EM 599:

Smart Cities and

their Ecosystems

Philip Odonkor
School of Systems and Enterprises
Buffalo, NY

South Africa
Ghana
Office: North Building 211

Best way to contact: Email  [email protected]

Office Hours (Virtual or In-person): TBD and by request

Activity 1: About you 10 mins

Introduce yourself to the class

• Where do you come from/where did you grow up?
• What degree program are you in?
• What are your research interests
Class Outline

• Logistics

• Course Structure

• Overview of Smart Cities Research

• Class Schedule

Intro to Smart Cities 6

Canvas Portal
sit.instructure.com

Intro to Smart Cities 7

About this class

Lectures: Tuesdays | 6:30 PM – 9 PM

Prerequisites:
Basic Math Knowledge
Basic Data Analysis Skills

Textbook:
Links to complementary readings will be provided.

Intro to Smart Cities 8

About this class

Good for students who want to:

- Do data-driven research related to smart cities/smart infrastructure
- Have hands-on experience with real data-driven projects
- Improve your academic writing skills

Not great for students who want to:

- Conduct intensive coding projects
- Work with both hardware and software

Intro to Smart Cities 9

01
Challenges Cities Face

Intro to Smart Cities 10

Challenges
Motivation for this class

• 3.9 billion people live in urban cities (>54% of world population)

• By 2050, that number will raise to 6 billion people (65% world pop.)

How can we provide cities with adequate energy,

mobility, water and other urban services?

Cities must become smarter.

Intro to Smart Cities 12

 Scales of action

Individual Community State Planet

Building City Country

Bottom-Up Approach Top-Down Approach

(this class)

Focus on citizens and how we can use innovative technologies and open data to create solutions to issues that matter to them
and enable behavior change.
Intro to Smart Cities 13
Motivation for this class

How can we exploit data to help us design

smarter, more sustainable, and livable cities?

Intro to Smart Cities 14

Scope of Course

1. An overview of the core enabling technologies: instrumentation, data,

systems of insight, and systems of engagement.
2. Explore key city infrastructure: buildings, energy, water, transportation.
3. Address both the supply (efficiency, effectiveness) and demand
(consumption behavior) sides of the equation.
4. Role of policy in realizing the promise of technology.
5. Key challenges to overcome: inclusion, security, privacy, skills, and policy

Intro to Smart Cities 15

Learning Objectives

1. Demonstrate a systems approach reimagines cities as complex

socio-technical systems.

2. Understand the impact of technology/data on urban infrastructure

3. Develop socio-technical and data-driven solutions to sustainability

challenges facing cities.

Intro to Smart Cities 16

Grading

1. Homework: 20%
2. Midterm Exam: 15% Individual Effort (50%)
3. Final Exam: 15%
4. Course Paper: 50% Group Effort* (50%)

*Maximum groups of 2 students

Intro to Smart Cities 17

02
Course Project

Intro to Smart Cities 18

Course Paper (50% final grade)

At the end of this course, you will submit an 8-10 page conference-
quality research paper addressing a smart city challenge.

• You can work in teams of 2 (or individually if you wish)

• I will guide teams to select a suitable topic

Intro to Smart Cities 19

Smart Transportation
Example Topics
• Finding smart driving directions
• Large-Scale dynamic taxi ridesharing
The Intelligent Environment
• Instant travel time estimation of a path
• Infer and forecast fine-grained air quality
• Traffic predictions for a bike sharing system
• Suggest locations for monitoring stations
• Diagnose urban noises using big data
• Pollution emissions from vehicles
Big Data-Driven Urban Planning
• Discover functional regions in a city
Urban Economy using Big Data
• Glean underlying problems in road networks
• Rank real estates based on big data
• Location selection for ambulance stations
• Large-scale Dynamic City Express
• Detecting urban black holes by human mobility
• Construct popular routes from check-ins
• Planning bike lanes based on sharing-bikes’ trajectories

Urban Energy
Detecting Urban Anomalies • City-wide gas consumption of vehicles
• Detect collective anomalies based on cross-domain datasets • Indoor air quality monitoring for buildings
• Detect and diagnose traffic anomalies
• Predict flow of crowds in every region of a city
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/urban-computing/
Example
Datasets

https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/projects/
03
What is a City?

