Developing Future Human-Centered Smart Cities: Critical Analysis of Smart City Security, Interpretability, and Ethical Challenges
Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）；Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology（巴基斯坦-奥地利应用科学与技术学院）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Information Technology University（信息技术大学）
Kashif Ahmad, Majdi Maabreh, Mohamed Ghaly, Khalil Khan, Junaid Qadir, Ala Al-Fuqaha
As the globally increasing population drives rapid urbanisation in various parts of the world, there is a great need to deliberate on the future of the cities worth living. In particular, as modern smart cities embrace more and more data-driven artificial intelligence services, it is worth remembering that technology can facilitate prosperity, wellbeing, urban livability, or social justice, but only when it has the right analog complements (such as well-thought out policies, mature institutions, responsible governance); and the ultimate objective of these smart cities is to facilitate and enhance human welfare and social flourishing. Researchers have shown that various technological business models and features can in fact contribute to social problems such as extremism, polarization, misinformation, and Internet addiction. In the light of these observations, addressing the philosophical and ethical questions involved in ensuring the security, safety, and interpretability of such AI algorithms that will form the technological bedrock of future cities assumes paramount importance. Globally there are calls for technology to be made more humane and human-centered. In this paper, we analyze and explore key challenges including security, robustness, interpretability, and ethical (data and algorithmic) challenges to a successful deployment of AI in human-centric applications, with a particular emphasis on the convergence of these concepts/challenges. We provide a detailed review of existing literature on these key challenges and analyze how one of these challenges may lead to others or help in solving other challenges. The paper also advises on the current limitations, pitfalls, and future directions of research in these domains, and how it can fill the current gaps and lead to better solutions. We believe such rigorous analysis will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.
How to assess the potential of liking a city or a neighborhood before ever having been there. The concept of urban quality has until now pertained to global city ranking, where cities are evaluated under a grid of given parameters, or either to empirical and sociological approaches, often constrained by the amount of available information. Using state of the art machine learning techniques and thousands of geotagged satellite and perspective images from diverse urban cultures, this research characterizes personal preference in urban spaces and predicts a spectrum of unknown likeable places for…
In response to challenges posed by urbanization, David Bollier from the University of Southern California raised a new idea for city planning: a comprehensive network and applications of information technologies. IBM later echoed the idea and initiated its Smart Planet vision in 2008. After that, the smart city concept was quickly adopted by major cities throughout the world, and it has gradually evolved into a strategic choice by ambitious cities. This paper looks into the smart city trend by reviewing how the concept of smart city was proposed and what the essence of a smart city is. More sp…
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.
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…
Converting the city into a "smart" one is the emerging strategy of alleviating the problems generated by the rapid population growth in most urban areas, i.e., urbanisation. However, as the rate in which the different concepts of the smart city architecture are implemented is very high, academic research pertaining these advancements simply can not keep up. To improve the existing knowledge-base regarding the concept of smart cities, this paper reviews the existing definitions, as well as its architectures, based on an in-depth literature review of relevant studies and research fields alike. A…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Yahoo Japan Corporation（雅虎日本公司）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Large mobility datasets collected from various sources have allowed us to observe, analyze, predict and solve a wide range of important urban challenges. In particular, studies have generated place representations (or embeddings) from mobility patterns in a similar manner to word embeddings to better understand the functionality of different places within a city. However, studies have been limited to generating such representations of cities in an individual manner and has lacked an inter-city perspective, which has made it difficult to transfer the insights gained from the place representatio…
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学李光耀公共政策学院）
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are increasingly embraced around the world to advance smart mobility and more broadly, smart, and sustainable cities. Algorithms form the basis of decision-making in AVs, allowing them to perform driving tasks autonomously, efficiently, and more safely than human drivers and offering various economic, social, and environmental benefits. However, algorithmic decision-making in AVs can also introduce new issues that create new safety risks and perpetuate discrimination. We identify bias, ethics, and perverse incentives as key ethical issues in the AV algorithms' decisio…
In city planning and maintenance, the abilty to quickly identify infrastructure violations - such as missing or misplaced fire hydrants - can be crucial for maintaining a safe city; it can even save lives. In this work, we aim to provide an analysis of such violations, and to demonstrate the potential of data-driven approaches for quickly locating and addressing them. We conduct an analytical study based upon data from the city of Beer-Sheva's public records of fire hydrants, bomb shelters, and other public facilities. The result of our analysis are presented along with an interactive explorat…
Smart Cities, with their problems and challenges, is an emerging smart paradigm. To achieve better quality and usability levels, we need engineering solutions to support smart cities' soft-layer development. Statics, dynamics and generative semantics are involved, but segregating Coordination Protocols from the other semantics could act as a complexity management strategy to tackle the inherent complexity of smart city systems. Here we demonstrate how we could engineer the protocols layer of a smart city by using a Reo-Based solution.
