Siemens-CitySense

CitySense falls under the thematic areas of "Energy" and "Infrastructures, Urban Development and Environment" and targets smart cities & intelligent communities. The infrastructures and services a city provides to its officials, policy makers, inhabitants and visitors are critical factors for the quality of life of its citizens, the local economy, and the environment. However, designing and implementing efficient and effective interventions in urban environments is an extremely complex process; one that needs to take into account a large number of diverse factors and information that is often unavailable, incomplete, inaccurate, or dynamically changing over time. The Open Data initiative, the rise of high quality crowdsource data (e.g., Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap), and the proliferation of Social Media have changed this landscape by making available for the first time previously unattainable native data sources, which encompass our daily activities and can shed light across the complete spectrum of urban life.

Extracting actionable knowledge from such data is an open research area, with profound potential impact on urban life, energy provision, and sustainable commercialization. In this context, the proposed research focuses on all aspects of harvesting, management, analysis, adaptation, and intelligent decision-making that will enable us to leverage these new data sources as instruments for analyzing and facilitating the way people commute, interact, and utilize urban environments and resources.