AIT Workshop: “Complexity Science – Big Data for Smart Cities”

June 17th 2015, AIT at Techgate Vienna

About the workshop

Smart City concepts are based on the use of new technologies to improve cities’ efficiency, livability, inclusiveness, and sustainability. Information and Communication Technologies play an essential role in this context by facilitating new and integrated concepts of energy, mobility, water or lightning systems, by connecting citizens and city administration, by providing a new basis for urban planning, design and participation. The degree to what the big promises of Smart Cities will be actually realized therefore largely depends the assessment, analysis & management of high dimensional and cross-sectional data of multiple kinds.

However, data is only part of the story. The success of Smart City ideas or its failure will essentially depend on the amount and quality of usable information that can be generated from that data. This will heavily depend on new methodical developments – partly provided by the science of complex adaptive systems. The synthesis of big data with methods of making usable sense of it might become a basis for new forms of decision making within the complex environment of cities, including participatory democracy, urban planning, and design. Failure of this synthesis might lead to an essentially disappointing outcome of the Smart City idea, by simply being unable to make use of the potential of the big data era.

This second workshop in this series aims at identifying major trends, demands, opportunities, and wishes related to big data driven applications for Smart Cities. Based on the special case of Vienna, urban practitioners and scientists will elaborate the need for action to tap the full potential of Smart Cities and to establish a ‘wish-list’ how complexity science could help addressing problems where current methodology comes to its limits. The workshop will be kick-started by contributions of internationally reknown speakers that should highlight several of the potentials that are within reach in the context of complexity science and Smart Cities. The aim of the workshop is a focused and structured discussion of the invited participants.