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Symposium Chairs
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Dominik P.H. Kalisch, PhD
Chair | Trinity University
Living in cities is becoming increasingly attractive for many people around the world. According to the United Nations, more than 3.6 billion or 51.6% of the world’s population were living in urban agglomerations in 2010. Especially from an ecological point of view, cities are a central issue for the future. Cities consume enormous amounts of energy, raw materials, and space, additionally producing tons of waste and hazardous materials, while many places suffer from congestion, traffic jams, crime, etc.
In 2013 Richard Simpson wrote: “The political and economic foundations of cities will determine [...] whether four billion new urban houses in the next 40 years can be built, whether global warming can be limited to 2 °C compared to 1990 levels, and whether the state and quality of our ecosystems and resources can be sustainably maintained.”
The more urban our planet grows, the more we come to realize that our cities play an essential role in shaping this sustainable future. Here is where we live, consume, produce, work, and enjoy our lives; they are the centers of creativity, wealth and power and therefore a part of the solution. The city of the future thus will have to be fundamentally different from the energy consuming, greenhouse gas emitting, car stuffed and often socially unbalanced urban systems that we have come to create throughout the last 100 years.
Today ́s cities are using systems and infrastructure which are partly based on outdated technologies, making them unsustainable, inflexible, inefficient and difficult to change. In addition, the increasing pace of urbanization and transformation of the cities challenges traditional approaches for urban system forecasting, policy and decision-making even further. In order to solve these challenges, we have to understand cities as hyper-complex interdependent systems that, with their interconnected layers and subsystems, cannot be efficiently understood separately from one another, but form a complex interdependent system of infrastructural, economic, and social components that cannot be seen in isolation and therefore require a holistic system model.
Data, Analytics and Technology are therefore the keys to understand the city; to create sustainable solutions and innovations and to improve the quality of a city. However, the high complexity of modern urban systems creates a challenge for the data and analytic methods used to study them, calling for new, more unified, robust and efficient approaches.
On the other hand, modern challenges in complex urban system studies come together with new unprecedented opportunities, such as digital sensing. The technological revolution resulted in the broad penetration of digital technologies in the everyday lives of people and the cities creating big data records of human behavior. Also, recent advances in network science allow for the analysis of interactions between people, companies and urban infrastructure from the new complex network perspective.
The following table shows the preliminary timeline for the symposium.
|
Time |
Topic |
Author |
|
9:00 AM |
A Holistic Approach to Understand Urban Complexity. |
Dominik Kalisch, Steffen Braun, Alanus von Radecki |
|
9:30 AM |
An Intelligent Hot-Desking Model Based on Occupancy Sensor Data and its Potential for Social Impact |
Konstantinos Maraslis, Peter Cooper, Theo Tryfonas, George Oikonomou |
|
10:00 AM |
Collaborative construction of an open Official Gazette |
Gisele Craveiro, José Alcazar, Andrés Martano (VOIP) |
|
10:30 AM |
Data Driven Governments: Creating Value through Open Government Data |
Judie Attard, Fabrizio Orlandi, Sören Auer |
|
11:00 AM |
Keynote Enthralled by the Immediate. Why Humans have not Adopted Smarter Cities solutions faster |
Mark Dixon |
|
11:30 AM |
||
|
12:00 PM |
Lunch Break |
|
|
12:30 PM |
||
|
1:00 PM |
Characterization of behavioral patterns exploiting description of geographical areas |
Zolzaya Dashdorj, Stanislav Sobolevsky |
|
1:30 PM |
Analysis of customers’ spatial distribution through transaction datasets |
Yuji Yoshimura, Alexander Amini, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Josep Blat, Carlo Ratti |
|
2:00 PM |
Real-Time Data Collection and Processing of Utility Customer's Power Usage for Improved Demand Response Control |
Shawyun Sariri, Volker Schwarzer, Michael Angelo, Dominik Kalisch, Reza Ghorbani |
|
2:30 PM |
Visualization of Open Urban Data for Illegally Parked Bicycles |
Shusaku Egami, Takahiro Kawamura, Yuichi Sei, Yasuyuki Tahara, Akihiko Ohsuga |
|
3:00 PM |
Sake Selection Support Application for Countryside Tourism |
Teruyuki Iijima, Takahiro Kawamura, Yuichi Sei, Yasuyuki Tahara, Akihiko Ohsuga |
|
3:30 PM |
Discussion Groups |
|
|
4:00 PM |
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The technological revolution resulted in the broad penetration of digital technologies into the everyday lives of people and the cities are creating big data records of human behavior. More and more big urban data becomes available every day and there is a trend in cities to use the data that is available to improve quality of life, reduce costs, and improve decision objectivity to deliver urban services to people in need. This is especially true for cities like Chicago or New York which start to roll out city-wide sensor data for managing the urban system. Data, analytics, and technology are therefore the keys to make this data not just accessible but to gain meaningful insight into urban systems to understand the city, to create sustainable solutions and innovations, and to improve the quality of a city allowing evidence based decisions.
