Smart City Expo, perspective from geospatial researchers

5th December 2016 geoc

Attending the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) is a common desire within ITC-related professionals and researchers, you find in a single place all commercial solutions, some customers showing their own experience with Smart City projects, some Experts discussing about future trends, and academics interested on meeting “Real” products to feed their own research.

Between thousands of attendees there were seven Geotec members walking through Europa Fira, listening to interesting and motivational speeches, while digging into multiple ideas from entrepreneurs, local government agents, young researchers and well-known companies.

Most remarkable issues there at the Expo were related to:circular economy, sustainable mobility, open data and artificial intelligence. Regarding there were…

Discussion about Sustainable Mobility was a full track on the agenda, and walking/cycling experiences were presented everywhere, a mix of mobile apps, infrastructure plan, sharing/rented projects were presented. Main tendency is to have less private individual vehicles and more public and shared bicycles, therefore cycling infrastructure will be part of this transformation. The session “Walkable and cyclable cities” easily resumes those innitiatives.

SCEWC2016 offered a rich set of keynote speakers, but Parag Kanna’s presentation about connected cities had an important effect on attendees, his map-based speech showed future trends on urbanization and development of future cities (also smart). With a global view of connections he explained briefly how the world is showing us tendencies that must be attended, with his web tool those tendencies could be explored and analyzed.

Another interesting Keynote, gave by Susan Etlinger, was about how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can be implemented in new solutions for cities, enhancing new developments such as image recognition, self-driving cars and conversational assistants.

Finally, the importance of sharing economy and governance of the city commons was presented by David Bollier. This alternative forms of creating economical development is rising on cities like Barcelona, looking to strengthen local business and entrepreneurship.

Prof. Michael Gould presented the preliminary results of the ESR07 project in the “Solutions for More Inclusive and Participative Cities (elevator pitch format)” track.

A full three days event is always exhausting, but attending during different days as a group will allow to identify multiple trends and development, this exercise helped Geotec on having a global look at state-of-the-art commercial solutions for Smart Cities.

ESR were also in contact with local partners from the program. Castellón City Hall representatives were present at the event, looking for solutions to improve the city. Also ESR15 shared experiences in the Urbiotica’s stand, who presented its solution to different stakeholders.

(*) Geotec Researches who attended the Smart City Expo: Fernando Benitez (ESR11), David Frias, Khoi Ngo (ESR06), Diego Pajarito (ESR07), Manuel Portela (ESR15), Luis Rodriguez, Sergi Trilles, Michael Gould.

GEO-C researchers presented their results on the International UCAmI Conference 2016

5th December 2016 geoc

The 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2016 took place from November 29th to December 2nd in Canary Islands. The Spanish based conference was a place to meet different Smart City related topics that involve technologies from eHealth to Internet of Things solutions. This openness of topics helped to know how different approaches can be interrelated in a Smart City context, providing challenges in communication, protocol integrations and citizen involvement.

GEO-C Members assisted to present two papers. Firstly, Manuel Portela (ESR15) presented at the HCI track its research project “Methods to observe and evaluate interactions with everyday context-aware objects”. The talk was centered on Design Research methods such as Ethnography and Ethnomethodology that are being used in the project to evaluate new interactions in the urban space.

Secondly, Auriol Degbelo presented the paper on “Toolkits for smarter cities: a brief assessment“. This short paper looked into the areas of smart city toolkit research which are relatively uncovered by the scientific community. The gist of the presentation was that toolkits for smarter cities are emerging, but aspects such as user-centeredness, component integration, openness and documentation are still relatively uncovered.

The event was a good opportunity to meet new developments in the academic scenario of Smart Cities in Spanish Universities.

SAS Forum Portugal 2016

30th November 2016 geoc

Last October 27th, on the frame of SAS Forum Portugal 2016 #SASFPT16, ESR 10 Fernando Santa was presenting his project about predictive analytics, human mobility and social networks.

Paper accepted for publication in JeDeM.

29th November 2016 geoc

The paper “Designing Semantic APIs for Open Government Data” (Authors: Auriol Degbelo, Sergio Trilles, Christian Kray, Devanjan
Bhattacharya, Nicholas Schiestel, Jonas Wissing and Carlos Granell) has been accepted for publication in the eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government.

Abstract: Many countries currently maintain a national data catalog, which provides access to the available datasets – sometimes via an Application Programming Interface (API). These APIs play a crucial role in realizing the benefits of open data as they are the means by which data is discovered and accessed by applications that make use of it. This article proposes semantic APIs as a way of improving access to open data. A semantic API helps to retrieve datasets according to their type (e.g., sensor, climate, finance), and facilitates reasoning about and learning from data. The article examines categories of open datasets from 40 European open data catalogs to gather some insights into types of datasets which should be considered while building semantic APIs for open government data. The results show that the probability of inter-country agreement between open data catalogs is less than 30 percent, and that few categories stand out as candidates for a transnational semantic API. They stress the need for coordination – at the local, regional, and national level – between data providers of Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Open Data for Open Cities GeoC Workshop in Geomundus conference

11th November 2016 geoc

From November 4 to November 5, 2016, GeoC – UJI led Open Data for Open cities participatory workshop related to Open Data and its use. This activity was held in last Geomundus conference that took a place last weekend in Castellon de la Plana – Spain.

With over 30 students from the consortium of Erasmus Mundus (EM) International Master’s program in Geospatial Technologies (Nova University, Munster University, UJI University) and also Geomundus keynote speaker Richard Sliuzas from Twente University, topics such as available open data, re-use barriers and engagement mechanisms of cities open data portals were talked during this activity.

The overall aim of this workshop was to identify and discuss how open data consumer search and use open data services for a specific application. The activities made during this activity were:

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GeoTec Group and GeoC UJI presented several talks in last Esri Spain user conference.

9th November 2016 geoc

From October 26 to October 27, was held at Madrid the last Esri Spain User conference, the main event of Esri Spain company which meet together their customers, professors, some partners and students related to, GIS, smart Cities, Open Data, and GI applications that use Esri Technology.

During this couple of days, the Geotec research group and GeoC UJI presented several talks related to their projects and initiatives. Education track was the place to meet with some professors, Esri Master program students, and other people interested with the progress and success stories related to educations and GIS applications.

David Frias, who led the talks called, “NavApps: Un juego móvil para mejorar las habilidades espaciales en la ESO”, was the initial talk for GeoTec research group, Whom presented the process made for ENAbLE project. NavApps project is a geo-game with APP/Web application to improve the spatial skills of children from 12 to 16 years old, which is also part of ENAbLE project.

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GeoC UJI and Nova were part of GeoMundus 2016 conference.

7th November 2016 9th November 2016 geoc

From November 4 to November 7, 2016, Geomundus an international symposium on Geography, Earth and Environmental Studies, held by the students from the consortium of Erasmus Mundus (EM) International Master’s program in Geospatial Technologies.

This year GEO-C: Enabling Open Cities project, funded in the Marie Curie International Training Networks (ITN) program was also part of this conference. The conference took a place in Castellón, Spain.

Geo-C team at UJI University, Spain; and Geo-C Nova, Lisboa; conducted several talks to share their current research progress as well as a participatory workshop called Open Data for Open Cities (leaded by Esr11) with over 30 students from the International Master Program.

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Paper accepted for presentation @ LBS2016!

4th November 2016 11th February 2017 geoc

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

24th October 2016 28th October 2016 geoc

A 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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