scholarly journals Data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future: urban computing and intelligence for strategic, short-term, and joined-up planning

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri

AbstractSustainable cities are quintessential complex systems—dynamically changing environments and developed through a multitude of individual and collective decisions from the bottom up to the top down. As such, they are full of contestations, conflicts, and contingencies that are not easily captured, steered, and predicted respectively. In short, they are characterized by wicked problems. Therefore, they are increasingly embracing and leveraging what smart cities have to offer as to big data technologies and their novel applications in a bid to effectively tackle the complexities they inherently embody and to monitor, evaluate, and improve their performance with respect to sustainability—under what has been termed “data-driven smart sustainable cities.” This paper analyzes and discusses the enabling role and innovative potential of urban computing and intelligence in the strategic, short-term, and joined-up planning of data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. Further, it devises an innovative framework for urban intelligence and planning functions as an advanced form of decision support. This study expands on prior work done to develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. I argue that the fast-flowing torrent of urban data, coupled with its analytical power, is of crucial importance to the effective planning and efficient design of this integrated model of urbanism. This is enabled by the kind of data-driven and model-driven decision support systems associated with urban computing and intelligence. The novelty of the proposed framework lies in its essential technological and scientific components and the way in which these are coordinated and integrated given their clear synergies to enable urban intelligence and planning functions. These utilize, integrate, and harness complexity science, urban complexity theories, sustainability science, urban sustainability theories, urban science, data science, and data-intensive science in order to fashion powerful new forms of simulation models and optimization methods. These in turn generate optimal designs and solutions that improve sustainability, efficiency, resilience, equity, and life quality. This study contributes to understanding and highlighting the value of big data in regard to the planning and design of sustainable cities of the future.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri

AbstractIn recent years, it has become increasingly feasible to achieve important improvements of sustainability by integrating sustainable urbanism with smart urbanism thanks to the proven role and synergic potential of data-driven technologies. Indeed, the processes and practices of both of these approaches to urban planning and development are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism, giving rise to a new phenomenon known as “data-driven smart sustainable urbanism.” Underlying this emerging approach is the idea of combining and integrating the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable sustainable cities to optimize, enhance, and maintain their performance on the basis of the innovative data-driven technologies offered by smart cities. These strengths and synergies can be clearly demonstrated by combining the advantages of sustainable urbanism and smart urbanism. To enable such combination, major institutional transformations are required in terms of enhanced and new practices and competences. Based on case study research, this paper identifies, distills, and enumerates the key benefits, potentials, and opportunities of sustainable cities and smart cities with respect to the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as the key institutional transformations needed to support the balancing of these dimensions and to enable the introduction of data-driven technology and the adoption of applied data-driven solutions in city operational management and development planning. This paper is an integral part of a futures study that aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. I argue that the emerging data-driven technologies for sustainability as innovative niches are reconfiguring the socio-technical landscape of institutions, as well as providing insights to policymakers into pathways for strengthening existing institutionalized practices and competences and developing and establishing new ones. This is necessary for balancing and advancing the goals of sustainability and thus achieving a desirable future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri ◽  
John Krogstie

AbstractThe IoT and big data technologies have become essential to the functioning of both smart cities and sustainable cities, and thus, urban operational functioning and planning are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism. This offers the prospect of building models of smart sustainable cities functioning in real time from routinely sensed data. This in turn allows to monitor, understand, analyze, and plan such cities to improve their energy efficiency and environmental health in real time thanks to new urban intelligence functions as an advanced form of decision support. However, prior studies tend to deal largely with data-driven technologies and solutions in the realm of smart cities, mostly in relation to economic and social aspects, leaving important questions involving the underlying substantive and synergistic effects on environmental sustainability barely explored to date. These issues also apply to sustainable cities, especially eco-cities. Therefore, this paper investigates the potential and role of data-driven smart solutions in improving and advancing environmental sustainability in the context of smart cities as well as sustainable cities, under what can be labeled “environmentally data-driven smart sustainable cities.” To illuminate this emerging urban phenomenon, a descriptive/illustrative case study is adopted as a qualitative research methodology§ to examine and compare Stockholm and Barcelona as the ecologically and technologically leading cities in Europe respectively. The results show that smart grids, smart meters, smart buildings, smart environmental monitoring, and smart urban metabolism are the main data-driven smart solutions applied for improving and advancing environmental sustainability in both eco-cities and smart cities. There is a clear synergy between such solutions in terms of their interaction or cooperation to produce combined effects greater than the sum of their separate effects—with respect to the environment. This involves energy efficiency improvement, environmental pollution reduction, renewable energy adoption, and real-time feedback on energy flows, with high temporal and spatial resolutions. Stockholm takes the lead over Barcelona as regards the best practices for environmental sustainability given its long history of environmental work, strong environmental policy, progressive environmental performance, high environmental standards, and ambitious goals. It also has, like Barcelona, a high level of the implementation of applied data-driven technology solutions in the areas of energy and environment. However, the two cities differ in the nature of such implementation. We conclude that city governments do not have a unified agenda as a form of strategic planning, and data-driven decisions are unique to each city, so are environmental challenges. Big data are the answer, but each city sets its own questions based on what characterize it in terms of visions, policies, strategies, pathways, and priorities.