Intro to Smart Cities 22

Name this City

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Intro to Smart Cities 23
Name this City

Sydney, Australia
Intro to Smart Cities 24
Name this City

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Intro to Smart Cities 25
Name this City

Rome, Italy
Intro to Smart Cities 26
Activity 2
What is a city?

Task: Tell us what a city means to you.

• What is the first thing that comes to

mind when you imagine a city?

• What are the best/worst parts of cities?

Intro to Smart Cities 27

What is a City?
It is a densely populated area where people live and work together.

Some see cities as

political systems

Economists see
cities as economic We will look at cities as
systems social + technological
systems

Sociologists see cities as

social systems
Intro to Smart Cities 28
Cities as Complex Socio-technical
Systems

Natural: drought, groundwater

Human: attitudes, household usage, population growth
Social: data, media coverage
Physical: leaking pipes, desalination equipment availability
Political: government leadership, policies
Industrial: water use for industry and agriculture

Intro to Smart Cities 29

04
What is a Smart City?

Intro to Smart Cities 30

What is a Smart City?

Are you aware of any smart cities?

If so, have you visited their website to find the aims

and objectives of their smart city program?

Intro to Smart Cities 31

Intro to Smart Cities 32
Intro to Smart Cities 33
How are smart cities ranked?

Intro to Smart Cities 34

Hoboken as
a Smart City.

Intro to Smart Cities 35

 What is a Smart City?

The effective integration of physical, digital and human systems

in the built environment to deliver sustainable, prosperous and
inclusive future for its citizens

(British Standards Institute , 2014)

Intro to Smart Cities 36

What are Smart Cities?

1. How should we think about them?

2. How should we conceptualize them?
3. How are they shaped by smart technologies?

8/29/2023 Intro to Smart Cities 37

 Smart Cities :
A Systems Thinking Approach

Intro to Smart Cities Source (Linkedin) @meganmcfadden 38

Homelessness

Intro to Smart Cities 39

Homelessness
Problem: People live on the streets (i.e. a symptom of root causes)

Common Solution: Homeless shelters are created to provide food, shelter, and
sanitation for this population of people (i.e. treating the symptom).

Issue: We are tackling homelessness in isolation Source (Linkedin) @meganmcfadden

Systems thinking:
Homelessness must be solved by addressing the root causes
of homelessness — oftentimes poverty, affordable housing,
mental illness, and substance abuse.

Intro to Smart Cities 40

Cities: System of Systems

Source (Linkedin) @meganmcfadden

Intro to Smart Cities 41

Activity 2
How do smart cities compare?

Task: Identify 3 different smart cities around the world.

Think about the following questions:

1. What is unique about each smart city?

2. Are the smart city solutions using a top-down or bottom-up approach?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches you’ve seen?
4. What do you think influenced the approaches the cities have taken?
5. Can you see any of these smart city approaches being applied to Hoboken?

Intro to Smart Cities 42

EM 599 Smart City Project Ideas Template

Design thinking Questions Ideas Weekly Topics

stage

Empathize What challenges would your city of Weeks 1:

interest face in the next 10 years?
City challenges, systems thinking, rich
picture, core elements of a smart city.

Define Define the city problem that you Week 2:

want to solve.
Role of citizens, design thinking, citizen
Which people or organizations are ideas platforms, living labs, open
impacted by the problem or might innovation, co-creation, rethinking city
have an influence on the problem? design.

Ideate Who/what data would you need to Week 3:

solve/address the problem?
Smart infrastructure, city sensors, data
What are your ideas for solving the (big, open, closed and shared), privacy,
problem? ethics.

Week 4:

Markets and finance, smart city

ecosystem, data economy, city open data,
hackathons, digital social innovation,
crowdfunding.

Intro to Smart Cities 43

Source: The Open University