Smart Cities

This area is growing as a higher level amalgamate of sub-systems with smart infrastructures and aiming to provide services at a community level.  Smart cities is an emerging concept which has been gaining momentum as the technology available becomes more sophisticated and provides continuous stimuli to solve some of the growing global concerns.  

There are already various “smart…” areas of technology quite consolidated and making their way into business and society.  This smarter systems are supported by various areas in computer science, for example sensor networks and context-aware software, which facilitates delivering more specific services to humans in more specific daily life contexts and better aligned to their individual preferences.  This has not been a sudden revolution, rather another stage in technological evolution.  With areas such as artificial intelligence maturing and basic infrastructures such as 5G looming in the technical horizon there are strong signals this trend will only continue. Then it seems quite a natural progression for society in general and for our technical communities as well, to move from the various current “smart …” silos, such as smart homes, smart cars, smart transportation, smart food grow, smart health, to be interconnected through an overall area which focuses on the multiple combinations and on their cooperation to achieve benefits for society none of those single areas can achieve in isolation.

As a comprehensive state of the art which can help decision makers around the world was needed I have recently helped to organize as a Guest Editor the biggest publication in this area so far, the Handbook of Smart Cities.

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Complementary have founded the Journal of Smart Cities and Society as I believe this area deserves more scientific workon its own and being so multi-disciplinary and complex much scientific debate is need to create safe systems.