04 October 2011 | General, ICT, TUD
Smart mobility, smart energy grids, smart cities!
The presentations from the COST Strategic Workshop on Smart Cities held on 26 and 27 September 2011 are now available and include project presentations on smart mobility, urban security and the future of the cities from a Smart Cities perspective.
Speakers from Academia (MIT, University of Coimbra, University of Stockholm, University Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid, Technical University of Milan), industrial laboratories (the IBM research centres from Dublin, New York and Zürich, Telecom Italia and Orange) as well as urban and regional authorities (the cities of Chicago, Dublin and Milan as well as the Regional Planning Institute of Isle de France) focused on the contribution and challenges for Decision Sciences and Technologies to Smart Cities.
Exciting projects on smart mobility, smart energy grids, urban security and the collection and use of information (including privacy issues) were presented and general viewpoints about the future of the cities under a Smart Cities perspective shared.
The focus was on the importance of improving services, utilities management and sustainability within Smart Cities as well as the need to create and design new services as well as invent new ways to use the city. The workshop also addressed the issue of inclusion and highlighted new forms of citizenship Smart Cities may offer.
At the final roundtable, speakers – Lisa Amini, Director of the IBM research laboratory in Dublin; Philippe Baptiste, Director of the National Computer Science Institute of the CNRS and Fred Roberts, Director of DIMACS – agreed that the Smart Cities perspective represents a great challenge for interdisciplinary research (at the edge of Computer Science, Decision Sciences, Social Sciences, Urban Planning etc.) as well as for the development of synergies between university and industrial laboratories on applied research subjects that impact our lives so strongly on a daily basis.
This successful workshop underlined the necessity to continue to network the different stakeholders involved in Smart Cities projects in Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. The creation of a COST Action with this goal will be pursued in the next months.
The workshop was a joint effort by the COST Office, GDRI ALGODEC funded by the CNRS and many other European Research Institutions and Universities and finally by the DIMACS (Rutgers University) Special Focus project on Algorithmic Decision Theory funded by the NSF (USA). More than 50 participants attended of which 10 early stage researchers.
