We present an ensemble learning method that predicts large increases in the hours of home care received by citizens. The method is supervised, and uses different ensembles of either linear (logistic regression) or non-linear (random forests) classifiers. Experiments with data available from 2013 to 2017 for every citizen in Copenhagen receiving home care (27,775 citizens) show that prediction can achieve state of the art performance as reported in similar health related domains (AUC=0.715). We further find that competitive results can be obtained by using limited information for training, which is very useful when full records are not accessible or available. Smart city analytics does not necessarily require full city records.
To our knowledge this preliminary study is the first to predict large increases in home care for smart city analytics.
This paper presents an ongoing analyze of the Active Citizen e-voting system proposed by the Moscow city hall. This research points out that the main objective of the platform is not to enhance the democratic power of the Muscovites, but to strengthen the position of Moscow as a modern city at a world scale and the position of the city hall in the Russian political system.
Smart cities use technology to improve traffic patterns, energy distribution, air quality and more. The elements of a smart city can also increase the convenience for its citizens, by integrating IT technology into many aspects of citizen interaction such as simplifying access to many of the city services. The fields of healthcare, education, culture, and shopping can all be integrated into the core of a smart city to create an infrastructure that allows citizens to live more conveniently. Actual deployment cases exist in U.S., Europe, Singapore, and South Korea. With this environment, we need…
Leveraging civic data, divided into 3 categories spending, infrastructure and citizen feedback, can present a clear picture of the priorities, performance, and pain-points of a city. Data driven insights highlight the current issues faced by citizens as well as disparity between government spending and quality of work, and can aid in providing effective solutions. City infrastructure; footpaths, lighting, and parks, describe the living quality of citizens and can be compared to the annual spending in these sectors to track effectiveness. Analyzing complaints ensures citizen feedback is taken i…
In smart cities built on information and communication technology, citizens and various IT systems interoperate in harmony. Cloud computing and Internet-of-Things technologies that have been developed for a long time are making modern cities smarter. Smart cities can have a positive impact on citizens, but they can also make cities dangerous. Today, with the emerging reality of smart cities, this paper looks at both the bright and dark sides and provides a foundation for supporting work-related tasks of IT professionals as well as non-IT experts involved in urban design and development.
This article interrogates the techno-politics of crowdsourced data in the study of environmental hazards such as floods, storms, wildfires, and cyclones. We highlight some of the main debates around the use of citizen-generated data for assessing, monitoring, and responding to disasters. We then argue that, compared to the number of articles discussing the quality of citizen-generated data, little attention has been dedicated to discussing the social and political implications of this kind of practice. While this article does not intend to present definitive answers, it outlines inevitable cha…
The purpose is to investigate the expected participation and mentality of smart citizens in smart cities. The key question is the role of the human factor in smart environments globally studied through a research corpus of 150 documents including mainstream summaries trend reports, white papers and visions of business, governmental and university research cooperations reaching a wide audience of the subject. Foremost, a short review of the changing scholarly trends is presented as a theoretical framework. Concerning its key ideas, the corpus based findings are recapped and analysed by content …
Currently, nearly four billion people live in urban areas. Since this trend is increasing, natural disasters or terrorist attacks in such areas affect an increasing number of people. While information and communication technology is crucial for the operation of urban infrastructures and the well-being of its inhabitants, current technology is quite vulnerable to disruptions of various kinds. In future smart cities, a more resilient urban infrastructure is imperative to handle the increasing number of hazardous situations. We present a novel resilient communication approach based on smart stree…
Urban Metaverse: The Smart City in the Industrial Metaverse. Opportunities of the metaverse for real-time, interactive, and inclusive infrastructure applications in urban areas
