The InterSCity project, a collaborative research effort about smart cities and the future internet that involves several Brazilian universities, is promoting a series of 4 open webinars on some of the most exciting advances made by its members. The webinars, which will also count with international guest speakers, will take place on 04/11, 18/11, 03/12, and 13/12, always at 14h00.
The fourth webinar (registration at https://interscity.org/register-webinar-4), on December 13th, comprises three presentations:
Title: Unveiling urban phenomena through digital traces
Abstract: As layers of networks and digital information blanket urban space, new approaches to the study of the built environment are emerging. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed—as are the tools we use to design them. In this presentation, I will explore how we can use digital tools to understand urban phenomena in novel ways. Examples include Desirable Streets, in which we quantify what makes some street more desirable than others by analyzing hundreds of thousands of actual pedestrians trips in Boston, based on data collected via self-tracking apps; and Favelas 4D, in which we’re combining community involvement with handheld laser scanning technologies and methods to mathematically understand the complex urban environment of informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro.
Fabio Duarte is a principal research scientist in the MIT Senseable City Lab, and lecturer in transportation and planning at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His book Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology and Design will be launched in 2021, by MIT Press.
Title: Federated Learning to predict traffic jam levels
Presenter: Matteus Vargas Simão da Silva (Unicamp)
Title: DAGSec: A hybrid distributed ledger architecture for the secure management of the Internet of Things
Presenter: Igor Drummond Alvarenga (GTA/UFRJ)
Please note that, while attendance is free of charge, you must register beforehand at https://interscity.org/register-webinar-4.
The third webinar took place on December 3rd, with three presentations:
Title: Urban Play: Technology, Play and Place Making
Abstract: Ricardo Álvarez will discuss his latest book (cowritten with Fabio Duarte), where they argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. He will discuss how technology can become powerful through dynamics of play and experimentation, and how they can be leveraged to create new experiences and syntheses of spatial design and develop emotionally resonant spaces. He will discuss examples of such dynamics both at the architectural and urban scales and will look at parallel industries and technologies that are currently being used to co-design spaces and experiences in the virtual world, which could be leveraged to improve the way we transform our physical environments.
Dr. Ricardo Álvarez is an academic and researcher whose work focuses on exploring the boundaries of digital technologies used for urban design purposes. He has performed research and teaching work as part of the City Design and Development Group and as a member of the Senseable City Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past nine years.
Dr. Alvarez has participated in urban innovation research projects that use Mixed Media, IoT, and A.I. in cities as diverse as Dallas, Laval, Cambridge, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Shenzhen, Paris, Medellin, Curitiba, and others. While his work covers a wide range of topics, from autonomous vehicles to urban innovation districts, and smart infrastructure systems, his passion lies in exploring processes that foster social imagination for spatial design, in particular on the collaborative use of VR and AR platforms for new urban systems and public spaces design. He considers himself a life-long gamer and is a strong proponent of cross-pollination between disciplines that create interactive spaces both in the physical and virtual realms, such as architecture, urban planning, video games, and synthetic simulations development.
Before MIT, he worked in the Mexican Federal Government as a founding member of ProMexico (the country’s Trade and Investment promotion Federal Agency), as well as in media, retail, financial industries.
Title: SDN-based Intent-driven IoT Networks
Presenter: Roberto Rodrigues Filho (UFG)
Title: Data-driven Analysis of fixed-route service reliability
Presenter: Diego Da Silva (UFABC)
The second webinar took place on November 18th, comprising three presentations:
Title: Dataspaces: Enabling Next-Generation Big Data Platform Architecture for Data Ecosystems
Abstract: Digital transformation is driving a new wave of large-scale datafication in every aspect of our world. Today our society creates data ecosystems where data moves among actors within complex information supply chains that can form around an organization, community, sector, or smart environment. These ecosystems of data can be leveraged to transform our world and present new challenges and opportunities in the design of intelligent systems. This talk presents my recent work on using the dataspace paradigm as a best-effort approach to data management within data ecosystems. The talk explores the theoretical foundations and principles of dataspaces and details a set of specialized best-effort techniques and models to enable loose administrative proximity and semantic integration of heterogeneous data sources. Finally, future dataspace research challenges, including data governance and the role of dataspaces to power data-driven AI are discussed.
Edward Curry is a Professor of Computer Science at the Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University. He is a Principal Investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics (www.insight-centre.org) and a funded investigator at LERO The Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie). His research interests are predominantly in open distributed systems, particularly in the areas of incremental data management (e.g. dataspaces), approximation and unstructured events types, with a special interest in applications for smart environments and data ecosystems. His research work is currently focused on engineering adaptive systems that are a foundation of smart and ubiquitous computing environments. He has given invited talks at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. He is Vice President of the Big Data Value Association (www.BDVA.eu) a non-profit industry-led organisation with the objective of increasing the competitiveness of European Companies with data-driven innovation.
Title: Application Studies of IoT Devices for Landslide Monitoring
Presenter: Alessandro Santiago dos Santos (IPT)
Title:Acceleration of Smart City Simulations
Presenter: Daniel Cordeiro (EACH-USP)
The first webinar took place on November 4th, with three presentations:
Title: Urban mobility: using mathematical models to predict where and how often we go
Abstract: Understanding the patterns underlying human mobility in urban areas is essential to better plan cities, engineering traffic, and mitigating diseases. However, existing studies have characterized only some spatial features of mobility — such as travel distance — overlooking an important temporal feature: how frequently do we visit a particular place? And, how is this visitation frequency related to the distance we traveled? Modeling the interplay between spatial and temporal features of mobility is critical; for instance, it can provide urban planners with the information to best place a shopping mall to attract customers.
The analysis of over 8 billion human mobility traces collected over four continents reveal that humans have a natural tendency of trading off travel distance with frequency: the further we travel, the less frequently we do it, according to a “visitation law” that can be described through a simple mathematical law. We will then show how this striking discovery can be used to better locate businesses and facilities in urban spaces, and find more effective containment strategies for disease spreading.
Paolo Santi is Principal Research Scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab and Research Director at the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR, Pisa, Italy. Dr. Santi holds a “Laurea” degree and the PhD in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Santi is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and has recently been recognized as Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. His research interest is in the modeling and analysis of complex systems ranging from wireless multi hop networks to sensor and vehicular networks and, more recently, smart mobility and intelligent transportation systems. In these fields, he has contributed more than 160 scientific papers and two books.
Title: BikeScience: Visual Analytics of Active Mobility, Assessment of the Cycling Potential of a Large Metropolis
Presenters: Higor Amario de Souza (RAD/IME-USP) and Pedro Freire (IME-USP)
Title: Analyzing the Mobility of Patients in a Large National Health System at Different Levels
Presenters: Lucas Stankus and Gabriely Pereira (IME-USP)
