Citizen empowerment and innovation in the data-rich city

This book analyzes the ongoing transformation in the “smart city” paradigm and explores the possibilities that technological innovations offer for the effective involvement of ordinary citizens in collective knowledge production and decision-making processes within the context of urban planning and management. To so, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from a range of experts including city managers, public policy makers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) specialists, and researchers. The first two parts of the book focus on the generation and use of data by citizens, with or without institutional support, and the professional management of data in city governance, highlighting the social connectivity and livability aspects essential to vibrant and healthy urban environments. In turn, the third part presents inspiring case studies that illustrate how data-driven solutions can empower people and improve urban environments, including enhanced sustainability. The book will appeal to all those who are interested in the required transformation in the planning, management, and operations of data-rich cities and the ways in which such cities can employ the latest technologies to use data efficiently, promoting data access, data sharing, and interoperability

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Selected Papers from the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications

This Special Issue comprises selected papers from the proceedings of the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications, held on 15–30 November 2018, on sciforum.net, an online platform for hosting scholarly e-conferences and discussion groups. In this 5th edition of the electronic conference, contributors were invited to provide papers and presentations from the field of sensors and applications at large, resulting in a wide variety of excellent submissions and topic areas. Papers which attracted the most interest on the web or that provided a particularly innovative contribution were selected for publication in this collection. These peer-reviewed papers are published with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications. We hope this conference series will grow rapidly in the future and become recognized as a new way and venue by which to (electronically) present new developments related to the field of sensors and their applications

Walk-sharing - A smarter way to improve pedestrian safety and safety perception in urban spaces

