Smart City = Smart Citizen = Smart Economy?

With a rapidly growing world population, urban populations are estimated to increase significantly over the next decades. This trend is reason for concern since the planet's resources are limited, and climate change is inherent. This chapter focusses on the question about whether new technologies employed in smart cities can be the answer to current and future needs of a city population. Cutting-edge technological advances are reshaping our ecosystem; transforming society, living, and work environments; transport systems; energy grids; healthcare; communications; businesses; and education. How can cities respond to the multitude of challenges by employing technology and at the same time ensure the public well-being, improve the quality of life of city inhabitants, and make sure that the human is still at the center of decisions?

A Cloud Platform for Sharing Educational Digital Fabrication Resources Over the Internet

Cloud and IoT technologies have the potential to enable a plethora of new applications that are not strictly limited to remote sensing, data collection, and data analysis. In such a context, the IoT paradigm can be seen as an empowering technology rather than a disruptive one since it has the capability to improve the standard business processes by fostering more efficient and sustainable implementations and by reducing the running costs. Cloud and IoT technologies can be applied in a broad range of contexts including entertainment, industry, and education, among others. This chapter presents part of the outputs of the NEWTON H2020 European project on technology-enhanced learning; more specifically, it introduces the concept of fabrication as a service in the context of educational digital fabrication laboratories. Fab Labs can leverage cloud and IoT technologies to enable resource sharing and provide remote access to distributed expensive fabrication resources over the internet. Both platform architecture and impact on learning experience of STEM subjects are presented in detail.

An Unified Secured Cloud System for the Education Sector of India

Cloud computing is based on years of research on various computing paradigms. It provides elasticity, which is useful in the situations of uneven ICT resources demands. As the world is moving towards digitalization, the education sector is expected to meet the pace. Acquiring and maintaining the ICT resources also necessitates a huge amount of cost. Education sector as a community can use cloud services on various levels. Though the cloud is very successfully running technology, it also shows some flaws in the area of security, privacy and trust. The research demonstrates a model in which major security areas are covered like authorization, authentication, identity management, access control, privacy, data encryption, and network security. The total idea revolves around the community cloud as university at the center and other associated colleges accessing the resources. This study uses OpenStack environment to create a complete cloud environment. The validation of the model is performed using some cases and some tools.

Privacy in Cloud-Based Computing

Cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), edge computing, and fog computing are gaining attention as emerging research topics and computing approaches in recent years. These computing approaches are rather conceptual and contextual strategies rather than being computing technologies themselves, and in practice, they often overlap. For example, an IoT architecture may incorporate cloud computing and fog computing. Cloud computing is a significant concept in contemporary computing and being adopted in almost every means of computing. All computing architectures incorporating cloud computing are termed as cloud-based computing (CbC) in general. However, cloud computing itself is the basis of CbC because it significantly depends on resources that are remote, and the remote resources are often under third-party ownership where the privacy of sensitive data is a big concern. This chapter investigates various privacy issues associated with CbC. The data privacy issues and possible solutions within the context of cloud computing, IoT, edge computing, and fog computing are also explored.

Intelligence Applied to Smart Cities Through Architecture and Urbanism

Implementation of the smart city concept in architectural school programs is neither evident nor simple. The starting point is a historical heritage of established patterns shaped to different schools of thought that have independently worked on territories at different scales: urban planning and building construction. The Spanish scenario understands the smart city as the ICTs (information and communication technologies) applied to security, data processing, logistics, energy management, among others, but we must not forget the Spanish urban plans born from the architecture discipline and how buildings are positioned within a site. The aim of this study is to highlight some reflections on the need to unite multiple and artificial intelligences so that the latter does not monopolize or gain exclusivity within the smart city design guidelines and listens to the city's demands.

IoT to Support Active Learning in Engineering Education

Engineering education requires a rather difficult learning process, which aims at building the student's capacities in theoretical insights in science, project-oriented thinking and co-operation, experimental verification of basic concepts in specific labs, deductive and creative thinking, and multi-disciplinary engineering. Many education techniques to help in that learning process have been proposed in literature and have found their way into the daily learning process. Two very prominent active learning techniques used in engineering education are on one hand the virtual and remote laboratories and on the other hand the fab labs. The upcoming internet of things paradigm is now adding new possibilities to further enhance those two techniques to support engineering education. In this chapter, the authors introduce some of those possibilities, describe use cases, and draw some conclusions on the current state of research.

Wireless Sensor Networks in IPM

An emerging field for environmental wireless sensor networks (WSN) is entomological vector surveillance. Sensor technology can be used to shoulder ecologically friendly practices within the integrated pest management (IPM) approach. Proper surveillance and subsequent modelling of the impact that pest and disease have on human health and crop agriculture is a pressing issue in numerous segments. Complex numerical models are being developed to generate information regarding the population dynamics of vector species and the expected circulation of vector-borne disease (VBD). These models require detailed micrometeorological forcing representative of the vector habitat to generate accurate simulations. Near real-time data offload in remote areas with flexible channels of communication for complex and heterogeneous topographies is an important component in this type of application. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of the scope and best-practice approaches in applying WSN technology to drive IPM models.

Software-Defined Networking

The connection of billions of devices to the internet poses numerous challenges to the networking infrastructure. The traditional networking paradigm is anticipated to be unable to cope with a scenario of myriad heterogenous devices connected through both wireless and wired links. The mobility and instability of a significant portion of the devices of the IoT demand a flexible and agile response of the network to adapt and keep the appropriate policies in effect. Software-defined networking (SDN) moves the intelligence of the network to a central controller with a global vision of the network capable of issuing timely instructions to the network nodes to accommodate the constant changes. This chapter presents the SDN paradigm, covering its architecture, functional blocks, interfaces, and protocols. The focus is put on the application of SDN to IoT environments supporting different applications, each with its specific difficulties, exploring current trends to tackle the identified challenges.

Public Services and Evolution of Smart Cities

The smart city is a concept that began to take shape at the end of the last century, emerging as a consequence of the real evolution of urban requirements. Whilst in bygone eras the need arose to equip cities with elements such as security, public health services, and public adornment, which were primordial for development of said cities, nowadays the—increasingly demanding—citizenry calls for a type of services related to the introduction of information and communications technology (ICT), aside from the cities' own evolution, as well as growth of the social and environmental capital. A smart city could be defined as a city which uses information and communications technology to ensure that both its critical infrastructure and the public services and components it offers are more interactive and efficient and that citizens can become more aware of them.

Consumer Privacy Regulations

Big data and analytics have not only changed how businesses interact with consumers, but also how consumers interact with the larger world. Smart cities, IoT, cloud, and edge computing technologies are all enabled by data and can provide significant societal benefits via efficiencies and reduction of waste. However, data breaches have also caused serious harm to customers by exposing personal information. Consumers often are unable to make informed decisions about their digital privacy because they are in a position of asymmetric information. There are an increasing number of privacy regulations to give consumers more control over their data. This chapter provides an overview of data privacy regulations, including GDPR. In today's globalized economy, the patchwork of international privacy regulations is difficult to navigate, and, in many instances, fails to provide adequate business certainty or consumer protection. This chapter also discusses current research and implications for costs, data-driven innovation, and consumer trust.