10,802 research outputs found
Challenges and opportunities to develop a smart city: A case study of Gold Coast, Australia
With the rapid growth of information and communication technologies, there is a growing interest in developing smart cities with a focus on the knowledge economy, use of sensors and mobile technologies to plan and manage cities. The proponents argue that these emerging technologies have potential application in efficiently managing the environment and infrastructure, promoting economic development and actively engaging the public, thus contributing to building safe, healthy, sustainable and resilient cities. However, are there other important elements in addition to technologies which can contribute to the creation of smart cities? What are some of the challenges and opportunities for developing a smart city?
This paper aims to answer these questions by developing a conceptual framework for smart cities. The framework is then applied to the city of Gold Coast to identify challenges and opportunities for developing the city into a ‘smart city’. Gold Coast is a popular tourist city of about 600,000 populations in South East Queensland, Australia, at the southern end of the 240km long coastal conurbation that is centred by Brisbane. Recently, IBM has nominated Gold Coast as one of the three cities in Australia for its Smarter Cities Challenge Grant. The grant will provide the Gold Coast City Council with the opportunity to collaborate with a group of experts from IBM to develop strategies for enhancing its ICT arrangements for disaster response capabilities. Gold Coast, meanwhile, has potential to diversify its economy from being centred on tourism to a knowledge economy with focus on its educational institutions, investments in cultural precincts and high quality lifestyle amenities. These provide a unique opportunity for building Gold Coast as an important smart city in the region. As part of the research methodology, the paper will review relevant policies of the council. Finally, lessons will be drawn from the case study for other cities which seek to establish themselves as smart cities
Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review
Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today.
Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work
closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue
situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain,
and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely
raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint.
Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and
shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically
survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for
domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal
welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether
animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated
in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is
used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not
isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote
data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart
technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well
as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to
motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication
management as well as policy for animal welfare
Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions
Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to
address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information
flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs
offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers,
involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems.
SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the
grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises
in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the
tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things
(IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the
generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by
incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as
well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such
devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG
systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes
of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues,
challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems
SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks
The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying
cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to
offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management
costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework,
communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services,
providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services
function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC
services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner.
According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can
indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication
systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic
ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in
a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service
provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density
of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging
Telecommunications Technologie
The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network
consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency
identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and
smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future
internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT
solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large
corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private
and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this
paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and
examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used,
functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends,
opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions.
Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under
five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart
environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a
guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to
motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic
exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially
significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201
A sub-mW IoT-endnode for always-on visual monitoring and smart triggering
This work presents a fully-programmable Internet of Things (IoT) visual
sensing node that targets sub-mW power consumption in always-on monitoring
scenarios. The system features a spatial-contrast binary
pixel imager with focal-plane processing. The sensor, when working at its
lowest power mode ( at 10 fps), provides as output the number of
changed pixels. Based on this information, a dedicated camera interface,
implemented on a low-power FPGA, wakes up an ultra-low-power parallel
processing unit to extract context-aware visual information. We evaluate the
smart sensor on three always-on visual triggering application scenarios.
Triggering accuracy comparable to RGB image sensors is achieved at nominal
lighting conditions, while consuming an average power between and
, depending on context activity. The digital sub-system is extremely
flexible, thanks to a fully-programmable digital signal processing engine, but
still achieves 19x lower power consumption compared to MCU-based cameras with
significantly lower on-board computing capabilities.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, submitteted to IEEE IoT Journa
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