SCORE Workshop 2022

Research and development efforts in smart cities have a myriad of focuses. For example, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) defines smart cities as “ a process rather than a static outcome, in which increased citizen engagement, hard infrastructure, social capital and digital technologies make cities more liveable, resilient and better able to respond to challenges”, focusing on resilience and liveability. IBM’s definition: “(Smart City is) one that makes optimal use of all the interconnected information available today to better understand and control its operations and optimize the use of limited resources” focuses on the use of information available. European Commission’s definition focuses on technologies: “Cities using technological solutions to improve the management and efficiency of the urban environment”. There are also transnational and international differences between different countries and continents in terms of what makes a city ‘Smart’, or how they perceive what smart cities development requires. As the variety of perspectives highlights, smart city development requires multi-disciplinary efforts involving technologists, social/ behavioural scientists, city planners, policymakers, engineers, data communication experts, and citizens, to name a few. Although on the rise, the current smart city solutions are still maturing and not always utilising such multi-disciplinary expertise. Lessons also can be learned from the commonalities and differences between different smart cities developments. Hence, greater benefits can be achieved by bringing together expertise from different communities, including IoT/Big Data, Policy Making, Social Science, and Citizen science with the potential application domain demands. 

 

The time is ripe to bring together these different disciplines related to smart cities open research and form an international community to identify the major challenges and research directions. The workshop is intended to make the first step in shaping such a community and providing a forum that focuses on inter-disciplinary learnings related to smart cities and enables:

• Sharing techniques, experiences and best practices in the development, deployment and management of smart city solutions

• Identifying potential domains and application areas

• Designing and reflecting on different smart cities solutions

• Replicability and reusability of smart city solutions

• Sharing successful impact stories of multidisciplinary research on smart cities

• Identifying future research directions

• Sharing experiences and reflections on failures and disappointments in smart city implementation and rese