Fortbewegung zu Fuß ist nachweislich der körperlichen und geistigen Gesundheit der Menschen zuträglich und gilt als Schlüssel zu nachhaltigem und lebenswertem städtischem Leben. Der Anteil der Fußgänger am Verkehrsaufkommen ist allerdings mit der rasanten Motorisierung und Verstädterung auf der ganzen Welt rückläufig. Darüber hinaus halten fußgängerunfreundliche Umgebungen Menschen davon ab, zu Fuß zu gehen. Die Angst vor Kriminalität wurde als wichtigstes Hindernis genannt. Sie macht das Zufußgehen zu kritischen Tageszeiten unattraktiv, selbst wenn es nach allen anderen Maßstäben bequem wäre. Die Furcht vor Kriminalität beeinflusst die Wahl des Weges und der Verkehrsmittel. Sie motiviert die Menschen dazu, kostspieligere Alternativen zu nutzen, zum Beispiel sinnvolle Umwege zu gehen oder ganz auf das Gehen zu verzichten und auf andere, meist motorisierte Verkehrsmittel umzusteigen. Die Angst vor Kriminalität verringert die allgemeine Begehbarkeit eines Stadtgebiets, reduziert die Zeit, die zu Fuß verbracht wird, und verhindert damit die Vorteile, die das Zufußgehen geboten hätte. Herkömmliche Ansätze zur Verringerung der Furcht vor Kriminalität in Außenbereichen umfassen städtebauliche Verbesserungen und Infrastrukturüberholungen. Sie sind teuer, lokal begrenzt und erfordern einen erheblichen Zeit- und Personalaufwand. Andere, neuere, ortsgestützte IT-Ansätze, die zum Beispiel sichere Routenempfehlungssysteme beinhalten, leiden unter einer starken Abhängigkeit von Kriminalitäts- und anderen Daten und sind dafür bekannt, dass sie Gesellschaften durch die Erstellung von Profilen sozioökonomischer Gruppen segregieren. Um die Herausforderungen der bestehenden Methoden zu überwinden, wird in dieser Arbeit das Walk-Sharing (wörtlich: gemeinsames Gehen) eingeführt. Walk-Sharing ist ein neuartiger Service in der Kategorie der geteilten Mobilität, die darauf abzielt, Menschen dazu zu ermutigen, zu Fuß zu gehen, anstatt andere Verkehrsmittel zu nutzen, wenn dies möglich ist. Da sich Menschen sicherer fühlen, wenn sie in Begleitung gehen, bringt Walk-Sharing Menschen mit ähnlichen räumlichen und zeitlichen Mobilitätsbedürfnissen zusammen, die bereit sind, zu Fuß zu ihren jeweiligen Zielen zu gehen. Durch das gemeinsame Gehen für einen Teil oder die gesamte Strecke verbessert das Walk-Sharing die aktive natürliche Wachsamkeit und verringert so die Angst vor Kriminalität. Durch die Verringerung der Angst vor Kriminalität während des Gehens hat Walk-Sharing das Potenzial, das Gehen attraktiver zu machen und damit den Anteil des Fußverkehrs auf kurzen Strecken zu erhöhen und folglich den motorisierten Verkehr zu reduzieren, was wiederum zu einer Verringerung der Emissionen und der Verkehrsbelastung führt. In dieser Arbeit werden die Grundlagen des Walk-Sharing erörtert, seine Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zu bestehenden geteilten Mobilitätsformen herausgearbeitet und ein konzeptionelles Modell vorgeschlagen, das eine abstrakte Darstellung eines möglichen Walk-Sharing-Systems darstellt. Basierend auf der Logik dieses konzeptionellen Modells wird in dieser Arbeit ein agentenbasiertes Simulationsmodell vorgestellt, um die Leistung von Walk-Sharing unter plausiblen Szenarien objektiv zu messen. Anhand theoretischer Simulationen wird das Sensitivitätsverhalten des Walk-Sharing-Modells dargestellt, was auch die logische Funktion des Modells selbst zeigt. Danach werden begründeter Annahmen über menschliche Präferenzen herangezogen, um eine Simulation des Walk-Sharing auf einem Universitätscampus vorzustellen. Diese Simulation zeigt bis zu 80% Effektivität in Bezug auf die Verbesserung der Sicherheit. Schließlich werden in dieser Arbeit eine Umfrage und deren Ergebnisse vorgestellt, die die tatsächlichen räumlich-zeitlichen Präferenzen, die sozialen Präferenzen und die allgemeine Wahrscheinlichkeit der Teilnahme an Walk-Sharing aufzeigen. Mit diesen Erkenntnissen wird eine kalibrierte, ausgefeiltere und fundiertere Simulation des Walk-Sharing vorgestellt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass gemeinsames Gehen bis zu 60% zur Verbesserung der Sicherheit beiträgt und gleichzeitig räumlich-zeitliche Kosten verursacht, die im Rahmen der von der befragten Gruppe bevorzugten Standards liegen. Walk-Sharing überwindet die Nachteile der bestehenden Ansätze zur Verringerung der Kriminalitätsfurcht, indem es proaktiv (unabhängig von Kriminalitäts- und stellvertretenden soziodemographischen Daten) und kostengünstig ist (keine größeren infrastrukturellen Veränderungen oder erheblicher menschlicher Aufwand erforderlich). Es ist skalierbar und übertragbar (kann überall angewendet werden und ist für die Gesellschaft angesichts der gegenwärtigen Verbreitung von Smartphones leicht zugänglich). Im Zeitalter des ubiquitären Computings, des Internets der Dinge, effizienter standortbezogener Dienste, und Smartphones könnte Walk-Sharing die intelligentere Lösung sein, die das Zufußgehen als sicherere Mobilitätsform für räumlich und zeitlich günstige Wege fördert und somit Fortschritte in Richtung eines nachhaltigeren städtischen Lebens macht, indem sie die aktive Mobilität erhöht und den motorisierten Verkehr reduziert

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

Digital Twins II

Treball desenvolupat en el marc del programa "European Project Semester".Digital Twins have been around since the early 2000s, but it has only been until now that they started to be affordable thanks to the Internet of Things. In the realm of smart cities, a Digital Twin is a virtual model of a city, a replica of the physical world, which are rapidly becoming indispensable tools to visualize the pulse of the city in real time with layered data sources of buildings, urban infrastructure, utilities, businesses, movement of people and vehicles. The advantages of implementing this concept is that it significantly increases the city's stability. Testing in a virtual model helps prevent emergencies, properly allocate resources that reduces costs and the chances of failure in the real world. This project is a continuation of the last year's theoretical study Digital Twins Ⅰ and its aim is to continue the research about Digital City Twins and explore the Big Data from the city sensors of Vilanova i la Geltrú. A group of five international students, led by the company Neapolis, are working on transforming the city into a smart one within the summer semester of the academic year 2020- 2021. In the process, we studied scientific articles, consulted with university professors from different countries (Spain, Belgium, Brazil), contacted IT and Data Security companies to obtain the necessary information. The report provides a study of practical examples using Digital Twins around the world, their impact on the city improvement, comparison of different platforms and software for developing Digital Twins and the reasoned choice of the best option for use in the next part of the project. Furthermore, it describes Information Infrastructure of Digital Cities, Big Data Management, Data Security and the implementation of Digital Twins in Vilanova i la Geltrú. The Big Data received from the city authorities was read and analyzed in the data part with necessary conclusions. This project made a great contribution to the further development of the Digital Twins for Vilanova i la Geltrú and will simplify the practical implementation for our followers of the next EPS project.Incomin

