Edit: IISSC has been moved to 2017, and dates in the article have been changed accordingly.
We talked with Marco Zappatore, a post-doc researcher at the Department of Innovation Engineering at the University of Salento, and the Technical Program Committee Chair of the 2nd EAI International Conference on ICT Infrastructures and Services for Smart Cities (IISSC 2017). The conference will take place in Brindisi, Italy between April 20-21, 2017, and is sure to bring a comprehensive perspective on issues that surround Smart Cities and their infrastructure.
What do you think are going to be the highlights of IISSC 2017 that we definitely should not miss?
Thanks to the several research areas that will be addressed by the IISSC 2017 core topics, the Conference will represent a truly promising moment of knowledge sharing and technological showcasing. This event will hopefully allow the definition of novel research opportunities and project partnership thanks to the involvement of international researchers as well as the participation of policy makers and industrial stakeholders. IISSC 2017 will address research experiences and concrete application scenarios of Smart City initiatives from several perspectives: ICT, socio-technical systems, social implications.
What will make this year’s edition of IISSC 2017 unique?
The uniqueness of this year’s edition of IISSC 2017 is represented by the novel approach we are proposing: instead of addressing simply the Smart City initiatives that have been enriched the scientific literature in the last months, we also aim at involving policy makers and industrial stakeholders in order to start discussing Smart Cities from a broader point of view.
The adoption of novel technological drivers, indeed, should not be aimed only at boosting business opportunities but it should be also necessary to leverage these occasions for improving the ecology awareness of both citizenship and city managers
What role will Smart Cities infrastructure play in the next few years? How will innovation in this area shape our everyday lives?
The innovations fostered by the diffusion of new technologies and devices are already shaping our everyday lives: however, even if capillary, the adoption of these new opportunities is often neither systematic nor citizenship-focused. It is, therefore, fundamental to foster the creation and maintenance of effective ICT infrastructures capable of supporting the provisioning and the consuming of several digital services capable of actually improving daily quality of life as well as business opportunities. Data and computational power sharing, access to cloud computing resources and services, environmental smart monitoring, smart power-grids and smart-health solutions represent only a subset of the incoming opportunities that will help in the near future cities to become more comfortable and efficient.
Smart City initiatives often have environmental aspects. How can Smart Cities make an impact in ecology? What are some good examples?
The environmental impact is one of the main concerns when dealing with solutions involving an entire city: Smart City initiatives should be always shaped in a way suitable for promoting environmental sustainability. The adoption of novel technological drivers, indeed, should not be aimed only at boosting business opportunities but it should be also necessary to leverage these occasions for improving the ecology awareness of both citizenship and city managers, so that smart cities could become the best way for promoting ecologically sustainable innovation in our cities. Several examples of such actions can be cited: promoting intelligent and multi-modal urban transportations systems, using effective road traffic control systems, promoting a new conscience about pedestrians’ and bicycle drivers’ needs, favoring zero-emission business initiatives, focusing on climate adaptation needs and so on.
With program composition in mind, what trends in this field can we expect to see being covered?
The Technical Program Committee has been shaped in order to benefit from the expertise and experience of several scientists and researchers from the main academic European and extra-European institutions. A cross-disciplinary approach has been adopted in order to cover all the possible research fields that Smart Cities can deal with. As a consequence, we expect that IISSC 2017 will cover the most recent and promising research trends in e-health (with a particular interest in smart healthcare-support systems), smart agriculture and food management, smart power and energy systems (with a specific attention to smart buildings), smart transportation and logistics, smart environmental monitoring, sustainability and safety, e-education and e-inclusion, e-government and e-governance, e-tourism and e-culture, smart citizenships, socio-technical systems addressing Smart City scenarios, societal impacts of Smart City solutions.
IISSC 2017 is now accepting papers! Learn more.
