These days, unless something has the epithet “smart” attached to it, it is nothing. Smart Energy solutions promise cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy. Smart Cities promise better quality of life for its citizens. We will argue that for a “system” to be SMART, it should Sense Meaningfully, Analyze and Respond Timely. Using real-world examples from the domains of Smart Energy and Smart Cit...

So-called “Smart Dust” is envisioned to combine sensing, computing, and wireless communication capabilities in an autonomous, dust-grain-sized device. Dense networks of Smart Dust should then be able to unobtrusively monitor real-world processes with unprecedented quality and scale. In this paper, we present and evaluate a prototype implementation of a system for tracking the location of real-w...

Smart Cities require reliable means for managing installations that offer essential services to the citizens. In this paper we focus on the problem of evacuation of smart buildings in case of emergencies. In particular, we present an abstract architecture for situation-aware evacuation guidance systems in smart buildings, describe its key modules in detail, and provide some concrete examples of...

Many of the services a smart city can provide to its citizens rely on the ability of its infrastructure to collect and process in real time vast amounts of continuous data that sensors deployed through the city produce. In this paper we present the server infrastructure we have designed in the context of the HERMES project to collect the data from sensors and aggregate it in streams for their u...

Hutchins, Yuan, M., and Santangelo (2015) proposed the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) as a new field-normalized impact indicator. This study investigates the RCR by correlating it on the level of single publications with established field-normalized indicators and assessments of the publications by peers. We find that the RCR correlates highly with established field-normalized indicators, but th...

Design for civic participation in the “smart” city requires examination of the algorithms by which computational processes organize and present geospatial information to inhabitants. How does awareness of these algorithms positively or negatively affect use? A renewed approach to one popular twentieth-century model for city design reveals potential paths for answering this question. The paper e...

Smart Houses are a prominent field of research referring to environments adapted to assist people in their everyday life. Older people and people with disabilities would benefit the most from the use of Smart Houses because they provide the opportunity for them to stay in their home for as long as possible. In this review, the developments achieved in the field of Smart Houses for the last 16 y...

Duality between the ‘axion’ field a and the antisymmetric tensor field Bμν is traced after a nonperturbative effect, gaugino condensation, breaks the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry a → a + c. Even though the PQ symmetry was at its origin, duality is nevertheless not broken by this effect. Below condensation scale, the axion simply gets a mass, but in the ‘stringy’ version, the Bμν field disappears ...