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"Visvizi, Anna"
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Energy Sustainability in Smart Cities: Artificial Intelligence, Smart Monitoring, and Optimization of Energy Consumption
Energy sustainability is one of the key questions that drive the debate on cities’ and urban areas development. In parallel, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing have emerged as catalysts in the process aimed at designing and optimizing smart services’ supply and utilization in urban space. The latter are paramount in the domain of energy provision and consumption. This paper offers an insight into pilot systems and prototypes that showcase in which ways artificial intelligence can offer critical support in the process of attaining energy sustainability in smart cities. To this end, this paper examines smart metering and non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) to make a case for the latter’s value added in context of profiling electric appliances’ electricity consumption. By employing the findings in context of smart cities research, the paper then adds to the debate on energy sustainability in urban space. Existing research tends to be limited by data granularity (not in high frequency) and consideration of about six kinds of appliances. In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm support vector machine multiple kernel learning approach (GA-SVM-MKL) is proposed for NILM, with consideration of 20 kinds of appliance. Genetic algorithm helps to solve the multi-objective optimization problem and design the optimal kernel function based on various kernel properties. The performance indicators are sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp) and overall accuracy (OA) of the classifier. First, the performance evaluation of proposed GA-SVM-MKL achieves Se of 92.1%, Sp of 91.5% and OA of 91.8%. Second, the percentage improvement of performance indicators using proposed method is more than 21% compared with traditional kernel. Third, results reveal that by keeping different modes of electric appliance as identical class label, the performance indicators can increase to about 15%. Forth, tunable modes of GA-SVM-MKL classifier are proposed to further enhance the performance indicators up to 7%. Overall, this paper is a bold and novel contribution to the debate on energy utilization and sustainability in urban spaces as it integrates insights from artificial intelligence, IoT, and big data analytics and queries them in a context defined by energy sustainability in smart cities.
Journal Article
Politics and Technology in the Post-Truth Era
Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have directly impacted the way in which politics operates today. Bringing together research on Europe, the US, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, this book examines the relationship between ICT and politics in a global perspective.Technological innovations such as big data, data mining, sentiment analysis, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, social media and blockchain technology are reshaping the way ICT intersects with politics and in this collection contributors examine these developments, demonstrating their impact on the political landscape. Chapters examine topics such as cyberwarfare and propaganda, post-Soviet space, Snowden, US national security, e-government, GDPR, democratization in Africa and internet freedom.Providing an overview of new research on the emerging relationship between the promise and potential inherent in ICT and its impact on politics, this edited collection will prove an invaluable text for students, researchers and practitioners working in the fields of Politics, International Relations and Computer Science.
eBook
The New Silk Road Leads through the Arab Peninsula: Mastering Global Business and Innovation
This book is an incisive query into the origins, implications and opportunities that China's Belt and Road Initiative creates for stakeholders in Asia and the Arab World. It emphasises the role of cutting-edge technology in boosting collaboration in the fields of politics, economics, business, and culture across regions, countries and continents.
eBook
Clustering Smart City Services: Perceptions, Expectations, Responses
Smart cities research evolved into one of the most vibrant fields of research and policy-making with sustainability and well-being becoming the bons mots of the debate. The business sector, i.e., the developers and the vendors, form an equally important group of stakeholders in this context. The question is to what extent that debate yields the kind of output that the end-users would expect and would consider useful and usable. A plethora of smart city services exists. Literature suggests that a myriad of new ICT-enhanced tools could find application in urban space. Methodologically speaking, the question is how to link these two meaningfully. The objective of this paper is to address this issue. To this end, smart city services are mapped and clusters of services are identified; end users’ perceptions and expectations are identified and observations are drawn. The value added of this paper is threefold: (i) at the conceptual level, it adds new insights in the ‘normative bias of smart cities research’ thesis, (ii) at the empirical level, it typifies smart city services and clusters them, and (iii) it introduces a practical toolkit that policymakers, regulators, and the business sector might employ to query end-users’ perceptions and expectations to effectively respond to citizens’ needs.
Journal Article
Software Development Methodologies, HEIs, and the Digital Economy
Progressing digitalization of business, economy, and the society places higher education institutions (HEIs) in the center of the debate on how to effectively respond to challenges and opportunities that are thus triggered. Several facets of this process and corresponding challenges exist, including the complex question of how to match students’ skills and competencies with the demands and expectations of the industry. From a different angle, considering the changing nature of work, HEIs are responsible for equipping future employees with skills necessary to work in virtual, distributed, culturally diverse, and frequently global, teams. In the domain of software development, i.e., the backbone of the digital world, the challenge HEIs need to face is paramount. For this reason, the way software development is taught at HEIs is crucial for the industry, for the economy, for the students, and for the HEIs. As there is a tendency in the industry to embrace the scrum method and seek employees equipped with skills necessary for the scrum methodology use, it is necessary to ensure that HEIs offer the students the opportunity to get exposed to scrum. By querying the challenges of switching to agile software development methodologies in senior capstone projects, this paper makes a case that software development and software development methodology form the thrust of a multi-stakeholder ecosystem that defines today’s digital economy and society. In this context, the added value of this paper rests in the elaboration of a method enabling HEIs to move toward scrum in senior projects.
