CLW 2014 - City Labs Workshop

Social media and digital traces from sensor such as smartcards and mobile phones have played a key role in providing insights into people's activities, opinions and day-to-day lives. These detailed user-generated information streams offer a unique opportunity for cities to understand and engage their citizens. The research domain of smarter cities aims to monitor disruptive events (e.g., emergencies, Olympics), analyze social behaviour, identify citizens' sentiment and understand their interactions with services. On the other side, cities can use their understanding of the citizen to foster stronger relationships with the diverse communities in their constituencies. This understanding could be applied to mobilize people on important issues such as education, health care, political engagement and community awareness. Also, new digital fabrication tools have been recently used to generate adoptable, dynamic and interactive architecture able to evolve together with urban dwellers, and it has been shown that new Internet-of-Things devices could effectively capture physical observations to understand how cities and urban centers work. As a result, cities now provide a living lab where applied research can be carried out to understand citizen and services with a focus on collaborative, user-centred design and co-creation.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive and social computing paradigm to understand cities. We are seeking multidisciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel citizencentric applications that benefit not only citizens, but also urban planners and policy makers. We believe this topic will attract researchers from communities ranging for computational science, to social science and urban design.
This workshop fosters discussions covering topics such as (but not limited to):
Use of social media to engage citizens, for example through gamification
Improving understanding of the city through mining social media
Disaster recovery and coordination using social media
Mobilizing the community through social media
Pervasive applications for user interaction and data collection
Enabling citizen and NGO initiatives through social media
Methodology for quality evaluation and validation of user generated content
Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration of city data
Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement
Internet of Things (IoT) for cities
Digital Fabrication tools for adaptable cities