Program

Educational resources

The lecture addresses the issue of technology evolution and its impact on the market. City planners need to understand how technology is evolving in order to make the appropriate choices for the evolution of their infrastructures, both physical and soft.

The lecture starts by looking at the current status of technologies in the areas of processing, storage, communications, sensors and charts the foreseen evolution. Then it looks into how these evolutions are affecting the decisions of municipalities and companies working in the smart cities space.

The final part provides concrete examples of cities planning, including transportation, lightning, open data framework.

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the Industry Advisory Board within the Future Directions Committee, chairs the 3I Technology Enablement Committee and co-chairs the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento.

He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

He writes a daily blog, with commentary on innovation in various technology and market areas.

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Modern cities have been transformed into live organisms in which citizens not only consume data and information but are also actively producing them. The interesting part is that this data production is happening at rates we have never seen before. As a result, the volume, variety and velocity of the data has grown so large that existing data management technologies are not able to cope with them. The data with these characteristics are referred to as Big Data.

In this lecture we present the limitations of the traditional technologies when dealing with Big Data and introduce WHAT the novel technologies are offering. We present the general principles of distributed processing, the modern programming paradigm of map reduce, the fundamentals of NoSQL systems, the integration of data processing and the cloud, and the idea of the Hadoop environments. We also discuss some new query paradigms, namely the idea of interactive query relaxation, of keyword querying on structured data, and of exemplar queries.

Yannis Velegrakis is a faculty member at the University of Trento, head of the Data Management Group, and coordinator of the EIT Digital MSc program in Trento.

He holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. His research areas include large scale data management (Big Data), social data analytics, integration of heterogeneous data, query answering, data quality and graph data.

Prior to joining the University of Trento, he held a researcher position at AT&T Research Labs in the United States. He has also spent time as a visitor at the University of California, Santa-Cruz, the IBM Almaden Research Center, and the Center of Advanced Studies of the IBM Toronto Lab. He has been a general chair for VLDB13, and PC char for WebDB12, DESWEB10/11, SWAE07, SDSW14, and ExploreDB17. He holds 2 US patents and has been a fellow of Marie Curie and of Paris Saclay “Jean d’Alembert”.

Educational resources

Facilitating positive changes in citizens’ behaviors is an important dimension in a Smart City, and one of the key issues for city sustainability. However, innovative and often costly city policies and advanced IT solutions are liable to fail, if not combined with initiatives aimed at increasing the awareness of citizens, and promoting their behavioural change.

In this lecture, we discuss the potential of gamification mechanisms to incentivize voluntary behavioural changes. We present a service–based gamification framework which can be used to develop long-running city-wide games on top of existing services and Internet of Things infrastructures within a Smart City. And we discuss the outcomes of the adoption of this framework in different open–field game campaigns that have been undertaken by the city of Trento to promote sustainable mobility.

Marco Pistore is senior researcher at FBK, where he leads the Smart Community Lab.

He has an h-index of 45 and more than 200 publications in international journals, conferences, and symposia. He is the coordinator of EU H2020 project SIMPATICO and has been scientific coordinator of EU FP7 project STREETLIFE; he is and has been local coordinator of various national and EU research projects (including FET projects ALLOW and ALLOW Ensembles and IP project SLA@SOI), and steering committee member of the FP7 NoE S-Cube.

He is also project manager / coordinator of industrial and innovation projects in the areas of service oriented applications, e-government, and smart cities and communities.

Educational resources

Facilitating positive changes in citizens’ behaviors is an important dimension in a Smart City, and one of the key issues for city sustainability. However, innovative and often costly city policies and advanced IT solutions are liable to fail, if not combined with initiatives aimed at increasing the awareness of citizens, and promoting their behavioural change.

In this lecture, we discuss the potential of gamification mechanisms to incentivize voluntary behavioural changes. We present a service–based gamification framework which can be used to develop long-running city-wide games on top of existing services and Internet of Things infrastructures within a Smart City. And we discuss the outcomes of the adoption of this framework in different open–field game campaigns that have been undertaken by the city of Trento to promote sustainable mobility.

Annapaola Marconi is the head of the DAS research unit. Her research interests include self-adaptive software systems, collective adaptive systems, service-oriented computing and gamification techniques. She has been actively involved in various local and international research projects, such as ALLOW, S-Cube, SLA@SOI, SmartCampus, ALLOW Ensembles, CLIMB (Children’s Independent Mobility), and the FP7 project STREETLIFE, where she is Scientific Coordinator.