However, the high complexity of modern urban systems creates a challenge for the data and analytic methods used to study them, calling for new more unified, robust, and efficient approaches. Also, recent advances in network science allow for consideration of interactions between people, companies, and urban infrastructure from the new complex network perspective.
The primary goal of the symposium is to outline important research challenges in the field of complex urban systems, discussing applicable data sources, methodologies and their current limitations. The following are some of the broad contexts that we will consider:
Michael Batty claims “the development of a science of cities built in the traditions of classical science” to be impossible as “cities are not only growing larger…. but they are in the process becoming more complex” [New Science of Cities]. They include many interconnected layers and subsystems, such as not only urban infrastructure but also information fluxes, human dynamics and connections, business interactions, etc. As those layers often cannot be efficiently understood separately from one another, this calls for a holistic consideration of the city as a complex system. This is why one of the focuses of a proposed symposium is to consider recent advances of complexity theory in application to the urban systems and further avenues in this direction.
As mentioned before, complex urban systems consist of many layers. However, the entities within them are strongly interconnected within the layers and between them (such as people connected with each other, but also with the companies they work for or use the services of). Obviously interactions between people, companies and urban infrastructure could be considered from the new complex network perspective. This makes network theory one of the primary tools for urban studies. During the symposium we’ll consider applications of the theory of complex networks (especially multiplex networks including several interconnected layers) to urban challenges, as well as shifting the foundations of the theory motivated by urban challenges.
Modern challenges in complex urban system studies come together with new unprecedented opportunities, such as digital sensing. The technological revolution resulted in the broad penetration of digital technologies in the everyday lives of people and the cities, creating big data records of human behavior, such as cell phone data records, social media, vehicle GPS traces, individual economical transactions and many others. One of the focuses of the symposium is opening up the potential of said data for urban studies and innovation, considering analytic and knowledge extractions approaches and their limitations.
The increasing pace of urbanization creates huge sustainability challenges. We often see evidence of cities (like Singapore as one of the best examples) entirely transformed over the course of just a few decades evolving from a regular town to a world mega-city. Many cities (like Riyadh or Phoenix) are created within an artificially transformed natural environment like oases in the middle of the desert. Sustainability of urban development for examples like that is of the paramount importance which can not be overestimated. Also, high population congestion within urbanized territories becomes particularly vulnerable to various natural or technological disasters and emergencies, making urban systems face increasing resilience requirements. During the symposium we’re going to focus on addressing sustainability and resilience challenges for the cities through complexity science approaches powered by urban big data.
More and more data is available in and about our cities and these data sets are often made more publicly available. Research conducted by Fraunhofer-Institute in 2012 in major world cities showed that we will see a shift away from political decisions that are based on ideology but move more and more to data driven ones. What started in cities like New York will become the norm. Cities will use the information that they have available and merge them with additional publicly available data sets like yelp, twitter, facebook, etc. Besides the questions of how to deal with the amount of data available and new algorithms that make use of such data sets, this also raises the question of governmental processes, accountability and ethical issues. However, using this information not only makes the city more efficient, but also more transparent and verifiable by the citizens.
The increasing speed of urban transformation challenges traditional approaches for urban planning and innovation. More and more information is required to support decisions and solutions in this area to account for all interrelated crucial aspects. At the same time, widespread digital technologies offer new opportunities of digital sensing, providing us with the vast amount of urban data, direct measurements of human activity in the urban environment; an opportunity one could hardly imagine some 10 years before. Utilizing those new data sources and development of good practices and use cases for urban innovation will be another important focus for the symposium.
We invite papers and presentations on the topics above. Submitted papers should present a novel scientific contribution and will undergo a regular peer-review procedure.
Accepted papers will be published in the “Decision, Negotiation, Leadership, Social Communities and Technology” minitrack proceedings of the HICSS Conference. Outstanding papers will be given the opportunity to be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems”. The goal of this special issue is to present novel methodological and technical approaches, use cases in urban (big) data analysis applications and technology, as well as share the related practical experiences with the readers. This special issue will provide clear proof that (big) data analytics and technologies are playing an ever increasing important and critical role nowadays in urban governing, sustainable and resilient cities, and business intelligence, which is a new cross-discipline research in computer science and business. It is also expected that this special issue will research new best practices and learn from the past experiences in (big) data analytics applications.
Please submit your papers to be included in the conference proceedings (mini-track) through PSC online system and select Minitrack “Decision, Negotiation, Leadership, Social Communities and Technology”.
Paper formatting guidelines are available at the conference website. The total paper size including references is limited to 18 pages in the specified Springer’s format. Detailed requirement for the submission to the special issue to be specified. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. To submit a paper for the journal please use the TLDKS submission system following the TLDKS paper formatting guidelines.
and read the intersting papers from this symposium.
If you have any question please let us know.
The following institutions ond organizations support the symposium. If you would like to support us as well, please get in contact with us: dkalisch AT stmarys-ca DOT edu. Please download a brief overview of the standardized sponsoring options, however, we would also be able to create a unique sponsoring and branding opportunity.
The CompleXity Symposium is part of the Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS) at the Grand Hyatt in Kauai, HI.
