As part of our MOOC on “Smart Cities: Technological and Societal Challenges”, participants contributed to activities aimed at identifying relevant initiatives worldwide.

The result of their work has been edited within two PDF documents (in French) that you may download from the following links:

• An inventory of smart cities and supporting urban digital services.
• Urban services for and by connected bicycles.

Enjoy the reading!

The Urban Life and Mobility Action Line of the European  EIT Digital organisation supports 2 transatlantic innovation activities that build upon collaborative research projects undertaken within the CityLab@Inria and Inria@SiliconValley initiatives, and benefit from the newly created IT Digital’s Silicon Valley hub:

• CivicBudget on “Software platform supporting Internet-based participatory budgeting campaigns” builds upon interdisciplinary research collaboration between CityLab@Inria and the SocialAppsLab at CITRIS at UC Berkeley. The activity leverages and integrates research results on Internet-scale service-oriented collaborative systems and online participatory democracy. Partners are CITRIS, Inria, MissionsPubliques, Nexus, and TU Berlin.
• Env&You on “Personalizing environmental science for your home, your neighborhood and your life” leverages and integrates research results on data assimilation and IOT-based, social and physical, mobile crowdsensing. Partners are Ambientic, CapDigital, Forum Virium Helsinki, Inria, NumTech, TheCivicEngine.

Both activities bring together European and California partners, with the aim of experimenting their solutions in at least 2 European and 1 California cities.

Both activities were launched the week of january 11, 2016, with the Kick off meetings being hosted by CITRIS at UC Berkeley.

The CityLab MOOC (in French) on smart city starts 25 January  and closes 28 February 2016.

The MOOC has been cited by LesEchos.fr as one of the MOOCs to follow to start 2016. See the article here.

Detail about the MOOC including registration may be found here.

Looking forward your participation – at least the French speaking ones 😉

Members of CityLab co-organize the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Sensors and Smart Cities (SSC) in May 2016 in St Louis, Missouri, in conjunction with SmartCOMP 2016.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together innovative developments in areas related to sensors and smart cities.

Call for papers is open till February 15th.

For more information, please visit http://ssc2016.unime.it

Listen to Interviews (in French) on new technologies developed in the SiliconValley and worldwide, including smart cities, on the occasion of the 10 years of the Atelier US.

Listen to the Podcast

An overview of Funding opportunities for smart cities is available Here.

The summary brings together the European grants, loans and equity investments supporting the roll-out of smart city solutions.

CityLab@Inria has been labelled as an Inria Project Lab for a period of 4 years, starting December 2015.

Inria Project Labs’ initiatives enable the launch of ambitious research projects directly linked with the institute. These programmes are often interdisciplinary and call on a wide range of skills.

Their key aim is mobilising and highlighting the expertise of Inria researchers around key challenges.

Visit the Inria Project Labs page to know more

Registration for the CityLab MOOC on Smart City to be given in French and entitled “Villes intelligentes : défis technologiques et sociétaux ” has now opened.

The MOOC will start on 25 January 2016 and close on 28 February 2016.

More here.

In the context of the COP21 (21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) held at the end of this year in Paris and of the 2020 Olympics Games and Paralympics Games in Tokyo, the Embassy of France in Japan and the Science Council of Japan jointly organize 2 days of scientific and technological symposium about Smart Cities, in partnership with the City of Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. This event will gather French and Japanese stakeholders (researchers from universities or research organizations, companies, public authorities and associations). This symposium aims at developing an integrated and innovative approach to design the future sustainable and Smart Cities through 4 major topics: smart resources network, transportation, buildings and citizen-centric digital services.

This symposium will be the first event of the French-Japanese year of Innovation that will be launched early October. It will be opened by speeches from the Ambassador of France in Japan as well as from both representatives of the city of Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

To know more:  http://www.institutfrancais.jp/smartcity

On Wednesday July 8, 2015, Inria announced the launch of SoundCity, a mobile application to measure your personal exposure to noise pollution. The project is supported by the City of Paris smart city initiative and Bernard Jomier, deputy mayor responsible for health, disability, and relations with Paris public hospital system.

Noise pollution, which lowers quality of life and harms health, is a serious environmental challenge in almost every major city. The noise levels found in most cities today can interfere with memory and learning, disturb sleep, and contribute to heart disease. In Paris, the urban ecology agency and the Bruitparif association currently rely on monitoring stations and computer simulations to understand noise exposure of citizens. SoundCity aims to complement these data with personal sound level exposure measurements collected with smartphones. SoundCity will also help citizens be more aware and engaged with noise in their environments.

To know more:

• SoundCity press release
• Soundcity
• UrbanCivics