Special Session

Smartification from Pilot Projects to New Trends in Urban Ecosystems

Smartification is the new trend, but it consists of a wide amount of possibilities. The special session provides an overview from the past, looking at existing projects, to the present, which should provide solutions for settled cities, new paradigms and out-of the box propositions, till the future with applications towards self-awareness of smart cities. 

Smart cities are reality, as pilot projects are already currently operative worldwide. Examples of pilot existing projects will be presented during this Special session.  

Moreover, while many proposals of smart city projects involve often green field areas, as a matter of fact, many areas have been already urbanized in the past and smartification should handle these areas as well. This should be done rethinking and making up new uses for the existing infrastructures. Projects to adapt existing urban environments, upgrading their functionalities to smart applications have key importance for realistic near-future smart cities, as it will be shown in exemplar projects. The final future perspective is the design of an ecosystem, with synergies, connections and a perfect knowledge of the existing challenges: smartification is the new life for existing cities toward future. 

Finally, self-awareness is a fundament building block of future urban intelligence. Activity recognition and dynamic scene understanding are the future of applications of AI in the urban environment, to continuously monitor in real time the urban activities, recognizing them and launching an alarm in case of anomalies. 

Contributions coming from Industry and Academia on real projects for Smart Urban Ecosystems are welcomed.  

Novelty and motivation: the main motivation of this section is the presentation of existing projects, already operative in the real urban environment from Asia to Europe. Specifically, these applications can be deployed not only on greenfield environments, but most relevantly in existing urbanized areas. The solutions are modular to enhance safe and smart MaaS.  A holistic approach to the urban environment viewed as an ecosystem is proposed, where energy is stored and used in an integrated manner and AI provides the city with its own intelligence. Main contributions are coming from Industrial players, an intergovernmental organization and Academia. 

Chairs Information