Urban growth creates challenges recognized by the global community. Sustainable development is a widely accepted strategic framework in city planning and urban parks play an important role in it. Nonetheless, it is argued, that urban parks and other open green spaces are important for the quality of life of an increasingly urbanized society. Following the industrial revolution with its massive ...

Nowadays, researches on Smart Environments represent interesting challenges in pervasive computing. Indeed, remote services, wireless networks and miniaturized devices are becoming more and more diverse and affordable, as well as essential in our daily activities. Unfortunately, the most of these handled devices and services are rather isolated and cannot easily cooperate between each other. Mo...

One salient feature of data produced by the IoT is its heterogeneity. Despite this heterogeneity, future IoT applications including Smart Home, Smart City, Smart Energy services, will require that all data be easily compared, correlated and merged, and that interpretation of this resulting aggregate into higher level context better matches people needs and requirements. In this paper we propose...

On 9 October 2012 Gerrit Niezen successfully defended his PhD dissertation at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, entitled: “Ontologies for interaction: Enabling serendipitous interoperability in smart environments”. The work was supported by the SOFIA (Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications) project and funded through European JTI ARTEMIS under the subprogramme “Smart Envi...

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the c...

Over the past five years or so, in the streets of places like Seattle, Washington DC, Genoa, Goteborg and Montreal, an extraordinary and diverse protest movement has been critiquing and resisting the dominant political-economic order. That order is characterized by (1) the increasing control of large corporations over material life and the persistent extension of capitalist social relations; an...

That's it, a book to wait for in this month. Even you have wanted for long time for releasing this book big data and internet of things a roadmap for smart environments studies in computational intelligence; you may not be able to get in some stress. Should you go around and seek fro the book until you really get it? Are you sure? Are you that free? This condition will force you to always end u...

In the latest years the wind energy sector experienced an exponential growth all over the world. What started as a deployment of onshore projects, soon moved to offshore and, more recently to the urban environment within the context of smart cities and renewable micro-generation. However, urban wind projects using micro turbines do not have enough profit margins to enable the setup of comprehen...

In this paper the orchestration of wearable sensors with human computation is explored to provide map metadata for blind navigation. Technological navigation aids for blind must provide accurate information about the environment and select the best path to reach a chosen destination. Urban barriers represent dangers for the blind users. The dynamism of smart cities promotes a constant change of...

A large body of research has addressed many issues in smart environments, but few have taken a user-centric approach. We believe that one of the main reasons that smart environments are still largely unrealized is because research is technology-centric, with inadequate focus on users. Because everyone will use smart environments, it is important to study a variety of potential users. To help br...