CityLab 2016 - The CityLab Workshop

The CityLab Workshop
(collocated with the 10th Intl. Conference on Web Social Media)
17 May, 2016, Cologne, Germany
http://citylab16.sis.pitt.edu
AIMS & TOPICS OF INTEREST:
This workshop aims into bringing together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the web, the mobile, the pervasive and the social computing paradigm to understand cities and, crucially, engage their citizens in an effort to reclaim urban space for improving their quality of life. Our goal is to create a better understanding of cities and a living lab for understanding both technological and social phenomena. The interdisciplinary focus aims into attracting and welcomes diverse researchers from social sciences and information systems.
We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel citizen centric applications that benefit not only citizens, but also urban planners and policy makers. This is especially important with many cities now signing up for opportunities to participate in Living Labs or Smarter Cities pilot programs, the need to discuss and evaluate where these projects are going is highly topical at this time. Though the concept of “smart cities” is widely popular, there is still no consensus on how to pursue this goal. The workshop topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Improving understanding of the city through mining social media (including location-based services) in the urban context
Open data platforms
Urban crowdsourcing
Civic sensing technologies
Intelligent urban services
Use of social media to engage citizens, for example through gamification
Disaster recovery and coordination using social media
Modeling of human mobility
Use of social media to engage citizens
Visualization and interfaces to facilitate the exploration of urban data
Privacy and ethical concerns
Internet of Things (IoT) for cities
Mobilizing the community through social media
Pervasive applications for user interaction and data collection
Enabling citizen and NGO initiatives through social media
Digital Fabrication tools for adaptable cities
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract Registration: February 27, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: March 11, 2016
Camera-ready Version Due: March 17, 2016
Workshop Date: May 17, 2016
URBAN BEERS
The workshop will include an "Urban Beers" session, which will bring together the local community with the global network of researchers that will participate in the workshop and allow for a productive idea exchange. It will start with a quick presentation from the local stakeholders as well as an 1-minute madness-type presentation from the workshop authors and any other participant that would like to do so. The latter will have to inform us prior to the workshop through a form that we will set up on the workshop’s page. This will allow everyone to be aware of each other’s interests and direct the interactions over the "Urban Beers”. The "Urban Beers" session will take place in a location outside the traditional academic environment in order to facilitate the interactions.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS AND PROCEEDINGS
We solicit 6-pages research papers that will present original, previously unpublished, research. All of the submissions should be in PDF format and conform to theAAAI formatting guidelines. All of the submissions will be handled electronically. Each paper will be reviewed by several members of the program committee.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
* Daniele Quercia
Bell Labs
Cambridge, UK
E-mail: dquercia-AT-acm.org
* Konstantinos Pelechrinis
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh, USA
E-mail: kpele-AT-pitt.edu
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (PRELIMINARY)
Clio Andris (Penn State)
Francesco Calabrese (IBM Research)
Licia Capra (University College London)
Justin Cranshaw (Microsoft Research)
Theodoros Damoulas (University of Warwick)
Rosta Farzan (University of Pittsburgh)
Aliso Heppenstall (University of Leeds)
Renaud Lambiotte (University of Namur)
Ed Manley (University College London)
Cecilia Mascolo (University of Cambridge)
Mirco Musolesi (University College London)
Anastasios Noulas (Lancaster University)
Kerstin Sailer (University College London)
Raz Schwartz (Facebook)
Alex Singleton (University of Liverpool)
Max Sklar (Foursquare)
For any questions please e-mail contact the PC chairs.