Keynotes and invited talks

It is clear that Seoul and Singapore have taken the international lead in turning genuinely smart. This entails knowing everything possible about not just the city but also its inhabitants. The effect is to make people transparent and to hold them accountable for eventual misdeed or misbehaviour. I intend to show how this is done in Singapore. To be fair, the city administration is also keen to be transparent. The people seem to be happy in general with this situation.
So the question is: forced by rising worldwide insecurity, will cities such as Paris or Rome, or any other human agglomeration not feel obliged to follow Singapore’s example simply to protect its citizens? What would be the consequences on social behaviour and the people’s welfare? I do not pretend to answer this question myself but to invite a debate either then and there with the audience, or invite the conference planners to set one up.

Derrick de Kerckhove is former director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology at the University of Toronto (Canada), where he is professor emeritus at the Department of French. He subsequently joined the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Napoli Federico II (Italy).
Presently, scientific director of the Rome based monthly Media Duemila, he is author of more than a dozen books edited in over ten languages including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian, Slovenian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He is also research director at the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute (IN3) at l’Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona (Spain).
His fields of research include technopsychology, psychotechnology, neuro-cultural research, art and communication technologies, media theory, collaborative educative software, and connected intelligence.

According to a recent UN report, urbanization will increase world’s urban population by 2.5 billion people and 2.9 billion vehicles by 2050. Most likely, 2.0 billion of vehicles will be in new emerging developing countries. If you think that traffic jam is a problem, just wait.
As a consequence, in order to be the most livable, sustainable and competitive, cities around the world are actively experimenting with smart technologies to pave the way for a smart transportation system (ITS).
This talk will consist in an overview about the major research projects related to the design of cognitive cars and smart roads applications, which we are currently investigating at the DIVA Strategic Research Network and TRANSIT Network and PARADISE Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa.
Next we shall focus on the main challenges, modeling, simulation and design issues and discuss some results obtained recently.
Finally, if time permits, we will talk about LIVE testbed, a convergence of distributed simulation, wireless multimedia and vehicular sensor technologies we are developing at DIVA and PARADISE Research Laboratory for an urban vehicular grid. This testbed will facilitate and enable us to evaluate and design new protocols and applications for future generations of connected vehicular and sensor network technologies.

Azzedine Boukerche is a Full Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair Tier-1 position at the University of Ottawa. He is the Scientific Director of NSERC-DIVA Strategic Research Network and NSERC TRANSIT Research Network, and a Director of PARADISE Research Laboratory at uOttawa.
Prior to this, he held a faculty position at the University of North Texas, USA. He worked as a Senior Scientist at the Simulation Sciences Division, Metron Corporation located in San Diego. He spent a year at the JPL/NASA-California Institute of Technology where he contributed to a project centered about the specification and verification of the software used to control interplanetary spacecraft operated by JPL/NASA Laboratory.
A.Boukerche is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of the Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award, the Premier of Ontario Research Excellence Award, the G. S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research, The IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award, The IEEE CS- Meritorious Award, the University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Research, IEEE Canada G. Gotlieb Computer Silver Medal Award, the Spanish Catedra de Excelencia, IEEE ComSoc Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE Computer Society TCPP Technical Achievement and Contributions Award.
A.Boukerche serves as an Associate Editor for several IEEE Transactions and ACM journals, as well as a Steering Committee Chair for several IEEE and ACM international conferences.
His current research interests include smart city, smart transportation, vehicular networks, sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless multimedia and pervasive computing, performance evaluation and modeling of large-scale distributed systems, and large-scale distributed interactive simulation.
Azzedine Boukerche has published extensively in these areas, and he is the recipient of several best research paper awards for his work on smart transportation, vehicular and sensor networking and mobile computing. He is the editor of three books on mobile computing, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