This work analyses the practice of sister city pairing. We investigate structural properties of the resulting city and country networks and present rankings of the most central nodes in these networks. We identify different country clusters and find that the practice of sister city pairing is not influenced by geographical proximity but results in highly assortative networks.
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Harokopio University of Athens（哈罗科皮奥大学）；University of Cantabria（坎塔布里亚大学）
In this paper we present a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)-based platform, enabling the retrieval and analysis of big datasets stemming from social networking (SN) sites and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, collected by smart city applications and socially-aware data aggregation services. A large set of city applications in the areas of Participating Urbanism, Augmented Reality and Sound-Mapping throughout participating cities is being applied, resulting into produced sets of millions of user-generated events and online SN reports fed into the RADICAL platform. Moreover, we study the appl…
The Government through the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (Kemkominfo) held the 100 Smart Cities Program, an effort to improve the quality of public services. The program produces a Smart City Masterplan to develop regencies and cities. Access to the website of the regencies-cities government that is member of the program is one success indicator of using technology for the community, because the accessing speed (loading time) and responsiveness of the website is a convenience factor in service users. Hence, the importance of viewing and monitoring public service websites…
In a world with an ever increasing urbanization, governance is investigating innovative solutions to sustain the society evolution. Internet-of-Things promises huge benefits for cities and the proliferation of smart city deployments demonstrates the common acceptance of IoT as basis for many solutions. The city pilots developments occurred in parallel and with different designs thus creating fragmentation of IoT. The European project SynchroniCity aims to synchronize 8 smart cities to establish a shared environment fostering a self-sustained business growth. In this article we present the coll…
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 …
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative view, as Darwinism does not involve only competition, the public benefit obtained by cooperation, return in terms of private benefit too. An urban genetic code is proposed, according to which cities emerge connecting nature and urbanity, and as sum of multiuse, independent micro-areas, each one with its centrality, job locations, parks and daily shops-services …
Smart cities are an actual trend being pursued by research that, fundamentally, tries to improve city's management on behalf of a better human quality of live. This paper proposes a new autonomic complementary approach for smart cities management. It is argued that smart city management systems with autonomic characteristics will improve and facilitate management functionalities in general. A framework is also presented as use case considering specific application scenarios like smart-health, smart-grid, smart-environment and smart-streets.
The purpose of the present paper is to show how blockchain and IoT technologies can benefit smart city projects, which tend to spread in the context of the sharing economy. The article also aims to describe the challenges and potentialities of smart city projects. It was found that technology platforms can serve as a strategy to build the basis for product development (goods and services) and technology-based innovation.
The systems that operate the infrastructure of cities have evolved in a fragmented fashion across several generations of technology, causing city utilities and services to operate sub-optimally and limiting the creation of new value-added services and restrict opportunities for cost-saving. The integration of cross-domain city data offers a new wave of opportunities to mitigate some of these impacts and enables city systems to draw effectively on interoperable data that will be used to deliver smarter cities. Despite the considerable potential of city data, current smart cities initiatives hav…
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written in 1961 and is now one of the most influential book in city planning. In it, Jane Jacobs proposed four conditions that promote life in a city. However, these conditions have not been empirically tested until recently. This is mainly because it is hard to collect data about "city life". The city of Seoul recently collected pedestrian activity through surveys at an unprecedented scale, with an effort spanning more than a decade, allowing researchers to conduct the first study successfully testing Jacobs's conditions. In this paper, we ident…
The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainabl…
Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method to quantify city influence using geolocated tweets to characterize human mobility. Rome and Paris appear consistently as the cities attracting most diverse visitors. The ratio between locals and non-local visitors turns out to be fundamental for a city to truly be global. Focusing only on urban residents' mobility flows, a city to city network can be construc…
The link between transport related emissions and human health is a major issue for city municipalities worldwide. PM emissions from exhaust and non-exhaust sources are one of the main worrying contributors to air-pollution. In this paper, we challenge the notion that a ban on internal combustion engine vehicles will result in clean and safe air in our cities, since emissions from tyres and other non-exhaust sources are expected to increase in the near future. To this end, we present data from the city of Dublin that document that the current amount of tyre-related PM emissions in the city migh…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Charles Sturt University（查尔斯特大学）
Most existing real estate appraisal methods focus on building accuracy and reliable models from a given dataset but pay little attention to the extensibility of their trained model. As different cities usually contain a different set of location features (district names, apartment names), most existing mass appraisal methods have to train a new model from scratch for different cities or regions. As a result, these approaches require massive data collection for each city and the total training time for a multi-city property appraisal system will be extremely long. Besides, some small cities may…
