SCCTSA 2017 - Fourth international workshop on Smart City Clouds: Technologies, Systems and Applications

This workshop is co-located with the tenth IEE (Insititution of Electrical Engineers)/ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) international conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC) 2017 between 5 - 8 December 2017, Austin, Texas, USA.
About the workshop
This Smart City Clouds: Technologies, Systems and Applications (SCCTSA) workshop invites original research papers providing insights into smart cities needs, processes and frameworks using cloud-based software technologies and applications. Also, contributions relating to the use of cloud, big data, real-time processing, internet of things (IoT) are encouraged.
Key facilitator of a smart city
ICT (information and communication technologies) is becoming increasingly pervasive to urban environments and provides the necessary basis for sustainability and resilience of smart future cities. ICT as the prime enabler for smart cities transforms application-specific data into useful information and knowledge. From the ICT perspective, the possibility of realisation of smart cities is being enabled by smarter hardware (smart phones, sensor nets, smart household appliances). This hardware can organise in an IoT and thus become a major source of user and environment-specific data.
Use of cloud computing can be considered as a common platform for managing cross-departmental city data and providing necessary computation power to generate required integrated information intelligence for decision making and policy development.
Importance of intuitive software
ICT tools for a smart city often deal with different application domains such as land use, transport and energy. These rarely provide an integrated information perspective to deal with sustainability and socioeconomic growth of the city. Smart cities can benefit from such data (often open data) and information using real-time cross-thematic, data collection, processing, integration and sharing through interoperable services deployed in a cloud environment.
However, such information utilisation requires appropriate software tools, services and technologies. In order to collect, store, analyse and visualise large amounts of data from the city environment, citizens and various departments and agencies at city scale to generate new knowledge and support decision making.
Significance of smart city data
In the above context, the real value of smart city data is gained by new knowledge generation and by performing context-based data processing and analytics using various data mining, machine learning or statistical methods. This becomes challenging when applied to large-scale or real-time data, and hence requires appropriate tools and techniques to be applied in a cloud environment to process and generate required information. In addition, privacy and security issues must be dealt to avoid sharing intrusive details of participants.