Elisabetta Farella is the head of the E3DA research unit. Her research interests are in energy autonomous embedded systems (e.g. wearables, WSN, smart objects and IoT) and their applications in several domains. She was previously at DEI - University of Bologna and at CINECA. She coordinated activities in EU projects (FP6, FP7, EIT Digital activities, ARTEMIS JU projects, EUREKA Eurostars), international cooperation (SIA RAAK PRO), local funding (PRRIIT, legge VI); she coordinated 3 research groups at T3LAB (http://www.t3lab.it/), on RFID, Smart Spaces, WSN topics.

See the educational resources of the previous lecture

• Recent attacks on/using IoT devices and critical infrastructure
• Defence strategies (a bit technical but not too much)
• Why IoT security is very different from IT security (architectural issues, vendor’s incentive, “patchability”, “monitorability”)
• The IoT and critical infrastructure attacker

Sandro Etalle is full professor and head of the Security group at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at the University of Twente.

He holds an MSc in mathematics from the University of Padova and a PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam. Etalle is a co-founder of the spin-off Security Matters, where he served 4,5 years as CEO and is now chairman of the board.

Etalle is one of the authors of the Dutch “National Cyber Security Research Agenda”, he has been leader of several national and EU projects, and program chair of several international conferences.

Educational resources - part 1

Educational resources - part 2

Papers and blogs the lecturer will refer to (students are encouraged to take a look at them, they are mostly “lightweight” essays):

• Ransomware and the Internet of Things, by Bruce Schneier, June 2017
• Security and the Internet of Things, by Bruce Schneier, February 2017
• Strategic Principles for Securing the Internet of Things (IoT), US Department of Homeland Security, Nov 2016
• From intrusion detection to Software Design, by S. Etalle. ESORICS 2017 (Educational resources - part 2)

Smart transportation, a main pillar of future smart cities, aims to leverage advanced technologies to enable smarter, eco-friendly and more efficient mobility of people and goods around the world, especially in big cities. The projected massive growth of the number of vehicles on the roads (2.9 billion vehicles by 2050 according to a recent UN report), plus urban transformation and a trend towards mega cities create greater and more challenges for achieving smart transportation goals. Among these challenges, the excessive traffic congestion and its resulting impact on travellers’ journey experience, road safety, air quality and economy.

In this lecture, we will give an overview of the recent advances on smart transportation, including driverless cars and smart mobility apps, with special focus on connected cars system (or vehicular networks). Then, we will present our recent contributions on safety messages dissemination and beaconing congestion control in urban vehicular networks along with advanced solutions for mitigating unexpected urban traffic congestion. Finally, we will highlight the main emerging challenges hindering the achievement of a sustainable and efficient smart mobility system.

Soufiene Djahel is Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology, Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) since Sep. 2015.

Prior to this, he held an Engineering Research Manager position at University College Dublin (Ireland) where he was conducting and leading research activities on smart transportation for almost four years. Dr. Djahel received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from A. Mira University (Algeria, 2007) and Lille 1 University-Science and Technology (France, 2010), respectively.

His current research interests include smart transportation, vehicular networks, security and QoS issues in wireless networks and e-health.

He is a senior member of the IEEE and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK. Dr. Djahel serves as TPC member in many IEEE flagship conferences and as a reviewer for several IEEE journals in his research areas. He was the general co-chair of VTM 2014, RA-WERHA 2015 and ISNCC 2016 and the TPC co-chair of VTM 2012, ISNCC 2015 and IEEE ISC2 2016. He is guest editor of special issues on smart and green transportation, and RFID for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and International Journal of RF Technologies Research and Applications, respectively.

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The realization of Smart Cities (and the Internet of Things) is creating an unprecedented tidal data wave, consisting of the collection of continuous measurements from an enormous number of sensors. The goal is to better understand, model, and analyze real-world phenomena, interactions, and behaviors. Consequently, there is an increasingly pressing need for developing techniques able to collect, process, index and mine a very large number of streaming data, and in particular, data series.

In this talk, we describe various efforts in designing techniques for managing and analyzing a large number of high-rate data streams, such as data-driven data acquisition and distributed outlier detection, as well as indexing and mining truly massive collections of data series. We discuss novel techniques that adaptively create data series indexes, allowing users to correctly answer queries before the indexing task is finished. We also show how our methods allow mining on datasets that would otherwise be completely untenable, including the first published experiments using one billion data series.

