First International Workshop the Urban Internet of Things (Urban IOT 2010) - Programming the real-time city in conjunction with the Second International Conference on the Internet of Things 2010 (IOT 2010), Tokyo, Japan
As more people move to cities, it is becoming increasingly challenging to design infrastructures that efficiently support the many changing needs of its inhabitants. New modalities will need to be designed to deliver services such as transportation, healthcare, education or public safety in a timely manner for more people in urban areas that are growing both in size and complexity. Cities are now being blanketed by systems and networks driven by digital data in real-time. This way, while keeping infrastructures operational, large amounts of data are being generated, representing digital traces of human activity and their context in urban space: environmental sensors measure parameters such as air quality, temperature or noise levels; telecommunication networks reflect connectivity and location of its users; transportation networks digitally manage mobility of people, vehicles as well as products in the city, just to name a few.
Over the past years, initial research has been carried out employing such data to better understand how people make use of their cities and how such usage changes in real-time. Today, it is becoming increasingly relevant to expand on this research by exploring ways in which such data streams can become tools for people in the very moment of taking decisions in the city. While real-time data has been extensively used within individual systems or networks, promising results and applications seem to emerge from creatively combining multiple of such data streams from different kinds of data sources. Recent innovations in technology, such as wireless communication or handheld electronics with integrated sensors, have contributed significantly in the development of the field described above. However, many challenges need to be addressed to fully disclose the vision of a real-time city.
This workshop will provide a forum for the different disciplines involved in the design of future cities to establish a common ground for better interdisciplinary cooperation in this area. We invite original and inspiring contributions from technology experts, researchers in academia and industry, designers, urban planners, and architects to share their knowledge, experiences, and best practices for building smarter cities. We particularly encourage practical or provocative ideas that deal with the various technical and social challenges, and opportunities offered by the increasing digitalization of our urban environments. The format will be a full day mix of paper, invited, and demo presentations, along with open discussions about the particular challenges of urban environments.
Relevant topics include - but are not limited to - the following:
- How does and how can real-time data impact and change the way people experience their city?
- how to devise an urban real-time data platform that nurtures a community of developers to join in the design of applications based on infinite combinations of multiple data streams?
- how to automate the combination and processing of different raw data streams in order to obtain meaningful information for human users by exploring new directions in semantic Web technologies?
- how can disciplines such as urban planning, architecture and design transform the potential of real-time data platforms into real value for citizens?
- how can city administrations, institutions, and companies benefit from publicly sharing real-time data generated within their systems and networks?
- how to establish levels of trust and reputation in data sources contributed both by established institutions as well as individually user generated content?
- how Web technologies and infrastructure can be leverage to facilitate real-time data streams collection, sharing, processing, and storage for expert and non-expert users?
- how to create an ecosystem around real-time data sharing platforms that creates mutual benefit for both data contributors as well as data consumers in order to encourage active participation and long term sustainable growth of the user community?
We solicit short papers (max. 6 pages) or demo papers (max. 3 pages) that describe new research directions, early results, works-in-progress and working prototypes in the areas of ubiquitous computing and interaction design for urban environments. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published on the IEEE Digital Library. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to fully register for IOT 2010 and to present the paper on-site. (No-show at the workshop will result in an exclusion from the IEEE Digital Library.)