IISSC 2016 - EAI International Conference on ICT Infrastructures and services for Smart Cities (IISSC)

Modern cities are becoming more and more representative of a changing world, where several trends are clearly emerging: constantly improving technological innovation, fast and chaotic urbanization, ageing population in Western countries and simultaneous demographic growth in emerging countries, global warming and environmental pollution are just some of them. Recent studies assess that by 2050 nearly 70% of the world population will live in cities, thus characterizing these urban conglomerations as the most energy-consuming entities (75% of the world energy by 2050) and as the main responsible for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 75% by 2030 and up to 80% by 2050) worldwide, as estimated by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
According to the city concept proposed by the ISO/IEC standards institution, "a city is a system of systems with unique history and set in a specific environmental and societal context" which needs "all the key city actors to work together, utilising all their resources, to overcome the challenges and grasp the opportunities that the city faces". In such an extremely variegated context, therefore, cities must become “smarter” in order to improve citizenship’s life quality and societal conditions, to exploit the available resources more effectively, to achieve the expected goals and fulfil the purposes set up by policy makers and, at the same time, without affecting or endangering the environment and by making all of this economically sustainable.
ICT Perspective
Technological innovation can drive cities to significant levels of smartness, by intervening in several areas, such as:
Smart Urban Environment, by fostering energy consumption reduction and environmental sustainability;
Smart Living, by providing novel high-quality healthcare and wellbeing services, home-automation and smart-home solutions;
Smart City Governance, by promoting the effective interconnection across institutions and administrations and by allowing citizens to access services more easily;
Smart Urban Mobility, by supporting novel solutions for people and good transportation;
Smart Citizenship, by offering people new, engaging e-educational opportunities which exploit collaborative remote learning and online participation.
Socio-Technical Perspective
ICT infrastructures and services represent the two most relevant and mutually related key technological drivers enabling cities to achieve their smartness. In order to actually become Smart Cities, indeed, municipalities around the world must leverage the opportunities disclosed by ICT infrastructures ? such as cloud computing solutions, pervasive communication systems, open broadband networks, sensor technologies and intelligent data management systems ? in order to deliver a broad range of services to their citizens and administrators.
This scenario is featured by a tight interaction between people and technologies in their daily life, both in workplaces and homes, thus connecting the ICT infrastructures and services to Socio-Technical Systems (STSs). A correct analysis and exploitation of STSs represent, in our opinion, the third pillar for a true achievement of the Smart City model, so that new generations (the so-called "Millennials") can exploit smart devices to reduce digital gaps and improve the urban efficiency.
Social Perspective
Citizens are becoming more and more the primary research and market source of insights, since infrastructure and services providers aim at offering life-enhancing or life-changing solutions to them (e.g., smart energy metering, e-shopping, e-health, traffic management, smart environmental monitoring, shared transports, etc.), capable of creating truly intelligent collaborations and automated information flows between devices and people. From such challenging premises, the core mission of the conference is to address those key topics on ICT infrastructures (technologies, models, frameworks) and services fostering the smart city model, in order to enhance performance and wellbeing, to reduce costs and resource consumption, to cope with societal impacts and to take into consideration citizens’ voices and opinions, as well as to engage them more effectively and actively in urban life.
The conference aims to be an opportunity for people from academia, industries and public institutions to meet in the same arena and define new collaborations in the perspective of future project calls. Therefore, it will include a scholar track (whose results will be published in Springer), to disseminate theoretical scientific activities, as well as it will leave room to present available innovative solutions and active research projects, and novel ideas for new project proposals.
Significant Events
Workshops and Panels
Public-private partnerships are fundamental to create suitable opportunities for the development of Smart Cities. Network connectivity, smart capabilities, data resiliency and security, energy efficiency are the key elements for successful experiences in this area. Academic or industrial workshops aim at collecting concrete use cases and successful Smart City scenarios, leveraging ICT infrastructures as the enabling element for their sustainability. Contributions from universities, research centers, public and private firms are equally welcomed.
Smart City Challenges and Needs
According to the European Commission, Smart Cities represent an opportunity for Europe and ICT infrastructures are the backbone upon which citizens and business have to rely for empowering their lives, fueling the economic growth, tackling global changes. Some cities have already experienced a smart approach within their urban frameworks and many more are starting this complex yet fascinating path nowadays. The aim of the roundtable is to let cities present their current activities and the challenges they envision in their near future in order to highlight how Smart City solutions can be financially viable, sufficiently safe, effectively integrated, efficiently automated
FIWARE Discussion Panel and Exhibition
This track aims at gathering contributions and fostering discussion opportunities about the usage of FIWARE open APIs, the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative and middleware within entrepreneurial ICT accelerators. Participants from the Apulia region, as well as Italy and other European countries are welcomed to present their successful achievements that have been awarded with finance support from the European Commission.
Tutorials
Tutorial are very welcome. Submitted tutorial proposal will be limited to 1 page and required to be in a single column. Electronic submission of proposals (in PDF format) is required. Submissions should include tutorial title, abstract, name of authors, their affiliations, emails addresses, and postal addresses.
RELEVANT TOPICS
Potential topics of interest, which can be investigated from different perspectives (social, organizational, technological) include, but are not limited to, the following application domains:
E-health
Agriculture and Food
Smart Energy & Smart Buildings
Mobility, Transports & Logistics
Environment Management and Sustainability
E-tourism & E-culture
E-education
E-government
E-inclusion
Urban Security
Effective Experiences about smarter and sustainable cities
Significant activities empowering Smart Citizenships
Socio-Technical Systems
Societal impact of Smart City solutions
Public-private partnerships enabling Smart City Solutions
Successful projects and initiatives for Smart Cities
Highlights
The event is endorsed by the European Alliance for Innovation, a leading community-based organisation devoted to the advancement of innovation in the field of ICT.
All accepted papers will be submitted for publication in Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library, one of the world's largest scientific libraries.
Proceedings are submitted for inclusion to the leading indexing services: Elsevier (EI), Thomson Scientific (ISI), Scopus, Crossref, Google Scholar, DBLP.
Best Papers will be considered for publication in the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities.
Co-location of the event with the 2nd EAI International Conference on Cloud Networking for IoT Systems (CN4IoT).