Big Data Analytics for Smart Cities

In the last few years, cities have become engines of wealth creation thanks to the advent of the new information and communication. The capability to both generate and collect the data of public interest within the urban area (e.g., information about social events, public service usage, and mobility) has increased at an unprecedented rate, to such an extent that data rapidly scales towards big (urban) data. Such abundance creates an unprecedented opportunity to understand the way people interact in and with the urban environment, and enables researchers to tackle important and urgent urban challenges (e.g., traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy sustainability) by adding intelligence to the urban environment. The design and development of innovative services and solutions tailored to smart cities entails the acquisition, integration, and analysis of heterogeneous data (e.g., social network data, urban safety and security perception, mobility data, energy consumption data, and data that may increase citizen awareness on the urban environment). To collect, store, manage, and analyze data, as well as visualize the results of the data analysis process, in order to make them readable and usable by citizens, ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management and analytics models, and novel visualization methods should be devised.