Journal Article
The Future of Innovation and Technology in Education: Policies and Practices for Teaching and Learning Excellence
This book explores the effective use of information and communication technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. Concept-laden and practice-driven discussions offer insights into the art and practice of employing virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), electronic devices, social networks and massive open online courses (MOOCs) in education.
eBook
The VWRCA index: Measuring a country's comparative advantage and specialization in services. The case of Poland
In the extant body of literature on the servitization of the economy, on the one hand, and determinants of growth and development, on the other, the classic question of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) plays a prominent role. Regardless of the popularity, relevance, and validity of the use of the RCA as a part of multivariate queries on the above topics, this paper argues that the RCA alone offers a rather static insight into a country's economic performance. Most importantly, the classic take on the RCA does not allow us to query a country's comparative advantage and degree of specialization in the services sector. By inserting itself in the broader discussion on ways of bypassing the limitations inherent in the classic RCA index, this paper proposes a novel take on the RCA index, i.e., the Visvizi-Wosiek RCA (VWRCA) index, and, subsequently, applies it to the study of the evolution of the services sector in Poland over the period 2010-2019. The added value of the VWRCA index is threefold. (i) By recognizing the increasing role of services in the global economy, it serves as a useful tool in queries aimed at examining the structure of a given economy, the degree of specialization in the production of certain services, and the real revealed comparative advantage a country has in the production of a certain group/category of services. (ii) By focusing solely on services, the VWRCA index allows us to examine the volume and velocity of trade in services independently from the volume of trade in goods. (iii) Due to the resulting methodological accuracy, it enables the inclusion of a temporal dimension in the analysis, which in turn gives cues as to specific developments and the actual performance of a given economy regarding the evolution of the services sector.
Journal Article
Study of image sensors for enhanced face recognition at a distance in the Smart City context
Smart monitoring and surveillance systems have become one of the fundamental areas in the context of security applications in Smart Cities. In particular, video surveillance for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) applied to the recognition of potential offenders and to the detection and prevention of violent acts is a challenging task that is still undergoing. This paper presents a method based on deep learning for face recognition at a distance for security applications. Due to the absence of available datasets on face recognition at a distance, a methodology to generate a reliable dataset that relates the distance of the individuals from the camera, the focal length of the image sensors and the size in pixels of the target face is introduced. To generate the extended dataset, the Georgia Tech Face and Quality Dataset for Distance Faces databases were chosen. Our method is then tested and applied to a set of commercial image sensors for surveillance cameras using this dataset. The system achieves an average accuracy above 99% for several sensors and allows to calculate the maximum distance for a sensor to get the required accuracy in the recognition, which could be crucial in security applications in smart cities.
Journal Article
Conceptualizing Walking and Walkability in the Smart City through a Model Composite w2 Smart City Utility Index
This paper explores walking and walkability in the smart city and makes a case for their centrality in the debate on the resilience and sustainability of smart cities, as outlined in the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is argued that, while the human/inhabitant-centric paradigm of urban development consolidates, and research on walking, walkability, and pedestrian satisfaction flourishes, the inroads of ICT render it necessary to reflect on these issues in the conceptually- and geographically-delimited space of the smart city. More importantly, it becomes imperative to make respective findings useful and usable for policymakers. To this end, by approaching walking and walkability through the lens of utility, the objective of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework in which the relevance of walking and walkability, hereafter referred to as w2, as a distinct subject of research in the smart cities debate is validated. This framework is then employed to construct a model of a composite w2 smart city utility index. With the focus on the development of the conceptual framework, in which the w2 utility index is embedded, this paper constitutes the first conceptual step of the composite index development process. The value added of this paper is three-fold: First, the relevance of walking and walkability as a distinct subject of research in the realm of smart cities research is established. Second, a mismatch between end-users’ satisfaction derived from walking and their perception of walkability and the objective factors influencing walking and walkability is identified and conceptualized by referencing the concept of utility. Third, a model smart city w2 utility index is proposed as a diagnostic and prognostic tool that, in the subsequent stages of research and implementation, will prove useful for decisionmakers and other stakeholders involved in the process of managing smart cities.
Journal Article