The SmartSantander project

The SmartSantander project has deployed during the past two years a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. This facility is sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities, and to stimulate the development of new applications by end-users. Besides, it provides support to the experimental advanced research on IoT technologies, and allows a realistic assessment on new services by means of users’ acceptability tests. The facility already counts with more than 10,000 IoT devices (March 2013), and by the end of 2013 it will comprise of more than 12,000. The core of the facility is being installed in the city of Santander (Spain), the capital of the region of Cantabria situated on the north coast of Spain, and its surroundings. Besides Santander, other deployments have been placed in Lübeck (Germany), Guilford (UK) and Belgrade (Serbia). SmartSantander will enable the Future Internet of Things to become a reality

From the Internet of Things to the social innovation and the economy of data

Historically, cities and their citizens have led the largest changes that have been taking place continuously, especially since the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. This phenomenon is especially significant from the mid-eighteenth century and it will become more intense if the predictions that establish that, around the year 2050, approximately 70% of the world population will concentrate in some type of city finally come true. With these boundary conditions, it is evident that the achievement of more efficient and sustainable cities is an unavoidable objective for which politicians, managers and technicians must work in order to guarantee the quality of life of their citizens. Although this paradigm of sustainability and efficiency has always been present in the managers of cities, it has not been until very recently that technology has made available to the responsible parties a plethora of possibilities that, when properly employed, translate into significant savings. At the same time, the day-to-day improvement of the citizens is consolidating a new urban concept in which the different processes and systems that occur in it are continuously monitored in both time and space. This paper reviews the evolution of one of the pioneering examples of such cities, Santander, where an Internet of the Things infrastructure was deployed a decade ago. In this time, multiple technologies and services have been developed and deployed in smart city pilots. The paper discusses the key lessons learnt from the digitalization of the city and the new challenges that have arisen as we were paving the way for a smarter and more liveable city.This work has been funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. RTI2018-093475-A-I00 FIERCE (Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs) project

Empowering citizens towards the co-creation of sustainable cities

Urban ecosystems are becoming one of the most potentially attractive scenarios for innovating new services and technologies. In parallel, city managers, urban utilities and other stakeholders are fostering the intensive use of advanced technologies aiming at improving present city performance and sustainability. The deployment of such technology entails the generation of massive amounts of information which in many cases might become useful for other services and applications. Hence, aiming at taking advantage of such massive amounts of information and deployed technology as well as breaking down the potential digital barrier, some easy-to-use tools have to be made available to the urban stakeholders. These tools integrated in a platform, operated directly or indirectly by the city, provide a singular opportunity for exploiting the concept of connected city whilst promoting innovation in all city dimensions and making the co-creation concept a reality, with an eventual impact on government policies.This work would not have been possible without the contribution of the OrganiCity team, which has been partially funded by the European Union, under the grant agreement No. 645198 of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program

Electromagnetic field assessment as a smart city service: The SmartSantander use-case

Despite the increasing presence of wireless communications in everyday life, there exist some voices raising concerns about their adverse effects. One particularly relevant example is the potential impact of the electromagnetic field they induce on the population's health. Traditionally, very specialized methods and devices (dosimetry) have been used to assess the strength of the E-field, with the main objective of checking whether it respects the corresponding regulations. In this paper, we propose a complete novel approach, which exploits the functionality leveraged by a smart city platform. We deploy a number of measuring probes, integrated as sensing devices, to carry out a characterization embracing large areas, as well as long periods of time. This unique platform has been active for more than one year, generating a vast amount of information. We process such information, and the obtained results validate the whole methodology. In addition, we discuss the variation of the E-field caused by cellular networks, considering additional information, such as usage statistics. Finally, we establish the exposure that can be attributed to the base stations within the scenario under analysis.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE: Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

SmartSantander: Internet of Things research and innovation through citizen participation

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.Although only a few names appear in this paper’s list of authors, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-257992

Perdedores: Vladimir Tatlin y Arno Breker

La libertad creativa, gran conquista del arte del siglo XX, en buena medida significó para la escultura un abandono del espacio físico e ideológico real en favor del expositivo. No obstante, hubo artistas, como los constructivistas rusos, que lejos de refugiarse en la tradición artística, o en la creación autónoma pura, decidieron sumarse a la modernidad para intentar colaborar en la construcción de una nueva sociedad. El rechazo del Proyecto para el Monumento a la III Internacional de Tatlin, evidenció la dificultad de la escultura abstracta para hacerse portadora de un cierto grado de significación. Los sistemas totalitarios prefirieron otros lenguajes artísticos más susceptibles de hacerse portadores del mensaje propagandístico ideológico.For sculpture, creative freedom, the great victory of 20th century art, involved leaving real physical and ideological space for exhibition space to a large extent. Nevertheless, there were artists, such as the Russian constructivists who, far from taking refuge in artistic tradition, or pure autonomous creation, decided to join modernity to attempt to collaborate in the creation of a new society. The rejection of Tatlin’s Project for the Monument to the 3rd International, showed how difficult it was for abstract sculpture to bear a certain degree of significance. Totalitarian systems preferred other artistic languages more likely to carry the ideological propagandistic message

Fostering inter-operable urban ecosystems through the adoption of common frameworks

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase. More sustainable cities and improving citizen’s quality of life are the leit motiv of such transformation. However, such aims are difficult to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not carried out following a common approach. Optimizing the behavior of any specific urban service needs to be performed taking into consideration both the service itself as well as its interaction with adjacent services. This means that any solution aiming to achieve the autonomous city management paradigm is tightly related to the adoption of common frameworks which are able to guarantee interoperability with other systems. Furthermore, cities themselves are not isolated systems. Well the opposite, cities interact one to the each other depending on different attributes. This implies that sooner or later optimizing some processes in one city without having in mind the adjacency to others might not be efficient enough. Hence, interoperability among cities will become a must, not just in terms of optimization but also replicability. Based on this boundary conditions this paper describes a framework aimed to ensure interoperability and replicability among cities. Some of the tools for assessing compliance with specific standardization activities are also presented.This work has been partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreement No. 732240 SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond). The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors. In addition, this work has been also partially funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. RTI2018-093475-AI00 FIERCE (Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs

Fostering IoT service replicability in interoperable urban ecosystems

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen's quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certi cate for smart cities. To assess the bene ts of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus con rming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme [SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond)] under Grant 732240, and in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, MINECO-FEDER) through the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00

Managing pervasive sensing campaigns via an experimentation-as-a-service platform for smart cities

The adoption of technologies like the IoT in urban environments, together with the intensive use of smartphones, is driving transformation towards smart cities. Under this perspective, Experimentation-as-a-Service within OrganiCity aims to create an experimental facility with technologies, services, and applications that simplify innovation within urban ecosystems. We discuss here tools that facilitate experimentation, implementing ways to organize, execute, and administer experimentation campaigns in a smart city context. We discuss the benefits of our framework, presenting some preliminary results. This is the first time such tools are paired with large-scale smart city infrastructures, enabling both city-scale experimentation and cross-site experimentation.This work was partially supported by the OrganiCity research project funded by the European Union, under the grant agreement No. 645198 of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation progra