Towards Citizen Co-Created Public Service Apps

WeLive project's main objective is about transforming the current e-government approach by providing a new paradigm based on a new open model oriented towards the design, production and deployment of public services and mobile apps based on the collaboration of different stakeholders. These stakeholders form the quadruple helix, i.e., citizens, private companies, research institutes and public administrations. Through the application of open innovation, open data and open services paradigms, the framework developed within the WeLive project enables the co-creation of urban apps. In this paper, we extend the description of the WeLive platform presented at, plus the preliminary results of the first pilot phase. The two-phase evaluation methodology designed and the evaluation results of first pilot sub-phase are also presented.The work presented in this research article has been carried out within the WeLive project from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 645845

Citizen-Centric Data Services for Smarter Cities

Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic “smart city in a box” solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens’ active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city’s data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities’ data ecosystem.The European Union’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme has supported this work under grant agreement No. 325097

Collaboration-Centred Cities through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data

This paper describes the IES Cities platform conceived to streamline the development of urban apps that combine heterogeneous datasets provided by diverse entities, namely, government, citizens, sensor infrastructure and other information data sources. This work pursues the challenge of achieving effective citizen collaboration by empowering them to prosume urban data across time. Particularly, this paper focuses on the query mapper; a key component of the IES Cities platform devised to democratize the development of open data-based mobile urban apps. This component allows developers not only to use available data, but also to contribute to existing datasets with the execution of SQL sentences. In addition, the component allows developers to create ad hoc storages for their applications, publishable as new datasets accessible by other consumers. As multiple users could be contributing and using a dataset, our solution also provides a data level permission mechanism to control how the platform manages the access to its datasets. We have evaluated the advantages brought forward by IES Cities from the developers' perspective by describing an exemplary urban app created on top of it. In addition, we include an evaluation of the main functionalities of the query mapper.European Union's Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (ICT-PSP CIP Programme). Grant Agreement Number: 32509

A Comparative Analysis of Human Behavior Prediction Approaches in Intelligent Environments

Behavior modeling has multiple applications in the intelligent environment domain. It has been used in different tasks, such as the stratification of different pathologies, prediction of the user actions and activities, or modeling the energy usage. Specifically, behavior prediction can be used to forecast the future evolution of the users and to identify those behaviors that deviate from the expected conduct. In this paper, we propose the use of embeddings to represent the user actions, and study and compare several behavior prediction approaches. We test multiple model (LSTM, CNNs, GCNs, and transformers) architectures to ascertain the best approach to using embeddings for behavior modeling and also evaluate multiple embedding retrofitting approaches. To do so, we use the Kasteren dataset for intelligent environments, which is one of the most widely used datasets in the areas of activity recognition and behavior modeling.This work was carried out with the financial support of FuturAAL-Ego (RTI2018-101045-A-C22) and FuturAAL-Context (RTI2018-101045-B-C21) granted by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

Critical Study on the Tube-to-Chip Luer Slip Connectors.

Luer slip is one of the gold standards for chip-to-world interface in microfluidics. They have outstanding mechanical and operational robustness in a broad range of applications using water and solvent-based liquids. Still, their main drawbacks are related to their size: they have relatively large dead volumes and require a significant footprint to assure a leak-free performance. Such aspects make their integration in systems with high microchannel density challenging. To date, there has been no geometrical optimization of the Luer slips to provide a solution to the mentioned drawbacks. This work aims to provide the rules toward downscaling the Luer slips. To this effect, seven variations of the Luer slip male connectors and five variations of Luer slip female connectors have been designed and manufactured focusing on the reduction of the size of connectors and minimization of the dead volumes. In all cases, female connectors have been developed to pair with the corresponding male connector. Characterization has been performed with a tailor-made test bench in which the closure force between male and female connectors has been varied between 7.9 and 55 N. For each applied closure force, the test bench allows liquid pressures to be tested between 0.5 and 2.0 bar. Finally, the analysis of a useful life determines the number of cycles that the connectors can withstand before leakage.The authors are grateful for the financial support from the Basque Country Government within the frame of the project BIKAINTEK 2018 (48-AF-W2-2018-00006)

A Semantically Enhanced Service Discovery for MANET

Service discovery is a fundamental aspect of many services oriented applications; however, it cannot be directly applied to mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) due to their dynamic nature. The lack of central manager nodes results in the need of specific discovery solutions for this kind of networks. In this paper, we present a solution for the discovery of services in MANETs that is based on the classification of service's parameters according to a shared domain ontology. Our proposed discovery protocol encompasses two main processes: dissemination and search. The search process defines a pruning mechanism that enables to detect if search messages must be propagated or not, reducing the number of messages communicated through the network. The dissemination and search processes are integrated within the route management mechanism that enables to reduce the number of propagated messages. We have implemented and tested our discovery solution using the ns-2 network simulator. Experiments have been performed using rigorously constructed scenarios for testing the characteristics of the proposed solution. The obtained results show how the inclusion of the ontology not only increments the expressiveness of the search and discovery process, but also enables to reduce the number of propagated messages due to the grouping and pruning processes

Collaboration-Centred Cities Through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data. Springer

This paper describes the IES Cities platform conceived to streamline the development of urban apps which combine heterogeneous datasets provided by diverse entities, namely, Government, citizens, sensor infrastructure and so on. Particularly, it focuses on the Query Mapper, a key component of this platform devised to democratize the development of Open Data based mobile urban apps. The advantages from the developers’ perspective brought forward by IES Cities are evaluated by describing an exemplary urban app created on top of it. This work pursues the challenge of achieving effective citizen collaboration by empowering them to prosume urban data across time.European Commission´s Competitive and Innovation Programme. ICT-PS

Analyzing Particularities of Sensor Datasets for Supporting Data Understanding and Preparation

Data scientists spend much time with data cleaning tasks, and this is especially important when dealing with data gathered from sensors, as finding failures is not unusual (there is an abundance of research on anomaly detection in sensor data). This work analyzes several aspects of the data generated by different sensor types to understand particularities in the data, linking them with existing data mining methodologies. Using data from different sources, this work analyzes how the type of sensor used and its measurement units have an important impact in basic statistics such as variance and mean, because of the statistical distributions of the datasets. The work also analyzes the behavior of outliers, how to detect them, and how they affect the equivalence of sensors, as equivalence is used in many solutions for identifying anomalies. Based on the previous results, the article presents guidance on how to deal with data coming from sensors, in order to understand the characteristics of sensor datasets, and proposes a parallelized implementation. Finally, the article shows that the proposed decision-making processes work well with a new type of sensor and that parallelizing with several cores enables calculations to be executed up to four times faster

Citizen-Centric Data Services for Smarter Cities

Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic “smart city in a box” solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens’ active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city’s data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities’ data ecosystem.The European Union’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme has supported this work under grant agreement No. 325097

Enabling Flexible and Continuous Capability Invocation in Mobile Prosumer Environments

sensor