Themis Palpanas is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), and professor of computer science at the Paris Descartes University (France), where he is director of diNo, the data management group.

He received the BS degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada.

He has previously held positions at the University of Trento, and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and visited Microsoft Research, and the IBM Almaden Research Center.

His interests include problems related to online and offline data management and data analytics, focusing on high-rate streaming data and very large data collections, as well as sentiment analytics and semantic-web engineering. He is the author of nine US patents, three of which have been implemented in world-leading commercial data management products. He is the recipient of three Best Paper awards, and the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award. He has served as General co-Chair for VLDB 2013, and Associate Editor for VLDB 2017. He is serving as an Editor in Chief for the BDR Journal, an Associate Editor in the TKDE, and IDA journals, as well as on the Editorial Advisory Board of the IS journal, and the Editorial Board of the TLDKS Journal.

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Urban sustainability research and development requires strong collaboration among different constituencies to be relevant.

Circular economy is an important component of urban sustainability. It involves novel business models for companies and new policies for city administrators. I will overview the impact that circular economy may have on businesses and citizens.

Energy efficiency especially in tropical climates is a key component in making cities livable. It takes a great deal of integration among different disciplines to improve substantially energy consumption while keeping good living conditions for people. I will review some of the research carried out in this domain with particular attention to the deployment of sensors and data analytics in this domain.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli holds the Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, at University of California at Berkeley. He helped founding Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in EDA.

He consulted for companies such as Intel, HP, Bell Labs, IBM, Samsung, UTC, Kawasaki Steel, Fujitsu, Telecom Italia, Pirelli, GM, BMW, Mercedes, Magneti Marelli, ST Microelectronics, UniPol and UniCredit. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology and Honorary Professor of the Politecnico di Torino.

He earned the IEEE/RSE Maxwell Award for “groundbreaking contributions that have had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering”, the Kaufmann Award for seminal contributions to EDA, the EDAA lifetime Achievement Award, the IEEE/ACM R. Newton Impact Award, the University of California Distinguished Teaching Award, and the IEEE Graduate Teaching Award for inspirational teaching of graduate students.

He is an IEEE and ACM fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and holds two honorary Doctorates. He authored over 850 papers, 17 books and 2 patents.

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In this talk we first introduce the concept of smart healthcare understood as the provision of healthcare in context-aware scenarios such as smart homes, smart hospitals and smart cities.

We provide an overview on the topic and analyse the importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) for the practical deployment of smart healthcare solutions. An apparent result of the generalisation of IoT, wearable technology and context-aware environments is the massive growth of available data on a wide variety of features (temperature, humidity, energy consumption, luminosity, blood pressure, and so on). This data (that might be considered Big due to its large volume and variety) must be managed, and information must be obtained from it. To do so, many techniques are at our disposal.

In the second part of the talk, we recall the foundations of recommender systems, and we pay special attention to collaborative filtering. This family of methods allows us to obtain information from large databases in a collaborative way that is especially suitable for smart healthcare applications.

We conclude the talk by providing the attendees with real examples in which collaborative filtering techniques are used to help solve smart healthcare problems:

• Introduction to smart healthcare (Electronic, Mobile and Smart Health, the role of IoT and IoMT, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Healthcare)
• Introduction to collaborative filtering (recommender systems, classification of methods, Collaborative Filtering, Practical examples)
• Application of collaborative filtering to smart healthcare (recommend healthy routes to citizens, decide where to place antennas for information sensing, open discussion)

Agustí Solanas (Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain, 1980) is a researcher at the Smart Health Research Group and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) of Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.

He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering from URV in 2002 and 2004, respectively, the latter with honours (Outstanding Graduation Award). He received a Diploma of Advanced Studies (Master) in Telematics Engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2006. He received a Ph.D. in Telematics Engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia in 2007 with honours (A cum laude).

His fields of activity are data privacy, data security, ubiquitous computing, and artificial intelligence specifically: clustering, evolutionary computation, artificial vision and robotic exploration. He has participated in several European-, Spanish-, and Catalan-funded research projects.

He has authored over 90 publications and he has delivered several talks. He has served as chair, programme committee member and reviewer in several conferences and journals.

