Within this article, the strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourcing for idea generation and idea selection in the context of smart city innovation are investigated. First, smart cities are defined next to similar but different concepts such as digital cities, intelligent cities or ubiquitous cities. It is argued that the smart city-concept is in fact a more user-centered evolution of the other city-concepts which seem to be more technological deterministic in nature. The principles of crowdsourcing are explained and the different manifestations are demonstrated. By means of a case study, the generation of ideas for innovative uses of ICT for city innovation by citizens through an online platform is studied, as well as the selection process. For this selection, a crowdsourcing solution is compared to a selection made by external experts. The comparison of both indicates that using the crowd as gatekeeper and selector of innovative ideas yields a long list with high user benefits. However, the generation of ideas in itself appeared not to deliver extremely innovative ideas. Crowdsourcing thus appears to be a useful and effective tool in the context of smart city innovation, but should be thoughtfully used and combined with other user involvement approaches and within broader frameworks such as Living Labs.

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Smart ideas for smart cities: investigating crowdsourcing for generating and selecting ideas for ICT innovation in a city context

Extended research on interactive public displays deployed in a city center reveals differences between the public's stated information needs and their actual information behavior and highlights effects that an artificial environment cannot duplicate.

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Multipurpose Interactive Public Displays in the Wild: Three Years Later

After years in the lab, interactive public displays are finding their way into public spaces, shop windows, and public institutions They are equipped with a multitude of sensors as well as (multi-) touch surfaces allowing not only the audience to be sensed, but also their effectiveness to be measured The lack of generally accepted design guidelines for public displays and the fact that there are many different objectives (eg, increasing attention, optimizing interaction times, finding the best interaction technique) make it a challenging task to pick the most suitable evaluation method Based on a literature survey and our own experiences, this paper provides an overview of study types, paradigms, and methods for evaluation both in the lab and in the real world Following a discussion of design challenges, we provide a set of guidelines for researchers and practitioners alike to be applied when evaluating public displays

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How to evaluate public displays

Postgraduate Students: Vladimír Arnot, Daniel Čapek, Rudolf Čejka, Dao Minh, Tomá Dulík, Martin Hrubý, Radek Kočí, Petr Kotásek, Marek Křejpský, Bohuslav Křena, Vladislav Kubíček, Vladimír Marek, Petr Matouek, Ale Mičín, Jiří Očenáek, Tomá Ondráček, Petr Peňás, Jaroslav Ráb, Richard Růička, Luká Sekanina, Ivan Schwarz, Azedien Sllame, Petr Smolík, Jiří Staroba, Josef Strnadel, Luká Szemla, Pavel Tinovský, Michal Tomů, Milan Urbáek, Michal Vojkůvka, Petr Vurm, Frantiek Zbořil

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

We present the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of novel urban computing infrastructure called ‘UBI-hotspot’. It is effectively a large interactive public display embedded with other computing resources. We have deployed a network of UBI-hotspots around downtown Oulu, Finland, to establish a public laboratory for conducting experimental ubiquitous computing research in authentic urban setting with diverse real users and with sufficient scale and time span. We focus on the first version of the UBI-hotspot which offers a wide range of services via different interaction modalities. We analyze the usage and user acceptance of the UBI-hotspots from qualitative and quantitative data collected over a period of eight months. Our first observations show that this type of infrastructure may be a useful addition to the urban space.

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UBI-Hotspot 1.0: Large-Scale Long-Term Deployment of Interactive Public Displays in a City Center

We present a unique urban computing testbed for studying the utilization of ubiquitous computing technology in the public urban space of a city center. The testbed comprises of a wide range of pervasive computing infrastructure and different middleware resources. We demonstrate the applicability and benefits of the testbed in evaluating technology pilots and prototyping new ubiquitous services in real-world urban setting. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges in deploying this kind of a large-scale testbed in a public urban space.

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Open Urban Computing Testbed

We report a novel deployment of so-called UBI-hotspots in a city center to establish an ecosystem infrastructure for conducting diverse urban computing research and business in authentic urban setting. We focus on the value network of the hotspots where the commercial use of the hotspots generates revenue for covering their operational expenses. The value network has been validated by a 12-month long operation, during which the hotspots and their services have been available to the general public on 24/7 basis.

UBI-hotspots: sustainable ecosystem infrastructure for real world urban computing research and business

We introduce BlueInfo, an open architecture for deploying web services in WPAN hotspots for cost-free context-aware mobile access over Bluetooth. A BlueInfo hotspot either pushes subscribed services at desired intervals to registered devices (BlueInfo Push) or alternatively the user invokes a particular service by sending a simple keyword query to the hotspot (BlueInfo Pull). The BlueInfo hotspot requests the service from the origin server in the Internet and relays the response to the mobile device, possibly after adaptation for mobile viewing. The usability of BlueInfo Pull in comparison to a mobile phone browser is demonstrated with an empirical user evaluation conducted in a laboratory setting.

Fabio Kruger

Papers

Multipurpose Interactive Public Displays in the Wild: Three Years Later

UBI-Hotspot 1.0: Large-Scale Long-Term Deployment of Interactive Public Displays in a City Center

Open Urban Computing Testbed

UBI-hotspots: sustainable ecosystem infrastructure for real world urban computing research and business

BlueInfo: Open Architecture for Deploying Web Services in WPAN Hotspots