A Framework for Improving the Multi-Device User Experience in Smart Cities

while accounting for the requirements associated with the target network? These include scalability, energy-efficiency and privacy preservation. Sensing the 'city pulse' brings challenges for the supporting data management which must scale-up, as well as integrate highly heterogeneous data of various qualities. The literature is rich with papers addressing these concerns individually. However, they are seldom tackled together, especially while simultaneously considering the urban scale. Our approach to overcome these challenges lies in the study of scalable protocols from the networking up to the middleware layers , together with advanced techniques for privacy enhancement and semantic-aware data management. • How can the data be aggregated so that the evolution of a city can be not only understood, but also anticipated and perhaps even influenced? Data analyt-ics is at the core of Smart Cities, making big data available to us through sensing. Based on the open data trend, this can become very useful in providing knowledge on the cities. It is a very active area of research. However, numerous open problems remain regarding how large-scale data is analyzed and the uncertainty associated with urban-scale, crowd-sourced data collection must also be overcome. Our contribution in this area leverages advanced research results on data assimilation and machine learning. • While city-scale sensing and data analytics are two complementary aspects of Smart City systems, they are also interrelated as one may adequately inform the design of the other. Therefore, it is essential to design crosscutting architectures for Smart City systems based on the comprehensive integration of the custom data sensing and analytics that we will investigate. • Finally, the Smart City vision will only come true if it is accompanied by concrete urban services that do make our (future) cities sustainable and agile. A number of application areas have been suggested and these include smart energy, smart health and smart transportation. However, we are still lacking disruptive services that will contribute to making our cities better places to live while also addressing the central challenge of growth. One important question is how the use of city-scale sensing can impact city governance, particularly its social dimension? Our research will be guided by the study of new urban services which will be under-taken in close collaboration with external partners (especially city representatives) as well as researchers from the social science field. While the scientific focus of CityLab@Inria is broad, the Lab's research leverages relevant effort within Inria …