No abstract

Policy-making in local public administrations is still largely based on intuition rather than being backed up by data and evidence. The goal of this work is to introduce the methodology and software tools for contributing toward transforming the existing intuition-based paradigm of policy-making into an evidence-driven approach enabled by heterogeneous sources of data already available in the city. More specifically, methods for data collection, efficient data storage, and data analysis are implemented to measure the economic activity, assess the environmental impact and evaluate the social consequences of certain policy decisions. Subsequently, the extracted pieces of evidence are used to inform, advise, monitor, evaluate, and revise the decisions made by policy planners. Our contribution in this work is on outlining and deploying an easily extendable system architecture to harmonize and analyze heterogeneous data sources in ways that are found to be useful for policy-makers. For evaluating this architecture, we examine the case of a controlled parking system in the city of Thessaloniki and try to optimize its operation by balancing effectively between economic growth, environmental protection, and citizen satisfaction.

In this paper, we discuss how we can re-imagine the interaction between users (i.e. fashion designers and consumers) and fashion items, by researching and developing technologies that allow virtual try-on of garments. In this direction we a) generate personal 3D avatars of the user, b) automatically simulate the interaction between 3D user avatars and digital garments (i.e. size fitting and visualization of interactions during body movements), and c) extract fashion insights from user preference data and generate fashion recommendations. Building on recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision and interactive devices, we try to modernize the way people create, consume and experience fashion items by offering novel Human-Fashion-Interaction (HFI) applications that enhance the creative process of garment design, revolutionize the way people interact with fashion in social media, and simulate the physical in-store experience for online shopping.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Virtual reality.