A huge wastage of electricity can be seen in Bangladesh due to improper street light management which leads to an enormous financial loss every year. Many noteworthy works have been done by researchers from different parts of the world in tackling this issue by using the Internet of Things yet very few in Bangladeshi perspective. In this work, we propose an efficient Internet of Things-based integrated streetlight framework that offers cloud-powered monitoring, controlling through light dimming as per external lighting conditions and traffic detection, as well as a fault-detecting system to en…
Several challenges are faced by citizens of urban centers while dealing with day-to-day events, and the absence of a centralised reporting mechanism makes event-reporting and redressal a daunting task. With the push on information technology to adapt to the needs of smart-cities and integrate urban civic services, the use of Open311 architecture presents an interesting solution. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses an existing Open311 ontology to classify and report non-emergency city-events, as well as to guide the citizen to the points of redressal. The use of linked open dat…
Cities are inherently dynamic. Interesting patterns of behavior typically manifest at several key areas of a city over multiple temporal resolutions. Studying these patterns can greatly help a variety of experts ranging from city planners and architects to human behavioral experts. Recent technological innovations have enabled the collection of enormous amounts of data that can help in these studies. However, techniques using these data sets typically focus on understanding the data in the context of the city, thus failing to capture the dynamic aspects of the city. The goal of this work is to…
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 …
In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can deliver health co-benefits and importantly, are sustainable into the future. To enable this, a systematic and efficient means of performing inter- and intra-city comparisons based on urban form is required. Until now, methods for comparing cities have been limited by scalability, often reliant upon non-standardised local input data that can be costly and difficul…
We present SaSTL -- a novel Spatial Aggregation Signal Temporal Logic -- for the efficient runtime monitoring of safety and performance requirements in smart cities. We first describe a study of over 1,000 smart city requirements, some of which can not be specified using existing logic such as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and its variants. To tackle this limitation, we develop two new logical operators in SaSTL to augment STL for expressing spatial aggregation and spatial counting characteristics that are commonly found in real city requirements. We also develop efficient monitoring algorithms …
Smart cities are being planned for several advanced applications and services for the inhabitants. Smart cities initiative promise many new services which are not possible in the traditional city frameworks. In the smart city framework, the basic aim is to provide all the essential services through sensor based systems which does not need much human intervention. This system is designed to operate on its own in a self-organizing manner. Therefore, the hopes are really big from the smart cities to enhance the quality of lives and the economy. However, some of the promises in the smart cities ar…
New York University（纽约大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
While designing sustainable and resilient urban built environment is increasingly promoted around the world, significant data gaps have made research on pressing sustainability issues challenging to carry out. Pavements are known to have strong economic and environmental impacts; however, most cities lack a spatial catalog of their surfaces due to the cost-prohibitive and time-consuming nature of data collection. Recent advancements in computer vision, together with the availability of street-level images, provide new opportunities for cities to extract large-scale built environment data with …
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…
The recent demographic trends indicate towards a rapidly increasing population growth and a significant portion of this increased population now prefer to live mostly in cities. In connection with this, it has become the responsibility of the government to ensure a quality standard of living in the cities and also make sure that these facilities trickle down to the next generation. A program named Smart City Mission has been started for this purpose. With an extremely diverse population, that is only second to China in the world in terms of size, the Indian government has engaged in serious th…
Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper aims to add to the growing body of critical and civic led smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmenta…
Smart cities solutions are often monolithically implemented, from sensors data handling through to the provided services. The same challenges are regularly faced by different developers, for every new solution in a new city. Expertise and know-how can be re-used and the effort shared. In this article we present the methodologies to minimize the efforts of implementing new smart city solutions and maximizing the sharing of components. The final target is to have a live technical community of smart city application developers. The results of this activity comes from the implementation of 35 city…
The world is witnessing a period of extreme growth and urbanization; cities in the 21st century became nerve centers creating economic opportunities and cultural values which make cities grow exponentially. With this rapid urban population growth, city infrastructure is facing major problems, from the need to scale urban systems to sustaining the quality of services for citizen at scale. Understanding the dynamics of cities is critical towards informed strategic urban planning. This paper showcases QuantifiedCity, a system aimed at understanding the complex dynamics taking place in cities. Oft…
Understanding the determinants underlying variations in urban health status is important for informing urban design and planning, as well as public health policies. Multiple heterogeneous urban features could modulate the prevalence of diseases across different neighborhoods in cities and across different cities. This study examines heterogeneous features related to socio-demographics, population activity, mobility, and the built environment and their non-linear interactions to examine intra- and inter-city disparity in prevalence of four disease types: obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart dis…