This paper describes the International Disruptive Information Solutions hackathon and one the winning solutions. The purpose of the hackathon was to promote the use of disruptive ICT technologies (e.g. IoT, Big data, AI, blockchain) in urban infrastructures to create innovative waste management solutions in a smart city context. 29 students enrolled into this hackathon and in the end 4 teams submitted their solutions to the challenges. The winning proposal EcoQ, an approach for plogging collecting trashes while jogging, answered more than well to the presented challenge on waste management and…
In this position paper, we explore the adoption of a Smart City with a socio-technical perspective. A Smart city is a transformational technological process leading to profound modifications of existing urban regimes and infrastructure components. In this study, we consider a Smart City as a socio-technical system where the interplay between technologies and users ensures the sustainable development of smart city initiatives that improve the quality of life and solve important socio-economic problems. The adoption of a Smart City required a participative approach where users are involved durin…
The City of Toronto Long Term Care Homes & Services (LTCH&S) division is one of the largest providers of long-term care in the Canadian province of Ontario, providing care to 2,640 residents at 10 homes across Toronto. Our collaboration with LTCH&S was initiated to facilitate the increasingly challenging task of scheduling nursing staff and reduce high absenteeism rate observed among the part-time nurses. We developed a spreadsheet-based scheduling tool to automate the generation of schedules and incorporate nurses' preferences for different shifts into the schedules. At the core of the schedu…
We are entering a new "data everywhere-anytime" era that pivots us from being tracked online to continuous tracking as we move through our everyday lives. We have smart devices in our homes, on our bodies, and around our communities that collect data that is used to guide decisions that have a major impact on our lives - from loans to job interviews and judicial rulings to health care interventions. We create a lot of data, but who owns that data? How is it shared? How will it be used? While the average person does not have a good understanding of how the data is being used, they know that it …
Smart cities that make broad use of digital technologies have been touted as possible solutions for the population pressures faced by many cities in developing countries and may help meet the rising demand for services and infrastructure. Nevertheless, the high financial cost involved in infrastructure maintenance, the substantial size of the informal economies, and various governance challenges are curtailing government idealism regarding smart cities. This review examines the state of smart city development in developing countries, which includes understanding the conceptualisations, motivat…
Our proposed system has seven main contributions, i.e., Smart street lights, Smart home, Bio-metric door and home security system, Intelligent traffic lights management and road security system, Private and smart parking, Intelligent accident management system and Smart information display/ notice board system. Our prototypes / products employ Arduino UNO board, Node MCU, Ultrasonic sensor, Fingerprint module, Servo motors, GSM, GPS, LEDs, Flame Sensor, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi module etc. We are very confident that our proposed systems are efficient, reliable, and cost-effective and can be easily …
Internet of Things (IoT) technology is a fundamental infrastructure for information transmission and integration in smart city implementations to achieve effective fine-grained city management, efficient operations, and improved life quality of citizens. Smart-city IoT systems usually involve high volume and variety of information circulation. The information lifecycle also involves many parties, stakeholders, and entities such as individuals, businesses, and government agencies with their own objectives which needed to be incentivized properly. As such, recent studies have modeled smart-city …
With the advent of seamless connection of human, machine, and smart things, there is an emerging trend to leverage the power of crowds (e.g., citizens, mobile devices, and smart things) to monitor what is happening in a city, understand how the city is evolving, and further take actions to enable better quality of life, which is referred to as Crowd-Powered Smart City (CPSC). In this article, we provide a literature review for CPSC and identify future research opportunities. Specifically, we first define the concepts with typical CPSC applications. Then, we present the main characteristics of …
Microsoft Research India（微软印度研究院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Buildings consume over 40% of the total energy in modern societies, and improving their energy efficiency can significantly reduce our energy footprint. In this paper, we present \texttt{WattScale}, a data-driven approach to identify the least energy-efficient buildings from a large population of buildings in a city or a region. Unlike previous methods such as least-squares that use point estimates, \texttt{WattScale} uses Bayesian inference to capture the stochasticity in the daily energy usage by estimating the distribution of parameters that affect a building. Further, it compares them with…
