Week picks #12

OPEN CITY

Open City is a group of volunteers that create web apps with open data to improve transparency, efficiency, and decision-making for governments and our democracy.

CITISENSE

With the proliferation of personal mobile computing via mobile phones and the advent of cheap, small sensors, we propose that a new kind of "citizen infrastructure", CitiSense, can be made pervasive at low cost and high value. Though challenges abound in mobile power management, data security, privacy, inference with commodity sensors, and "polite" user notification, the overriding challenge lies in the integration of the parts into a seamless yet modular whole that can make the most of each piece of the solution at every point in time through dynamic adaptation. Using existing integration methodologies would cause components to hide essential information from each other, limiting optimization possibilities. Emphasizing seamlessness and information sharing, on the other hand, would result in a monolithic solution that could not be modularly configured, adapted, maintained, or upgraded.


ICRI - Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities

This new institute - a cooperation between University College London (UCL), Imperial College London and Intel - is concerned with how to enable future cities to be more connected and sustainable. This will entail investigating, developing and deploying adaptive technologies that can optimize resource efficiency, and enable new services that support and enhance the quality of life of urban inhabitants and city visitors. There are many fundamental technical, social and urban challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed to accomplish this. Our approach is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies from computer science, the social sciences, interaction design and architecture to improve how cities are managed and maintained in order to ensure and enhance citizen well-being.

Week picks series features every Friday some initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me to track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues of this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr while I wait to use them. Maybe this a good way.