Urban Computing Introduction
Our cities face many challenges well expressed by the following questions posed to the international community by The Urban Land Institute:
- How can we redevelop existing neighborhoods and business districts to improve the quality of life?
- How can we create more choices in housing, accommodating diverse lifestyles and all income levels?
- item How can we reduce traffic congestion yet stay connected?
- item How can we include citizens in planning their communities rather than limiting input to only those affected by the next project?
- item How can we fund schools, bridges, roads, and clean water while meeting short-term costs of increased security?
ICT for sure cannot provide an answer to those question on its own, but it is one of the most important enabling factor. A signal that ICT for Urban area is growing at a recognizable size was the pubblication in 2007 of a special issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing dedicated to Urban Computing -- the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles.
Urban settings range from our own cars, while we drive them in town, to public spaces such as streets and squares including semipublic ones like cafés and tourist attractions. Urban lifestyles are even broader and include people living, working, visiting and having fun in those settings. Not surprisingly, people constantly enter and leave urban spaces, occupying them with highly variable densities and even changing their usage patterns between day and night.
Some years ago, due the lack of data, solving Urban Computing problems looked a Sci-Fi idea. Nowadays, a large amount of the required information can be made available on Internet at almost no cost: computerized systems contain maps with the commercial activities and meeting places (e.g., Google Earth), events scheduled in the city and their locations, positions and speed information of public transportation vehicles and of mobile phone users, parking availabilities in specific parking areas, and so on.
However, current technologies are not up to the challenge of solving Urban Computing problems: this requires combining a huge amount of static knowledge about the city (i.e., urbanistic, social and cultural one) with an even larger set of data (originating in real time from heterogeneous and noisy data sources) and reasoning above the resulting time-varying knowledge. A new generation reasoner is clearly needed.
For this reason we are challenging the LarKC project to support the realization of a solution to one of the Urban Land Institute open questions: "how can we reduce traffic congestion yet stay connected?". We select such question because we have been working in this area for years and we can derive from our previous experiences challenging requirements not only for the LarKC project, but also for the entire community working on scalable, tolerant and dynamic reasoning.