Online Activities to Mobilize Smart Cities

A smart city is a dynamic living system that contains hard (unchanging) and soft (changing) parts that each involve the implementation of respective technologies. Prior research has focused on infrastructure, technology, and social components when discussing smart city structure. In this paper, we explore key elements within the soft aspects of smart city initiatives enabling the organization of a dynamic structure. To do so, we focus on human behavior, which we illustrate by analyzing online activities in two cases: one is related to a smart city while the other focuses on an online community. Based on the analysis, we identify key elements that reveal how people participate and become engaged in order to provide lessons to be taken into account within smart city initiatives. Within online activities, the key elements we note are related to knowledge generation, information sharing of common interests, and the creation of collective action

Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town: Panasonic’s Challenge in Building a Sustainable Society

Urban utility equipment and electronic goods manufacturers are experiencing profound challenges in this age of rapid technological change. Panasonic, Japan’s leading electronics company, has also recognized the limits of its traditional product manufacturing orientation and decided to enter IT-intensive town management in view of these challenges. It has advanced a new strategy for creating sustainable communities to encourage both stakeholders and local residents to get involved. Stressing sustainability, the strategy has adopted a long-term perspective (i.e., a 100-year timeframe). Significantly, it must provide values that foster community-based sustainability and adopt a business model that ensures the economic viability of both constructing the town and managing its ongoing services. As information systems play a big part in the provision of services in the new town, the strategy requires the linking of information with technology and social aspects, quite unlike traditional manufacturing, which is solely based on technology concerns. As part of its new strategy, Panasonic defined five prominent service areas (i.e., energy, security, mobility, wellness, and community). The company thought these areas would expand and generate new value and services throughout the strategy’s timeframe

Introduction to Government and Disaster Resilience Minitrack

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Introduction to the Minitrack on Disaster Information, Technology, and Resilience in Digital Government

International audienceThe 21st Century has been termed "the century of disasters." Worldwide there were twice as many disasters and catastrophes in the first decade of this century as in the last decade of the 20th Century. All continents are affected, both directly and indirectly. And the trend continues, fuelled by climate change, demographic changes and social dynamics. The serious challenges facing government in cities, regions and nations of the world relate to acute shocks (such as forest fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics and terrorist attacks) and chronic stresses (such as high unemployment, religious extremism, inefficient public transport systems, endemic violence, chronic shortages of food and water). Information is among the key life-supporting essentials in a disaster response, as well as water and basic foods which are vital to sustain lives. It is information technology these days that gives us access to most of this information. We rely greatly on it. In this sense, information management with effective use of information systems should be conducted and evaluated among disaster relief agencies. Successful information management will result in making higher situational awareness in a field that is crucial for a disaster response. It also guides us to build a disaster-resilient community which can adapt the society to those unexpected events. These issues should be tackled at each level of the governance (international, national, regional, local, etc.), and with regards to all relevant dimensions (social, technological, interoperability, agility, etc.). This minitrack features government and disaster information management, including the development of disaster resilience communities/societies. Five papers have been selected that deal with any aspect of the analysis, design, development, deployment, implementation, integration, operation, use or evaluation of ICT for discussing government roles for disaster responses, disaster information management, and resilience communities. In addition, we support innovative and breakthrough visions regarding "disaster information, technology and resilience.

Exploring Effective Ecosystems in Disaster Management: Case studies of Japan and Nepal

Existing literature argues that taking a holistic approach to disaster management is important for organizations in achieving resilience. However, theoretical underpinnings are lacking to achieve a holistic understanding. This paper applies the notion of an ecosystem as a holistic lens to understand complex disaster management. \ \ We report two case studies from Japan and Nepal to illustrate how an ecosystem works during a disaster. The Japan case is a government initiative, whereas the Nepal case is a non-governmental initiative. The theoretical framework of information ecology is used in analyzing the cases. \ \ Based on the findings, we formulate three propositions that show important elements of ecosystems to approach resilience. The study suggests that coevolution is a key to respond to constantly changing situations during a disaster. To accomplish ecosystem coevolution, creating a collaboration system with governments and local communities and embedding local knowledge into the system are essential. Furthermore, digital tools can play a critical role in the coevolution process.

Conceptualizing and Designing a Resilience Information Portal

Cities need to cater for the challenges they face. They must endure, respond to, and adapt to short-term shocks and long-term stresses. This ability is now commonly referred to as resilience. Communication and collaboration are vital aspects of a city\u27s effort of becoming (more) resilient. In particular, cities ought to engage their citizens, who ultimately are those that make it resilient - and who benefit from their city\u27s resilience. In this paper we present work from a large-scale research project with a considerably practical focus. We have employed IT artefacts to conceptualize and design what we call a Resilience Information Portal. This portal is meant to be the unifier of communication and collaboration efforts of a city. Our proposal takes into account that the basic technological artefacts already exist and are relatively simple, but that the actual problem is complex and requires the integration of various IT systems

Handling jets + missing E_T channel using inclusive mT2

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may discover the squarks (\tilde{q}) and gluino (\tilde{g}) of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) in the early stage of the experiments if their masses are lighter than 1.5 TeV. In this paper we propose the sub-system m_{T2} variable, which is sensitive to the gluino mass when m_{\tilde{q}}>m_{\tilde{g}}. Using it with the inclusive m_{T2} distribution proposed earlier, \tilde{q} and \tilde{g} masses can be determined simultaneously in the early stage of the experiments. Results of Monte Carlo simulations at sample MSSM model points are presented both for signal and background.Comment: Some typos are fixed and references are update