590,965 research outputs found
Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart
This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities
A Framework to Use Public-Private Partnership for Smart City Projects
The concept of Smart City has been emerging as a strategic set of integrated initiatives encompassing infrastructures, technology and digital services for the purpose of enhancing the quality of life of citizens. However, the development and implementation of Smart City projects require considerable investments that are difficult to fund with traditional public finance. In this context, Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) appear to be suitable solutions to overcome the shortage of public finance and cuts on public spending. However, the adoption of PPP forms for Smart City projects has not been fully explored and only experimentally applied so far. In order to promote the usage of PPP to finance Smart City initiatives, this paper proposes some PPP financial instruments and discusses the associated strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the use of Project Finance, Revenue Sharing and Social Impact Bonds are suggested as sound alternatives and suitable sources of financing for Smart City project
EASYFLOW: Keep Ethereum Away From Overflow
While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain
applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security
attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve
cryptocurrency transfer, any successful attacks can lead to money loss or even
financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on the overflow attacks in Ethereum
, mainly because they widely rooted in many smart contracts and comparatively
easy to exploit. We have developed EASYFLOW , an overflow detector at Ethereum
Virtual Machine level. The key insight behind EASYFLOW is a taint analysis
based tracking technique to analyze the propagation of involved taints.
Specifically, EASYFLOW can not only divide smart contracts into safe contracts,
manifested overflows, well-protected overflows and potential overflows, but
also automatically generate transactions to trigger potential overflows. In our
preliminary evaluation, EASYFLOW managed to find potentially vulnerable
Ethereum contracts with little runtime overhead.Comment: Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software
Engineering: Companion Proceedings. IEEE Press, 201
Sustainable forms of smart tourism
The improvement of technology makes smart devices and their applications in travel and tourism industry ever more popular and complex. Tourism require a variety of services and products. This diversity results in a multitude of smart applications and smart tourist systems designed to enhance visitor's experience and satisfaction while traveling. This article presents and briefly discusses the concept of smart tourism in the scientific literature and the way it can be applied for sustainable destinations. Some important difficulties and challenges of smart tourism are discussed
Limit cycle behavior of smart fluid dampers under closed loop control
Semiactive vibration dampers offer an attractive compromise between the simplicity and fail safety of passive devices, and the weight, cost, and complexity of fully active systems. In addition, the dissipative nature of semiactive dampers ensures they always remain stable under closed loop control, unlike their fully active counterparts, However undesirable limit cycle behavior remains a possibility, which is not always property considered during the controller design. Smart fluids provide an elegant means to produce semiactive damping, since their resistance to flow can be directly controlled by the application of an electric or magnetic field. However the nonlinear behavior of smart fluid dampers makes it difficult to design effective controllers, and so a wide variety of control strategies has been proposed in the literature. In general, this work has overlooked the possibility of undesirable limit cycle behavior under closed loop conditions. The aim of the present study is to demonstrate how the experimentally observed limit cycle behavior of smart dampers can be predicted and explained by appropriate nonlinear models. The study is based upon a previously developed feedback control strategy, but the techniques described are relevant to other forms of smart damper control
Big data and smart cities: a public sector organizational learning perspective
Public sector organizations (city authorities) have begun to explore ways to exploit big data to provide smarter solutions for cities. The way organizations learn to use new forms of technology has been widely researched. However, many public sector organisations have found themselves in new territory in trying to deploy and integrate this new form of technology (big data) to another fast moving and relatively new concept (smart city). This paper is a cross-sectional scoping study—from two UK smart city initiatives—on the learning processes experienced by elite (top management) stakeholders in the advent and adoption of these two novel concepts. The findings are an experiential narrative account on learning to exploit big data to address issues by developing solutions through smart city initiatives. The findings revealed a set of moves in relation to the exploration and exploitation of big data through smart city initiatives: (a) knowledge finding; (b) knowledge reframing; (c) inter-organization collaborations and (d) ex-post evaluations. Even though this is a time-sensitive scoping study it gives an account on a current state-of-play on the use of big data in public sector organizations for creating smarter cities. This study has implications for practitioners in the smart city domain and contributes to academia by operationalizing and adapting Crossan et al’s (Acad Manag Rev 24(3): 522–537, 1999) 4I model on organizational learning
Can smart cards reduce payments fraud and identity theft?
In the United States, when a consumer presents a payment to a merchant, the merchant typically makes a request for authorization before accepting the payment. Personal information, such as an account number, address, or telephone number, are often enough to initiate a payment. A serious weakness of this system is that criminals who obtain the correct personal information can impersonate an honest consumer and commit payments fraud. ; A key to improving security-and reducing payments fraud-might be payment smart cards. Payment smart cards have an embedded computer chip that encrypts messages to aid authorization. If properly configured, payment smart cards could provide direct benefits to consumers, merchants, banks, and others. These groups would be less vulnerable to the effects of fraud and the cost of fraud prevention would fall. Smart cards could also provide indirect benefits to society by allowing a more efficient payment system. Smart cards have already been adopted in other countries, allowing a more secure payments process and a more efficient payments system. ; Sullivan explores why smart cards have the potential to provide strong payment authorization and thus put a substantial dent into the problems of payments fraud and identity theft. But adopting smart cards in the United States faces some significant challenges. First, the industry must adopt payment smart cards and their new security standards. Second, card issuers and others in the payments industry must agree on the specific forms of security protocols used in smart cards. In both steps the industry must overcome market incentives that can impede the adoption of payment smart cards or limit the strength of their security.
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Smart Cities and M<sup>3</sup>: Rapid Research, Meaningful Metrics and Co-Design
The research described in this paper is undertaken under the banner of the smart city, a concept that captures the way urban spaces are re-made by the incursion of new technology. Much of smart is centred on converting everyday activities into data, and using this data to generate knowledge mediated by technology. Ordinary citizens, those that may have their lives impacted by the technology, usually are not properly involved in the ‘smartification’ process. Their perceptions, concerns and expectations should inform the conception and development of smart technologies at the same extent. How to engage general public with smart cities research is the central challenge for the Making Metrics Meaningful (MMM) project. Applying a rapid participatory method, ‘Imagine’ over a five-month period (March – July) the research sought to gain insights from the general public into novel forms of information system innovation. This brief paper describes the nature of the accelerated research undertaken and explores some of the themes which emerged in the analysis. Generic themes, beyond the remit of an explicit transport focus, are developed and pointers towards further research directions are discussed. Participatory methods, including engaging with self- selected transport users actively through both picture creation and programmatically specific musical ‘signatures’ as well as group discussion, were found to be effective in eliciting users’ own concerns, needs and ideas for novel information systems
Еволюція інтелектуальних електричних мереж та їхні перспективи в Україні
Modern trends in global energy and form the basis of "electric world". The main provisions of the modern concept of Smart Grid, the features of the concept of "reasonable efficiency" and policies to implement Smart Grid concept in leading countries. Features of the evolution of smart grids, advanced forms and directions of development of Smart Grid technologies and their implementation in Ukraine
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