Treating homes, offices and commercial buildings as intelligently networked collaborations can contribute to enhancing the efficient use of energy. When smart houses are able to communicate, interact and negotiate with both customers and energy devices in the local grid, the energy consumption can be better adapted to the available energy supply, especially when the proportion of variable renew...

In the smart city domain, many projects and works are generating essential information. Open and efficient sharing of this information can be beneficial for all parties ranging from researchers, engineers or even governments. To our knowledge, there is currently no full-fledged semantic platform which properly models this domain, publishes such information and allows data extraction using a sta...

There is a need for verification of the sustainability potential of an increasing number of smart city initiatives. This paper discuss a set of requirements necessary to consider when developing a methodology intended to evaluate the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions at a city level. A smart city definition is chose...

In this paper we provide an integrated presentation of applications, technologies and business models for wireless community network together with design considerations and examples. An overview is given of the state-of-the-affairs of wireless community networks. Driving forces and stakeholders of the projects and the applications and services will be presented for some carefully selected cases...

Significant work has been done in the areas of Pervcomp/Ubicomp/Smart Environments with advances on making proactive systems, but those advances have not made these type of systems accurately proactive. On the other hand a great deal is needed to make systems more sensible/sensitive and trustable (both in terms of reliability and privacy). We put forward the thesis that a more integral and soci...

Although events of the past decade have significantly undermined the intellectual case for hard-core macroeconomic planning, the idea of central planning continues to enjoy legitimacy at the local and regional levels. Much of the intellectual energy of those critical of the unhampered market process seems to have channeled toward more piece-meal environmental and social-policy interventions at ...

This study presents the first results of an analysis primarily based on semi-structured interviews with government officials and managers who are responsible for smart city initiatives in four North American cities—Philadelphia and Seattle in the United States, Quebec City in Canada, and Mexico City in Mexico. With the reference to the Smart City Initiatives Framework that we suggested in our p...