reflective of VCU’s diverse student population. As a result, they serve a critical role in student success and diversity initiatives. Keeping adjuncts connected with campus resources and engaged with the larger VCU community is also an important step in making the university more inclusive. This project will study opportunities associated with the orientation and support of adjunct faculty at VCU on both Monroe Park and MCV campuses. This project is research-oriented and will serve as an important foundation for developing and implementing a plan for institutionalized adjunct support. To develop a detailed proposal for implementation, our team consulted with several key stakeholders including: academic leaders who hire and support adjuncts in the current decentralized process students who have taken classes with adjunct instructors adjunct faculty who have recently taught at VCU Through a combination of methods, we aim to determine how adjuncts are utilized across the university, identify resources currently provided, and assess additional resource needs in an effort to inform a new orientation and support program for adjunct faculty at VCU

Redefining the Prison Milieu

Spaces of solitary confinement and isolation are the most detrimental to the mental health of any patient. In order to influence positive mental health, spaces must promote human interaction with the objective of instilling a sense of community in the inmates. A community is composed of varying architectural elements that create private and public spaces with different types of restrictions at different times

Generic model for resource allocation in transportation: Application to urban parking management

In this paper, we define the online localized resource allocation problem, especially relevant for modeling transportation applications. The problem modeling takes into account simultaneously the geographical location of consumers and resources together with their online nondeterministic appearance. We use urban parking management as an illustration of this problem. In fact, urban parking management is an online localized resource allocation problem, where the question is how to find an efficient allocation of parking spots to drivers, while they all have dynamic geographical positions and appear nondeterministically. We define this problem and propose a multiagent system to solve it. The objective of the system is to decrease, for private vehicles drivers, the parking spots search time. The drivers are organized in communities and share information about spots availability. We have defined two cooperative models and compared them: a fully cooperative model, where agents share all the available information, and a 'coopetitive' model, where drivers do not share information about the spot that they have chosen. Results show the superiority of the first model

HappyParking

There are estimations that indicate that about half of the vehicles on the move are searching for parking and that more than 40% of the total fuel consumption is spent while looking for an available parking space. This also contributes to significant urban traffic congestion. So, it would be interesting to have software tools that can help drivers to park easily. For the application challenge, our group proposed a HappyParking application, which would offer some interesting benefits: It ackowledges the importance of considering parking in the context of a displacement between a source location and a target location. This implies that the final target location has to be considered when deciding an appropriate parking space. Moreover, the application can be integrated into existing GPS-based navigation applications. It considers multimodality, that is, that parking a car could be just a leg within a longer trip using different modes of transportation. It exploits real-time constraints (e.g., time-based parking restrictions). It can accommodate a variety of methods to capture information about available parking spaces (e.g., magnetic sensors on the parkings, crowdsourcing information provided by drivers releasing a spot, cars with different types of sensors able to detect free places, etc.). It supports different types of parking spaces: on-street parking, private parkings and garages, home parking available for rental during specific time periods, etc...

The Conflict Between the Two Main Belgian Nationalities. Its Correlation With the Case of a Partnership Between University, Public and Private Iniatives, and Its Result in the New City of Louvain-La-Neuve.

This paper deals with contemporary planning projects that are correlated with community-university partnerships. It studies the ways in which the socio-spatial and national conflict in Belgium in the ’60 led to an innovative resolution which is correlated with planning projects (the transformation of rural space) and a new form of contemporary ‘new cities’. The main subject of work is the new city named Louvain-la-neuve that was created in order to accomodate the French-speaking university of Leuven after the linguistic conflict of 1968 and the social problem of the difficulties of the coexistence of two different nationalities. Through this project of the city in question, which was mobilized by the administration of the university (UniversitéCatholique de Louvain), the French-speaking Belgian government also aimed in the creation of a new pole of development in the French-speaking region (Wallonie) which would force the development of the whole region and would restore the French-speaking community in the limelight (as it was in an earlier time). More specifically, the research surveys the characteristics of the project according to some parameters: b) the role of the university in the planning processes c) the way that education consists the motivating force of a city and creates agglomeration economies d) and the planning theory in practice and the knowledge of university in planning matters, e)the results of the project in the national and regional economy in the local society and in the sustainability of the city. The local research including living in the area for several months took place in the year 2001 and the main research was made between September 2003 and August 2004 and the analysis of the data followed. The research was based on the local research as well as in two structured interviews with two off the main staff of both the French and Dutch-speaking administration committee of the university of Leuven, visual and photographical survey and group discussions with the local population permanent and temporary, and collection of all possible planning and policy documents as well as surveys concerning the project and the city. The outcome of the research shows the way in which the well-known Belgian national problem resulted in a partnership between the community and the university and in the creation of a new contemporary city that in our days tries to survive and ameliorate its environment through the knowledge-theory and the resources that the university can continuously ensure for the city’s development. The research has shown a new innovative approach of the Belgian planning processes that is deeply correlated to a socio-political problem.

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving