Smart cities in a smart world

Very often the concept of smart city is strongly related to the flourishing of mobile applications, stressing the technological aspects and a top-down approach of high-tech centralized control systems capable of resolving all the urban issues, completely forgetting the essence of a city with its connected problems. The real challenge in future years will be a huge increase in the urban population and the changes this will produce in energy and resource consumption. It is fundamental to manage this phenomenon with clever approaches in order to guarantee a better management of resources and their sustainable access to present and future generations. This chapter develops some considerations on these aspects, trying to insert the technological issues within a framework closer to planning and with attention to the social impact

Solvent accessible surface area approximations for rapid and accurate protein structure prediction

The burial of hydrophobic amino acids in the protein core is a driving force in protein folding. The extent to which an amino acid interacts with the solvent and the protein core is naturally proportional to the surface area exposed to these environments. However, an accurate calculation of the solvent-accessible surface area (SASA), a geometric measure of this exposure, is numerically demanding as it is not pair-wise decomposable. Furthermore, it depends on a full-atom representation of the molecule. This manuscript introduces a series of four SASA approximations of increasing computational complexity and accuracy as well as knowledge-based environment free energy potentials based on these SASA approximations. Their ability to distinguish correctly from incorrectly folded protein models is assessed to balance speed and accuracy for protein structure prediction. We find the newly developed “Neighbor Vector” algorithm provides the most optimal balance of accurate yet rapid exposure measures

Basic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development of web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, theBSCW Shared Workspace system—a centralized cooperative application integrated with an unmodified web server and accessible from standard web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through “shared workspaces”; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain

World Wide Web

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely-dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realise this potential through development of Web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing Web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, the BSCW Shared Workspace system—a centralised cooperative application integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through ‘shared workspaces’; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions, and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the Web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain