Many developing countries assign local governments increasing responsibilities in fighting poverty. This requires local social policy to go beyond the execution of centrally designed and funded education and health programs. Hence, local governments and their partners have both an opportunity and a need to analyze key local bottlenecks for poverty reduction and social development. Drawing on an...

The introduction of distributed energy generation has among other things the power to enable traditional consumers to also produce energy (called prosumers), which they subsequently may make available on the network. The emerging SmartGrid relies on the active participation of these prosumers, and their interactions may have a significant impact on its core operations. The NOBEL project investi...

Smart environments integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into devices, vehicles, buildings and cities to offer an increased quality of life, energy efficiency and economical sustainability. In this perspective, the individual has a core role and so has networking, which enables such entities to cooperate. However, the huge amount of sensitive data, social aspects and the mi...

The main goals of smart metering are the reduction of costs, energy and CO2 by the provision of actual metering information to the providers and the customer. They allow for flexible possibilities to influence the customers’ energy consumption behavior and to adapt dynamically the power generation and distribution to the requested energy by smart grids. Metering devices are under control of gov...

This article deals with the increasingly digital augmentation of urban space and looks at how so far initiatives in this sense have been deployed in a way that is disconnected from urban design knowledge and practice. The aim here is to contribute to a reflection on how urban design perspectives can – and should – play an important role in informing such developments. It promotes, through a ser...

Understanding the stakeholder’s needs, particularly the end-user’s need is important when designing and developing a critical infrastructure like power grid. Smart metering systems are considered as a vital element in grid modernisation projects. It provides the utility with a range of opportunities to improve their business. The benefits to other market parties are also clear. But the resident...

We present our approach on how smart city technologies may enhance the learning process. We have developed the CLIO urban computing system, which invites people to share personal memories and interact the collective city memory. Various educational scenarios and activities were performed exploiting CLIO; in this paper we present the methodology we followed and the experience we gained. Learning...

New urban development areas are expected to meet highest ecological standards. Beside the construction phase, it is the daily life in neighbourhoods that impacts their carbon footprint. Energy monitoring is a powerful tool for energy analytics, benchmarking, improvements and even real-time energy management on neighbourhood scale. Unfortunately, the standard planning processes on neighbourhood ...

The paper describes an ongoing work to define a framework to support monitoring procedures for distribution systems in smart cities. Specific use cases, involving data driven methods for energy monitoring, benchmarking and forecasting in urban scenarios are analysed. The objective is to identify services required in such framework to define the requirements of a reference architecture to suppor...

Smart Meeting Rooms (SMR) definition is evolving and in this article we present the evolution of such definition side by side with several projects that have been developed during the last decade. We also present the features and evaluation methods used in literature and we make a discussion on