Conference Topics

Significant societal challenges in the form of demographics, urbanisation, climate change, resource crises and global competition are driving profound changes within our cities. In order to cope, governments and businesses are turning to ‘smart city’ concepts with the aim to enhance the efficiency of key infrastructure, utilities and services to create a sustainable urban environment that improves the quality of life for its citizens and enhances economic development. Smart cities are essentially built by utilising a set of latest information and communication technologies (ICT), including Wi-Fi and mobile networks, wireless sensors, the Internet of things, big data analytic tools, cloud services, mobile devices, and mobile apps. In this context, ICT as an enabling Smart City technology will generate radically new “smart” services and facilities. The UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills values the smart city industry at more than $400 billion globally by 2020.

However, and despite the very attracting potential benefits and market opportunities, the roadmap towards the development of smart cities is in fact fraught with challenges and difficulties. In particular, the concept of ‘smart city’ is rather new and relatively ill-defined, e.g. is there any universally agreed definition of smart city? What is the optimal model for smart cities? In light of this discussion, cities in different countries across the world will have very diverse problems with different regional, political, legal, technical, and economic contexts – how to possibly apply the model and successful practices of one city into other cities with similar or different contexts? What is the current progress of smart city development in different parts of the world? Furthermore, smart city is a big umbrella that covers applications to support all services/areas of a city (e.g. transportation, healthcare, energy, public safety, education, waste management, food management, and many more). Given this wide coverage, it is clear that no city can be easily and dramatically transformed in one go. As such, smart city projects are usually kicked off by one department within a city, and move in phases, with progressive expansion of the functionality and degree of integration with different parts and areas of a city – which service area should receive the highest priority given resource constraints and specific needs of the city? How can various smart applications and services be properly integrated and so work together in a coherent way, with a high degree of data sharing to offer optimisation within the city? In addition, although the smart city concept is driven by advanced technologies, its success is highly dependent on the engagement of citizens. Historically, such engagement has been problematic especially considering individual differences (e.g. in age, education/skill/income levels, and past experience) – how to identify the needs of different groups of users in the city? How to make sure smart services can be adequately designed, developed and implemented to satisfy the various needs of local citizens? How to measure the level of user engagement in smart city services? How daily usage of smart services can lead to behaviour changes of citizens, and what are the economic and environmental impacts of such behaviour change?

It is obvious that the above challenging questions of smart cities cannot be easily answered from a single technical (e.g. computing and engineering) or non-technical (e.g. social, urban and business) perspective. In fact, due to the complexity of cities, no single effort will be sufficient in making the smart city vision become realistic. In order to transform cities into smarter and more liveable places, there is a strong need for more substantial collaboration among city leaders, ICT manufacturers, software companies, smart service providers, and academic research¬ers from all relevant disciplines.

This conference thus aims to provide a premier and exciting forum for the exchange of scientific ideas, research findings, and industrial practices among academics and practitioners, who are from different disciplines (e.g. information systems, computer science, telecommunication engineering, urban studies, and business and economics) but have common interests in smart cities. It welcomes all forms of relevant research, including conceptual, theoretical, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies. Papers with an interdisciplinary nature are particularly encouraging. In order to offer wide-ranging discussion opportunities, the conference seeks the most recent and relevant research on a variety of topics.

Topics of Interest

Main topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Further to looking at smart city as a holistic ecosystem, this conference also welcomes recent research that focuses particularly on one of the main service areas of smart cities.  Authors are encouraged to combine any of the above interested topics as relevant with a selected smart service area or application, such as: