Welcome message from the SCUCA 2013 chairs

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome all of you to the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Smart City and Ubiquitous Computing Applications - IEEE SCUCA 2013 held in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), Madrid Spain 3–7 June 2013. The mission of this workshop is to present recent achievements of ubiquitous computing as regards smart cities, urban planning and geo-informatics. In particular, this workshop addresses all the aforementioned issues by incorporating new technologies in the area of mobile communications, multimedia services, data storage and handling and ubiquitous computing. As more and more people leave villages and farms to live in cities, urban growth results. According to the UN State of the World Population 2007 report, sometime in the middle of 2007, the number of people living in cities and towns has overtook the number of people living in the rural areas and this event was recorded in the history as the arrival of the “Urban Millennium” or the ‘tipping point’. In regard to future trends, it is estimated 93% of urban growth will occur in developing nations, with 80% of urban growth occurring in Asia and Africa. Urged by these observations, city halls and political decision makers have become very alert, calling for urgent solutions to the growing problems. However, the recent advances in information and communication technologies may stimulate new solutions towards the urbanization problems. This is verified as a target research and innovation area in Horizon 2020 of European Union Policy under the challenge ‘Secure Clean and Efficient Energy’ with the main goal of jointly Smart Sustainable Cities. The aim is to integrate and validate ICT technologies and services in neighborhoods to make progress towards intelligent cities by exploiting ubiquitous technologies. In addition to technical developments, attention is given to innovative service business models which include security, safety and privacy issues.