Collective awareness and action in urban superorganisms

Abstract

Future urban scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. Citizens using their own capabilities integrated with ICT technologies could collaboratively constitute a large-scale socio-technical superorganism to support collective urban awareness and activities. This position paper, with the help of a representative case study, identifies the key challenges for future urban superorganisms and proposes a two-tier architecture to support their development.

Organizational and Technological Aspects of a Platform for Collective Food Awareness

“…Collective intelligence and nature-inspired computing represent an extremely interesting phenomenon that has been addressed in several application fields, e.g., smart cities [13], manufacturing [14], healthcare [15], energy [16], and finance [17].…”

Advances in Design for Inclusion

“…These technologies can be used to make new products, services and interactions designed to collect, increase and share information, knowledge, emotion, experience, through platforms which support higher social awareness. If applied then to the field of wellness, they can interact among each other, with the network and with the person, to drive, help and assist people, including socially vulnerable groups, towards an active, dynamic and athletic life, and they can become a means for monitoring the state of the user's wellbeing and health, with an eye to prevention and early diagnosis, and an important tool for studying and understanding the activity of the body on a large scale [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Following careful acquisition, review and integration of the data and basing our work on current technological macro-trends and the design opportunities that arise therefrom, our research led to definition of a DOS and several possible trajectories for innovation.…”

Logic Programming as a Service (LPaaS): Intelligence for the IoT

“…Accordingly, solveAfter methods have been introduced to enable fast-forwarding to the N+1 solution AfterN. The server implementation is realised exploiting a plurality of technologies that are commonly found in this field: in particular, the Business Logic is realised on the J2EE framework 3 , exploiting EJB 4 , while the database interaction is implemented Fig. 4.…”

“…The widespread adoption of the IoT perspective, according to which sensor networks, actuator devices, and computational resources seamlessly interact with people, is going to transform urban environments into smart environments -that is, physical environments enriched with sensing, actuating, communication, and computation skills -capable of acquiring and exploiting contextual knowledge so as to adapt to inhabitants' preferences, habits, and requirements [1]. People are thus continuously connected together and with their surrounding entities, in a situation-aware and socially-aware way that is increasingly shaping a dense ecosystem where ICT devices and people collaborate as they were a superorganism [2]in particular for complex urban services, such as intelligent transportation systems, environmental sustainability, and participatory governance [2], [3].…”