He has served as external reviewer for the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research. He is a member of several scientific organisations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He serves as Category Editor of Information Systems for the ACM Computing Reviews. Currently he is a member of the board of the IEEE Spain Section and the IEEE Special Technical Community on e-Government.

Educational resources

Since the UN has published the report about urbanization and its consequences on cities, several cities around the word have started thinking about their challenges and how to leverage technologies to tackle them, with the ultimate goal to be smart, green, efficient, innovative, etc. In the MENA region, Asia and Africa, several cities, from South Africa to India, have followed this wave. For example, we can mention the Smart Nation in Singapore, the 100 smart cities projects in India, smart Dubai and Masdar City in the UAE, Lusail City in Qatar, etc.

In this lecture, we will focus on, and analyze, the case of a futuristic smart city in the UAE called Masdar. We will discuss in details the success and the failure features of such city. From this study case, several other future cities can learn lessons.

Ali Oualid is considered as one of the international well-recognized expert in the field of smart, sustainable and future cities.

He has participated in several smart (future) cities projects as a researcher or as a consultant. He was involved in the planning and implementation of future cities in many domains such as smart mobility and transportation, smart tourism and destination, smart energy, smart healthcare, smart logistics, smart waste management, smart parking, smart water management, smart education, smart security, smart policing and law enforcement, etc.

He has given several training and capacity building courses related to that field. Moreover, he is a member of several organizations related to the area of smart cities or urban technologies. He has been invited in several occasions in local, regional and international events as a guest or keynote speaker in order to deliver talks about future cities and its domains.

Recently he founded the Future Cities Council organization, where he is the president.

Educational resources

For the innovation processes of a modern city, being either an urban or metropolitan scale complex system, is of paramount importance to integrate the tangible and intangible infrastructures available by the different stakeholders in the area. The development of effective technological solutions in response to emerging requests of new smart services of this comprehensive vision of the city necessarily starts from the available assets (which are coherently integrated with innovative processes, models and technologies). This “digital transformation” (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_transformation) builds upon two pillars characterizing the city of the future: the integrated management of data and the use of Open Service Technology Platforms. These prerequisites can be considered as the competitive element that allows the cities to solve the technological, social and economic challenges that have to be systematically solved from now on in what can be denoted as the Urban Digital Engineering. As a consequence, the innovation process consists of the coherent fusion between the technological and social dimensions, opening to the co-creation, the co-management and the adoption of new public service models, either public or private, at the urban or metropolitan levels: data collected from IoT solutions, privacy, security, energy efficiency and new procedure for public contracts assignment are only a subset of the aspects shaping the vision of the city of the future.

This is a paradigmatic change where the local administrations are and will be the reference point, even though the landscape is rapidly changing. Indeed, different major factors, such as macro economic factors, the reduction of the available resources, the necessity to focus on core activities, the need to outsource nonessential services, are pushing the local governments to interplay with other actors and providers of public and private services that have to meet the requests of the community. The mission in this context is then to cooperate among all the decision makers that operates at both the urban and metropolitan levels, which have the attractive possibility to reshape the future identity of the city.

Along this unavoidable pathway, the Open Service Technology Platforms can help in strengthening the solutions by offering the possibility to define communication and data sharing standards for the city; a major role is for example played by the PPP FIWARE (Open Service Technology Platform, www.fiware.org), AIOTI (IoT, www.aioti.org), BDVA (big data, www.bdva.eu), OASC (open and agile cities, www.oascities.org) and ECSO (Cyber Security, www.ecs-org.eu) initiatives.

Lanfranco Marasso is a P. Engineer; he took his Ph.D. on Process Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He is currently the Smart City Program Director at Engineering Ingegneria Informatica spa, Italy (www.eng.it).

He has been involved in management roles (CEO, CIO) in private companies at national and international level (Boston, MA, USA). In 1999 he moved from private to public sector as CIO of Municipality of Parma (Italy), and then to Engineering.

Since 2009 he has been working in R&D department looking at the technological transfer from research to innovation to the market. He has played an active role on several EU initiatives on software and services for public sector: FIWARE, ENOLL (European Network of Living Lab).

He is Chairman del TF7 - Smart City di BDVA (Big Data Value Association) and WG3.7 Smart City di ECSO (European Cyber Security Organisation). He is also co-chair of the WG8 Smart city at AIOTI (Alliance Internet Of Thing Innovation).

He has published several articles and books on process and project management, new technologies applications and innovation in public sector and smart city.