PerAwareCity 2019 - Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Pervasive Context-Aware Smart Cities and Intelligent Transportation Systems (PerAwareCity)

Cities and urban areas are an ideal platform for researchers and practitioners to test new technologies, concepts and applications. In Europe and the US, the population living in urban areas accounts for more than 75 percent. As a consequence, applications that are targeting urban areas can positively impact a significant fraction of the population in terms of various social benefits. In addition, the majority of the planet’s resources are consumed in cities. This, in turn, creates a significant potential for reducing the environmental impact of mankind by enhancing and optimizing the physical infrastructure digitally.
The ongoing advances in Pervasive Computing technology have delivered interesting hardware platforms that are suitable for city-scale infrastructure deployments. In addition, the success of mobile communication devices and mobile broadband connectivity enables citizens to tap into the digital resources that surround them anytime and anywhere. Another foremost important technology for building future generation of smart city applications is intelligent (real time) analytics and decision making by processing streaming sensor data available from the surrounding environment. Fleets of smart cars can be a distributed computational and sensing resource. Also, increasingly large crowds of people are being equipped with sensor-rich mobile and wearable devices, yielding Big Data arising from such environments, e.g., GPS data and social activity data, which can facilitate wide-scale crowd-sensing and crowdsourcing, contributing towards data acquisition in smart city applications. With such data, both centralized analytics and decentralized analytics could play a key role in data sense-making and decision making. Also, such analysis can be combined with data from increasingly deployed fixed sensors or IoT infrastructure in the city.
Context-aware applications in the smart city are numerous, from transportation, energy, safety to low-carbon living. There are many context reasoning and data acquisition, analytics and knowledge management issues in ITS and smart cities, such as architectural and algorithmic issues, incentive mechanisms, energy-efficiency, data verification, complex pervasive computing interactions, cost efficiency, urban data issues, data privacy and security, to name a few.
Recently researchers are actively engaged in finding the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in solving various data analytics and decision making problems related to Smart Cities which can benefit the society as a whole. E.g, (a) efficient water quality monitoring can ensure proper quality of water served for drinking, industry or agricultural purposes depending on specific requirements; (b) efficient healthcare assistant can track health status of elderly individuals staying alone in home to make decisions during emergency events through continuous learning; or (c) they can provide tailored services to patients in smart hospitals, (d) intelligently choosing proper sensor or communication interface depending on the data volume, communication requirement and importance of the event, (e) providing intelligent road traffic routing depending on action priorities of the user and based on the congestion condition which can further depend on weather or any other unexpected events, such as, accident, strike, etc.
This workshop will focus on bringing together researchers and practitioners working on systems and applications in the Smart City domain. All the architectural, networking and decision making aspects will be investigated and discussed. Underlying structure of Smart City systems, including different possible architectural models such as peer-to-peer, location based, server oriented, and hybrid models will be studied. Almost all smart city related problems, which are important for the societal welfare, and could potentially be solved using AI techniques, can be presented in this workshop by researchers from industry and academia. In general, we want to focus on solutions of the following questions: (a) how to design city-scale smart systems with autonomous coordination capabilities; (b) how to develop intelligent decision making abilities in emergency and safety-critical systems or during medium and large-scale disasters, and (c) how to handle real-time conditions innovate computing technology for diverse societal applications to improve the human experience. We also hope to produce a post-workshop position paper providing a summary perspective and future directions for work in the area. A community of researchers and practitioners will also be created and nurtured via this workshop.
Smart City as an emerging area attracts researchers to organize several thematic workshops and conferences. The 3rd IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Computing is focusing on bringing together researchers in the field of system, networking and communication to discuss major challenges, research problems, and potential applications to support smart cities and urban informatics. The First IEEE International Conference on Smart City Innovations (IEEE SCI 2017) focuses on smart city related applications and services. However, large scale data management and decision making for smart cities is not receiving enough attention. So, in this workshop, we propose to include the social good aspects of smart city applications using AI or ML techniques which are novel concepts and will be attractive to the community as a cross-disciplinary perspective. In summary, this workshop is unique (different from other ITS and smart city conferences) in its emphasis on the combination of context-aware computing, ITS and smart cities (IoT), and aims to maintain the important link between smart cities and pervasive computing.
Therefore PerAwareCity solicits papers addressing relevant topics, including - but not limited to - the following:
Smart City systems and platforms
Experiences from real-world experiments and deployments
Smart City applications, e.g. smart traffic management, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart waste management, Pollution control and management, Environmental sustainability, Water quality monitoring, Criminal activity profiling
Crowdsourcing and human computation
Internet of Things, Web and Linked Data technologies for Smart Cities
Big data in Smart City, Smart City Intelligent Data Processing
Cyber-physical systems and society
End user involvement, acceptance and user support aspects
Participatory sensing and processing
Sensor, Actuators and their networking in Smart Cities
Safety, security and privacy for Smart City applications
Scalability of Smart City systems and beyond (Smart Regions / Countries)
Adaptable, recoverable, and fault tolerant Smart City systems
Management, configuration, and deployment of Smart City infrastructures, Smart Infrastructure Health Monitoring