The introduction of new kinds of energy mixes to the electricity grid is a challenging environmental task for present and future generations as they fight the pollution and global warming issues associated with urbanization. Individual appliances and whole buildings that continuously incorporate local intelligence which originates from the new technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) are the ne...

Extending the services offered by the city requires, most of the times, reimplementation efforts. This paper presents our on-going efforts to develop a platform for the Smart City that focuses in providing the appropriate solutions for an easy integration of new services and devices. This endeavor is accomplished by abstracting communication issues using a middleware platform and by standardizi...

Rapid growth rates seem to indicate that recently introduced free-floating car sharing (FFCS) can mean a breakthrough for the car sharing idea. Like other vehicle sharing systems, FFCS systems face significant regional demand fluctuations. Thus, providers might have to reposition empty vehicles to not lose potential customers. However, this aspect has been hardly examined in research and practi...

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...

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...

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