Given that an estimated 70% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, sustainable urbanization has become a policy priority for administrations across the world. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a crucial role to play by increasing efficiency across industry sectors and enabling such innovations as intelligent transport systems (ITS), smart water, energy and waste management. There is wide recognition that building smart technologies into an existing city — or developing a Smart Sustainable City from the ground up — is a complex undertaking. It calls for improved cooperation and more integrated decision-making by a variety of stakeholders.
Major efficiency improvements could be achieved in cities by horizontally interconnecting systems such as energy, water, sanitation and waste management, transportation, security, environmental monitoring and weather intelligence. The interconnection of these systems will demand standardized interfaces. This is an area where ITU also has a particularly important role to play and that’s why in June 2015 established ITU-T Study Group 20 "IoT, including its applications and smart cities and communities".
Paolo Gemma will provide an overview of ITU-T SG20 which is developing standards to address the standardization requirements of IoT technologies, with an initial focus on IoT applications in smart cities.

Paolo Gemma - senior Specialist for Europe and representative of Huawei on issues related to energy saving and environmental sustainability of companies worldwide - has done its input in Huawei in April 2008.
Before he was in Nokia Siemens Networks, has been responsible for laboratories Italian for EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) and electrical safety areas. Previously he held for 18 years a role like within the Siemens Communications Division. Paolo Gemma, between the leading experts of sector at international level, has an active role in international standardization activities. Since 1993 has engaged in ETSI (European Telecommunication Standard Institute) and participates in the development of telecommunications EMC standards.
In 1997 he joined ITU-T Study Group 5 as Rapporteur and he is now the Chairman of Working Party 3 "ICT and Climate Change". Paolo Gemma has followed the work of the EE (Environmental Engineering) of ETSI Technical Committee since 1998. EE is the Technical Committee of ETSI engaged in the standardization of energy power, mechanics and environmental conditions. The group is committed since 2004 on ecological issues in particular with regard to the reduction of energy consumption and cooling management of equipment and installation publishing some standards on this issue.
In 2002, has been appointed Secretary of the Committee ETSI TC EE and 2009 holds the position of Chairman of the EEPS EE (eco Environmental product standard) working group. Paolo Gemma is a graduate in electrical engineering from the University of Genova.

Cyber-Physical Systems are distributed systems where computing is tightly integrated with physical systems via sensing and actuation devices. Autonomous driving cars, wearables, smart buildings are a few examples of applications that are relevant for smart cities.
The speech aims to review the state of the art for these applications based on the technology and design advances pointing out the challenges and the difficulties related to the massive introduction of smart devices.

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.

Internet of Things is promising to be a set of technologies able to have a high impact on how people live, produce, modify and interact with the environment.
Such a transformation is driven by increasing technologies capabilities of sensors/actuators, communications, general purpose hardware, availability of software and programmability of devices.
The integration of so different technologies is a problem in itself and IoT is also trying to solve cogent issues of specific problem domains, such as e-health, transportation, manufacturing, and so on.
Smart cities stand on their own because the smartness requires integration of different technologies, processes and different administrative domains creating the needs to see the city as a large complex system. In addition to technological and problem domain specific challenges, there exist further challenges that fall in business, social and regulation realms. They can greatly impact the deployment and the success of IoT deployment within smart cities.
The speech aims is to provide a view on some major technologies challenges of IoT and to cover a few critical business and social issues that could hamper the large deployment of IoT systems within smart cities by providing some examples related to the creation of a future city that leverages its cultural heritage and specific needs as Venice.

Roberto Minerva holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Telecommunications from Telecom Sud Paris, France, and a Master Degree in Computer Science from University of Bari, Italy.
He is the Chairman of the IEEE IoT Initiative, an effort to aggregate a large technical community of experts and to foster the research and innovation in several IoT fields.
R.Minverva is in TIM Lab, Italy, where he is currently involved in research activities related to SDN/NFV, 5G, Big Data, architecture for IoT, and ICT technologies for leveraging new business models. He is authors of several papers published in international conferences, books and magazines.