Cities and urban areas in combination with sustainability and circular economy form a significant part of the current research landscape and are an ideal platform for researchers and practitioners to test new technologies, concepts, and applications. In Europe and the US, the population living in urban areas accounts for more than 75 percent. Therefore, applications that are targeting urban areas can positively influence a significant fraction of the population in terms of various social benefits. In addition, the majority of the planet’s resources are consumed in cities. This, in turn, creates a significant potential for reducing the environmental impact of humankind by enhancing and optimizing the physical infrastructure digitally.

The ongoing advances in Pervasive Computing technology have delivered interesting hardware platforms that are suitable for city-scale infrastructure deployments. In addition, the success of mobile communication devices and mobile broadband connectivity enables citizens to tap into the digital resources that surround them anytime and anywhere. Another foremost important technology for building the future generations of smart city applications is intelligent (real-time) analytics and decision making by processing streaming sensor data available from the surrounding environment. With such data, both centralized analytics and decentralized analytics could play a key role in data sense-making and decision-making. In addition, such analysis can be combined with data from increasingly deployed fixed sensors or IoT infrastructure in the city. Recently researchers are actively engaged in finding the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in solving various data analytics and decision-making problems related to Smart Cities, which can benefit society as a whole.

Recent advancements in fields like the digital twin have brought forth additional challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing space, especially when having in mind the point of view of smart cities as “systems of systems”. In most cases, a multi-disciplinary approach is required for designing and implementing systems for smart circular cities, and such aspects are at the core of this workshop.

Therefore PerAwareCity & WSCC solicits papers addressing relevant topics, including - but not limited to - the following:

•Smart City systems and platforms
•Smart Cities as a system of systems
•6G and alternative communication architectures
•IoT, edge/fog, and cloud computing for smart and circular cities
•Experiences from real-world applications, experiments, and deployments
•Smart City pilots and applications, e.g. smart traffic management, smart healthcare (including approaches adopted for fighting COVID-19 virus), smart grid, smart waste management, pollution control and management, environmental sustainability, water quality monitoring, criminal activity profiling
•Applications of AI for smart cities
•Crowd-sourcing and human computation
•Internet of Things, Web and Linked Data technologies for Smart Cities
•Data management, open data and knowledge extraction in smart cities
•Big data in Smart City, Smart City Intelligent Data Processing
•Cyber-physical systems and society
•End-user involvement, acceptance, and user support aspects
•Participatory sensing and processing
•Sensor, Actuators and their networking in Smart Cities
•Safety, security, and privacy for Smart City applications
•Scalability of Smart City systems and beyond (Smart Regions / Countries)
•Adaptable, recoverable, and fault tolerant Smart City systems
•Management, configuration, and deployment of Smart City infrastructures, Smart Infrastructure Health Monitoring
•Accessibility in Smart Cities (e.g., designing accessible routes for users with mobility assistant devices)
•Citizen science and education-related aspects related to smart cities and circular economy
•Digital Twins and their application in Smart Cities and Sustainability
•People-centric systems and crowdsensing solutions in smart cities
•Studies on behavioral change aspects for sustainability
•Tools and techniques for urban co-creation

We expect researchers and members of the industry working on smart cities, the IoT, aspects of applied research on the circular economy, among other groups, will be interested to share their research and findings with the greater PerCom community. Moreover, the workshop is organized in collaboration with the recently established IEEE Special Technical Community (STC) on Smart and Circular Cities (https://smartcircularcity.isi.gr/). The STC aims to address technologies, systems, applications, and services in the Smart and Circular Cities domain and become a strong committee in the field, enabling the IEEE Computer Society to become a leading authority in the field. We also welcome papers on novel applications or environments that have a strong Smart City component, especially if those novel applications and environments challenge existing ideas and design techniques.