10.2196/16607 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. e16607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Lovis

Data-driven science and its corollaries in machine learning and the wider field of artificial intelligence have the potential to drive important changes in medicine. However, medicine is not a science like any other: It is deeply and tightly bound with a large and wide network of legal, ethical, regulatory, economical, and societal dependencies. As a consequence, the scientific and technological progresses in handling information and its further processing and cross-linking for decision support and predictive systems must be accompanied by parallel changes in the global environment, with numerous stakeholders, including citizen and society. What can be seen at the first glance as a barrier and a mechanism slowing down the progression of data science must, however, be considered an important asset. Only global adoption can transform the potential of big data and artificial intelligence into an effective breakthroughs in handling health and medicine. This requires science and society, scientists and citizens, to progress together.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Lovis

UNSTRUCTURED Data-driven science and its corollaries in machine learning and the wider field of artificial intelligence have the potential to drive important changes in medicine. However, medicine is not a science like any other: It is deeply and tightly bound, with a large and wide network of legal, ethical, regulatory, economical, and societal dependencies. As a consequence, the scientific and technological progresses in handling information and its further processing and cross-linking for decision support and predictive systems must be accompanied by parallel changes in the global environment, with numerous stakeholders, including citizen and society. What can be seen at the first glance as a barrier and mechanism slowing down the progression of data science must, however, be considered an important asset. Only global adoption can transform the potential of big data and artificial intelligence into an effective breakthroughs in handling health and medicine. This requires science and society, scientists and citizens, to progress together.


2020 ◽  
pp. 239-254
Author(s):  
David W. Dorsey

With the rise of the internet and the related explosion in the amount of data that are available, the field of data science has expanded rapidly, and analytic techniques designed for use in “big data” contexts have become popular. These include techniques for analyzing both structured and unstructured data. This chapter explores the application of these techniques to the development and evaluation of career pathways. For example, data scientists can analyze online job listings and resumes to examine changes in skill requirements and careers over time and to examine job progressions across an enormous number of people. Similarly, analysts can evaluate whether information on career pathways accurately captures realistic job progressions. Within organizations, the increasing amount of data make it possible to pinpoint the specific skills, behaviors, and attributes that maximize performance in specific roles. The chapter concludes with ideas for the future application of big data to career pathways.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 3065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dresp-Langley ◽  
Ekseth ◽  
Fesl ◽  
Gohshi ◽  
Kurz ◽  
...  

Detecting quality in large unstructured datasets requires capacities far beyond the limits of human perception and communicability and, as a result, there is an emerging trend towards increasingly complex analytic solutions in data science to cope with this problem. This new trend towards analytic complexity represents a severe challenge for the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) in science. This review article combines insight from various domains such as physics, computational science, data engineering, and cognitive science to review the specific properties of big data. Problems for detecting data quality without losing the principle of parsimony are then highlighted on the basis of specific examples. Computational building block approaches for data clustering can help to deal with large unstructured datasets in minimized computation time, and meaning can be extracted rapidly from large sets of unstructured image or video data parsimoniously through relatively simple unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Why we still massively lack in expertise for exploiting big data wisely to extract relevant information for specific tasks, recognize patterns and generate new information, or simply store and further process large amounts of sensor data is then reviewed, and examples illustrating why we need subjective views and pragmatic methods to analyze big data contents are brought forward. The review concludes on how cultural differences between East and West are likely to affect the course of big data analytics, and the development of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) aimed at coping with the big data deluge in the near future.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 2772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aguinaldo Bezerra ◽  
Ivanovitch Silva ◽  
Luiz Affonso Guedes ◽  
Diego Silva ◽  
Gustavo Leitão ◽  
...  

Alarm and event logs are an immense but latent source of knowledge commonly undervalued in industry. Though, the current massive data-exchange, high efficiency and strong competitiveness landscape, boosted by Industry 4.0 and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) paradigms, does not accommodate such a data misuse and demands more incisive approaches when analyzing industrial data. Advances in Data Science and Big Data (or more precisely, Industrial Big Data) have been enabling novel approaches in data analysis which can be great allies in extracting hitherto hidden information from plant operation data. Coping with that, this work proposes the use of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) as a promising data-driven approach to pave industrial alarm and event analysis. This approach proved to be fully able to increase industrial perception by extracting insights and valuable information from real-world industrial data without making prior assumptions.


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