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.