Friday, Feb 25, 2022

Program:

9:00 – 10:15 am Panel Session: CityBrain/City Intelligence with Open Data

Moderator: Hua Wei

Panelists

Sobhan Moosavi (Lyft)
Stephanie Dietrick (City of Tempe)
Cy Chan (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Geoff Boeing (USC)

Modern technologies enable us to collect city data at an unprecedented speed. A wide range of city data has become increasingly available, such as taxi trips, surveillance camera data, human mobility data from mobile phones or location-based services, events, car accidents, shared bikes, POI, traffic from loop sensors, public transportation data, and many more. How can we utilize such large-scale city-data towards a smart city? In this panel, we invite researchers that have been dealing with city data to introduce how they use and organize the open-source city datasets, discuss the techniques, and share lessons learned in turning open data into knowledge and intelligence in urban scenarios.

10:30 – 12:00 pm Invited Papers

Chair: Beibei Li

Selected Papers:

1)

Title: Towards a cross-domain semantically interoperable ecosystem

Authors: Milenko Tosic (VLF) , Fábio André Coelho (INESC), Barry Nouwt (TNO), Sasa Pesic (VLF), Aleksandar Tomcic (VLF)  David Emanuel Rua (INESC)

Contact Email: Milenko Tosic, milenko.tosic@vizlore.com

Abstract: The increasing number of IoT devices and digital services offers cross-domain sensing and control opportunities to a growing set of stakeholders. The provision of cross-domain digital services requires interoperability as a key enabler to bridge domain specifics while inferring knowledge and allowing new data-driven services. This paper addresses the H2020 InterConnect project’s Interoperability Framework, highlighting the use of semantic web technologies. The interoperability framework layering is presented, particularly addressing the Semantic Interoperability layer as its cornerstone to build an interoperable ecosystem of cross-domain digital services via a federation of distributed knowledge bases. Departing from a generic, ontology-agnostic approach that can fit any cross-domain use case, it validates the approach by considering the SAREF family of ontologies, showcasing an IoT and energy cross-domain use case.

2)

Title: The Pit Stop Problem: How to Plan Your Next Road Trip

Authors: Kostas Kollias kostaskollias@google.com Kostas Kollias (Google Research)*; Sreenivas Gollapudi (Google Research); Debmalya Panigrahi (Duke University)

Contact mail: Kostas Kollias kostaskollias@google.com

Abstract: Many online trip planning and navigation software need to routinely solve the problem of deciding where to take stops during a journey for various services such as refueling (or EV charging), rest stops, food, etc. The goal is to minimize the overhead of these stops while ensuring that the traveller is not starved of any essential resource (such as fuel, rest, or food) during the journey. In this paper, we formally model this problem and call it the {\em pit stop} problem. We design algorithms for this problem under various settings: single vs multiple types of stops, and offline vs online optimization (i.e., in advance of or during the trip). Our algorithms achieve provable guarantees in terms of approximating the optimal solution. We then extensively evaluate our algorithms on real world data and demonstrate that they significantly outperform baseline solutions.

3)

Title: Inferring Users’ Demographics From Mobile Tasks

Authors: Yuan Tian (University of Nottingham)*; Ke Zhou (University of Nottingham); Dan Pelleg (Yahoo!)

Contact mail: Yuan Tian yuan.tian@nottingham.ac.uk

Abstract: App usage behaviors reveal rich clues regarding one’s personal attributes since users always determine what apps to use depending on their personal needs and interests. It might be possible to predict smartphone users’ demographic attributes through their app usage behaviours. However, most of the existing methods for predicting users’ gender and age are straightforward, such as simply using app lists or app usage frequency as features, without considering the internal semantic relationship of apps usage. Recently, mobile tasks have been identified from mobile app usage logs, representing a more accurate unit for capturing users’ goals and behavioural insights. In this paper, we leverage the fine-grained task units for generating user representation for demographic prediction. Compared to treating apps independently, we analysed the effectiveness of tasks for inferring users’ demographics. Secondly, we explored approaches for constructing users’ representation and models with both mobile apps and tasks, including Bag-of-Apps (BoA), embedding and neural-based methods. Finally, by experimenting on a real-world large-scale dataset, we validate that the task-based user modelling approach can effectively improve the performance of age and gender prediction based on app usage logs, outperforming existing baseline models.

12:15 – 1:30 pm Keynote

Speaker: Dominic Papa, Vice President, Arizona Commerce Authority

CONNECTIVE – Greater Phoenix Smart City Initiative

1:45 – 3:00 pm Panel Session: Digital Twins and Ontologies for Sustainable Cities

Moderator:  Dragan Boscovic

Panelists

David Rua (INESC TEC Portugal)
Jason Whittet (AWS Smart City Innovation Center)
Mic Bowman (Intel Research)
Antonio Sanfilippo (QEERI – Qatar)

As urban areas continue to grow, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in cities by 2030. Cities are also significant contributors to climate change and account for 70% of global carbon emissions. To minimize its environmental impacts, a smart city has to use information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency of urban operations. The smart city concept refers to an urban development approach that uses smart ways of information and communication technologies to enable smart water management, smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart waste management, smart electricity management, smart tourism, etc. Smart sus­tain­able cities have recognized the potential of digital twins for these solutions and use the concept of physical-virtual twin­ning to anticipate changing needs of the population or environmental conditions. With the advent of blockchain technology, the scope for digital twins has gone up remarkably to produce additional competencies and new use cases for smart cities. This panel session will discuss how to integrate and initiate newer opportunities for sustainable management of city resources.