The conference paper accepted for publication in PerDis 2017

The paper “Public displays for public participation in urban settings: a survey” (Authors: Guiying DuAuriol Degbelo, Christian Kray) has been accepted for publication in the 6th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays.

Abstract: Public displays can be used to support public participation in urban settings. This article provides a survey of the use of public displays for public participation in an urban con- text, covering articles on this topic published between 2012 and 2016. 36 papers were selected and analyzed along eight dimensions: type of political context, type of scientific contribution, standalone displays vs displays with a device, single vs multi-purpose displays, shape of displays, lab vs field study, deployment in public vs semi-public space, and the level of public participation addressed. Our analysis revealed a number of trends regarding public displays and public participation in urban settings. Inspecting these articles also led to the observation that current research on public displays is mainly targeting lower levels of public participation and that the evaluation of public displays for public participation in urban setting remains a challenge.

The paper “Citizense – A generic user-oriented participatory sensing framework” has been accepted for publication in the International Conference on Selected topics in MoWNet’17

This paper, written by Ngo Manh Khoi, Luis E. Rodríguez-Pupo and Sven Casteleyn, described the general architecture of a generic participatory sensing framework that incorporates useful functionalities such as context-aware sensing, incentives for participants, an interactive dashboard for managing the content of the sensing campaign and viewing the results. The mobile client app (in Android) can also function as an offline data collecting tool.

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Information literacy seminar at UJI

The 24th of November Library services at UJI, organised a Library training session for GEO-C students. As part of WP6 (General studies) this seminar was designed to provide additional key competencies to GEO-C students, useful in their reserach.

During this session GEO-C students had the chance to learn more about the services offered by UJI’s library, putting special emphasis in the services especifically addressed to research. The seminar included the use of scientific databases (ScienceDirect or Web of Science), the introduction to reference management software (Mendeley) or an overview of tools for measuring scientific impact (Journal Citation Reports).

Check the full agenda here

Spatial-Temporal Predictive Modeling with Open Source and Open Data for Urban Areas Workshop – AAG Workshops 2017

 

W2_3 Spatial-Temporal Predictive Modeling with Open Source and Open Data for Urban Areas – Kick – off Workshop
Thursday, April 6, 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Organizers: Luis Santa (GEO-C Doctorate in Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities) & Shivam Gupta (GEO-C Doctorate in Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities)
Capacity: 25
Cost/person: $5.00
Room: Beacon B, Third Floor, Sheraton

The half-day workshop is aimed as a collaborative exercise, which extends ongoing research for developing open smart cities, using open data and open source statistical and GIS tools. Also, to provide a comprehensive but digestible introduction to the most common methods of analysis and geomatics work flows which are nowadays often encountered when tackling various issues in urban agglomerations. Given a multi-tiered nature of contemporary web applications, we propose an interactive session devoted to a R-supporting middleware, as well as the of statistical packages for popular web frameworks. The exercises in form of examples from fields of air pollution, climate and transportation among others.

Notes on OuiShare Fest BCN: The social approach to smart cities

img_8422OuiShare Fest is a non-academic event that took place in Barcelona and is connected to other similar events, like OuiShare Fest in Paris. It’s main purpose is to discuss and show new initiatives regarding the Sharing Economy. This was my first time that I’ve attended. Particularly motivated to assist to the workshop organized by the Making Sense EU project, and also to listen what is the perspective that BCN City Hall has around the Smart City discourse.

OuiShare is known as a non-enterprise oriented, but a community based organization. Beyond that, funding in the beginning of the project become from the main sharing economy companies, such as Airbnb. Nowadays, it remains, but in the Barcelona edition it won it main support from the Ayuntamiento.

I highlight this background because since the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, stated against the abuse of these kind of business and those related to Smart City discourse, many changes in Barcelona are happening around the scene. Continue reading

Geo-C posters at the VGI COST Energic Final conference at the RGS

img_20161014_122548A poster session is the right place to not only perform several times your elevator speech but also explain the abstract model of your research printed in an A1 paper sheet. Then after few times you find that your idea also inspires someone else and that short presentation became a chat with coffee and biscuits, at that time you realize your poster session was successful.

That was our sensation last October at the Royal Geographical Society in London, where we were invited to the closing meeting of the COST Energic Action IC1203 (European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing). Our two poster among 15 were visited and commented with multiple researchers, we also received multiple opinions, feedback from our ideas as well as invitations for visiting research teams for contrasting existing developments to improve ourselves.

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GeoC – Spain, present in Vespucci Initiative 2016. Sensors, Smart Cities, Open Data and Mobility.

vespucciDuring the week September 5 to 9, 2016 in Benicassim – Spain, took place the second week of the Vespucci initiative, about sensors and mobile applications for smart cities. Where GeoC in Spain attended.

This summer school had as facilitators, as Michael Gould (Universitat Jaume I), Christian Sailer (ETH Zurich), Steve Liang (University of Calgary), Thomas Bartoschek (University of Münster).

With attenders of several countries such as Colombia, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Germany, Cuba, Portugal. We had the opportunity to face interesting discussions of different topics, for instance, the real problem that we want to solve in our research topic, a business model for research projects, education and mobile learning, sensors, all those topics were covered using small groups for productive results and improve the local experiences.

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Notes on Design & The City Conference: Controversies on Urban Participation and Participatory Sensing

CgpPa8KWYAAaopbIt is well known that participation and citizen engagement is a hard goal to accomplish in cities. Applied technologies to public participation have brought new opportunities to the field. Beyond all the good intentions, there are a lot of grey zones in what society have accomplished by engaging the public. The disappointments in SmartCity projects are usually related to tools that where designed or defined in narrow ways, giving only a unidirectional sense. And as Dorien De Molder pointed, the “Smart City discourse is normative”, It’s based on and reinforces particular beliefs about relationship between people, power and digital technologies.

During the last week I attended to the Design and The City conference and workshops, in Amsterdam.
The event was curated by Martijn De Waal, who in his book “The city as Platform” gives us an idea on how the public context and technology are changing our perception about familiar places.

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GEO-C ESR team won second place in the #NRWHackathon !

On February 27, 2016 in Düsseldorf, more than 80 participants including developers, researchers, administration officials, students, designers and programmers came together to create applications for “Education through Open Data”.

After a very interesting panel discussion from Claus Arndt (Moers), André J. Spang (Empress Augusta High School), Christian Dinnus (Open.NRW) and Hartmut Beuss (CIO NRW), the day unfolded into developing applications that use Open Data to educate children.

As participants, we selected our teams based on our interests and skills in the morning and worked all afternoon to develop those ideas as a group. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to work with new people and exchange ideas as well as improve them. I was part of the ”AmazingMapPeople”: an international team (Colombia and Germany) of eight people from two entities IFGI-Viderum-con terra as well as interested citizens.

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