Keynote: Open UBI Oulu

Contemporary urban landscape is being pervaded by various forms of ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’) technologies. They provide new opportunities and challenges for the interaction with their inhabitants -essentially turning urban spaces into smart environments. However, cities as smart environments remain largely unexplored research wise, with smart cities’ impact on people’s daily lives much less prevalent than that of mobile and personal devices [1]. A smart city can be regarded as a highly complex, orchestrated, co-operative and coordinated “ensemble of digital artifacts”. Their research is moving away from single user or small user group systems towards complex sociotechnical systems as large-scale deployments of pervasive computing infrastructure for larger populations [2]. Despite 20 years of well-resourced ubicomp research, few visible and lasting contributions to the urban digital fabric have emerged. This lack of progress has triggered criticism on how research is conducted. Due to the high cost and efforts involved in setting up and maintaining real world installations for real people, ubicomp research has been mostly lab-based. Emerging real world ubicomp system studies dubbed as “in the wild” are still predominantly short-term and small-scale. Thus, they fail to establish the technical and cultural readiness and the critical mass of real users that are required before a system can be evaluated (un)successful [3]. Current “in the wild” ubicomp studies face also a number of methodological and theoretical challenges. First, the role of ubicomp systems as integral elements of urban landscape is not well understood [4]. Second, the current understanding of "wild practices" is seriously lacking [5]. Third, we do not have working approaches for reliably evaluating ubicomp systems in real-world settings. To address these gaps and to study the big effects of ubicomp technologies, we need a much wider and longitudinal access to large-scale real-world ubicomp installations, in order to significantly advance our understanding of the design, practices, and evaluation of ubiquitous interactions in city-scale smart environments. For this purpose the multidisciplinary UBI (UrBan Interactions) research program (http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/) coordinated by the University of Oulu has invested, together with the City of Oulu, several millions of euros into pervasive computing infrastructure deployed around downtown Oulu [6]. The infrastructure includes for example a municipal WiFi network providing open and free Internet access to the general public [7], a network of large interactive public displays at pivotal indoor and outdoor locations around Oulu [8], and an emerging collaborative 3D virtual model of downtown Oulu. The resulting Open UBI Oulu civic laboratory facilitates both