Smart Cities for Real People

Accelerating urbanization of the population and the emergence of new smart sensors (the Internet of Things) are combining in the phenomenon of the smart city. This movement is leading to improved quality of life and public safety, helping cities to enjoy economies that help remedy some budget overruns, better health care, and is resulting in increased productivity. The following report summarizes evolving digital technology trends, including smart phone applications, mapping software, big data and sensor miniaturization and broadband networking, that combine to create a technology toolkit available to smart city developers, managers and citizens. As noted above, the benefits of the smart city are already evident in some key areas as the technology sees actual implementation, 30 years after the creation of the broadband cable modem. The challenges of urbanization require urgent action and intelligent strategies. The applications and tools that truly benefit the people who live in cities will depend not on just the tools, but their intelligent application given current systemic obstacles, some of which are highlighted in the article. Of course, all the emerging technologies mentioned are dependent on ubiquitous, economical, reliable, safe and secure networks (wired and wireless) and network service providers

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2016 Preliminary Data

The present study, based on preliminary data from all states and the District of Columbia (DC) for the first six months of 2016, found an increase of seven percent in the reported number of fatalities compared with the first six months of 2015. More than twice as many states had increases (34) than had decreases (15 plus DC) compared with 2015.After adjusting for anticipated underreporting in the preliminary state data, GHSA estimates the number of pedestrians killed in 2016 increased by 11 percent compared with 2015. This was the largest annual increase in both the number and percentage of pedestrian fatalities in the 40 years that national records have been kept, with the second largest increase occurring in 2015. In addition, pedestrian deaths as a percent of total motor vehicle crash deaths have increased steadily, from 11 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2015.The number of nationwide pedestrian fatalities for all of 2016 was estimated based on preliminary data provided by State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) for the first six months of 2016, taking into account historic data regarding the relative proportions of pedestrian fatalities that occurred in the first and second halves of the year. About 6,000 pedestrian fatalities are estimated to have occurred in 2016, which could make 2016 the first year in more than two decades with more than 6,000 pedestrain deaths

Synergizing Roadway Infrastructure Investment with Digital Infrastructure for Infrastructure-Based Connected Vehicle Applications: Review of Current Status and Future Directions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The safety, mobility, environmental and economic benefits of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are potentially dramatic. However, realization of these benefits largely hinges on the timely upgrading of the existing transportation system. CAVs must be enabled to send and receive data to and from other vehicles and drivers (V2V communication) and to and from infrastructure (V2I communication). Further, infrastructure and the transportation agencies that manage it must be able to collect, process, distribute and archive these data quickly, reliably, and securely. This paper focuses on current digital roadway infrastructure initiatives and highlights the importance of including digital infrastructure investment alongside more traditional infrastructure investment to keep up with the auto industry's push towards this real time communication and data processing capability. Agencies responsible for transportation infrastructure construction and management must collaborate, establishing national and international platforms to guide the planning, deployment and management of digital infrastructure in their jurisdictions. This will help create standardized interoperable national and international systems so that CAV technology is not deployed in a haphazard and uncoordinated manner

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

Security Implications of Fog Computing on the Internet of Things

Recently, the use of IoT devices and sensors has been rapidly increased which also caused data generation (information and logs), bandwidth usage, and related phenomena to be increased. To our best knowledge, a standard definition for the integration of fog computing with IoT is emerging now. This integration will bring many opportunities for the researchers, especially while building cyber-security related solutions. In this study, we surveyed about the integration of fog computing with IoT and its implications. Our goal was to find out and emphasize problems, specifically security related problems that arise with the employment of fog computing by IoT. According to our findings, although this integration seems to be non-trivial and complicated, it has more benefits than the implications.Comment: 5 pages, conference paper, to appear in Proceedings of the ICCE 2019, IEEE 37th International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), Jan 11- 13, 2019, Las Vegas, NV, US