Modeling User Transportation Patterns Using Mobile Devices

Participatory sensing frameworks use humans and their computing devices as a large mobile sensing network. Dramatic accessibility and affordability have turned mobile devices (smartphone and tablet computers) into the most popular computational machines in the world, exceeding laptops. By the end of 2013, more than 1.5 billion people on earth will have a smartphone. Increased coverage and higher speeds of cellular networks have given these devices the power to constantly stream large amounts of data. Most mobile devices are equipped with advanced sensors such as GPS, cameras, and microphones. This expansion of smartphone numbers and power has created a sensing system capable of achieving tasks practically impossible for conventional sensing platforms. One of the advantages of participatory sensing platforms is their mobility, since human users are often in motion. This dissertation presents a set of techniques for modeling and predicting user transportation patterns from cell-phone and social media check-ins. To study large-scale transportation patterns, I created a mobile phone app, Kpark, for estimating parking lot occupancy on the UCF campus. Kpark aggregates individual user reports on parking space availability to produce a global picture across all the campus lots using crowdsourcing. An issue with crowdsourcing is the possibility of receiving inaccurate information from users, either through error or malicious motivations. One method of combating this problem is to model the trustworthiness of individual participants to use that information to selectively include or discard data. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of the performance of different worker quality and data fusion models with plausible simulated user populations, as well as an evaluation of their performance on the real data obtained from a full release of the Kpark app on the UCF Orlando campus. To evaluate individual trust prediction methods, an algorithm selection portfolio was introduced to take advantage of the strengths of each method and maximize the overall prediction performance. Like many other crowdsourced applications, user incentivization is an important aspect of creating a successful crowdsourcing workflow. For this project a form of non-monetized incentivization called gamification was used in order to create competition among users with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of data submitted to the project. This dissertation reports on the performance of Kpark at predicting parking occupancy, increasing user app usage, and predicting worker quality

A Framework for the Synergistic Integration of Fully Autonomous Ground Vehicles With Smart City

Most of the vehicle manufacturers aim to deploy level-5 fully autonomous ground vehicles (FAGVs) on city roads in 2021 by leveraging extensive existing knowledge about sensors, actuators, telematics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) gained from the level-3 and level-4 autonomy. FAGVs by executing non-trivial sequences of events with decimetre-level accuracy live in Smart City (SC) and their integration with all the SC components and domains using real-time data analytics is urgent to establish better swarm intelligent systems and a safer and optimised harmonious smart environment enabling cooperative FAGVs-SC automation systems. The challenges of urbanisation, if unmet urgently, would entail severe economic and environmental impacts. The integration of FAGVs with SC helps improve the sustainability of a city and the functional and efficient deployment of hand over wheels on robotized city roads with behaviour coordination. SC can enable the exploitation of the full potential of FAGVs with embedded centralised systems within SC with highly distributed systems in a concept of Automation of Everything (AoE). This article proposes a synergistic integrated FAGV-SC holistic framework - FAGVinSCF in which all the components of SC and FAGVs involving recent and impending technological advancements are moulded to make the transformation from today's driving society to future's next-generation driverless society smoother and truly make self-driving technology a harmonious part of our cities with sustainable urban development. Based on FAGVinSCF, a simulation platform is built both to model the varying penetration levels of FAGV into mixed traffic and to perform the optimal self-driving behaviours of FAGV swarms. The results show that FAGVinSCF improves the urban traffic flow significantly without huge changes to the traffic infrastructure. With this framework, the concept of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) is transformed into the concept of Automated ITS (A-ITS). Cities currently designed for cars can turn into cities developed for citizens using FAGVinSCF enabling more sustainable cities