Important Dates
• April 20, 2013: Paper Submission Deadline
• May 20, 2013: Notification Decision
• May 30, 2013: Camera Ready Due
• August, 2013: Workshop date

Description

Cities around the world aspire to provide superior quality of life to their citizens. Furthermore, many are also seen as centers of unique opportunities, like business, fashion, entertainment and governance, for their citizens. Cities want to retain such pre-eminent positions or re-position themselves for newer opportunities. But, resources needed to reach and sustain such aspirations are decreasing while the expectations continue to rise from an increasing population-base. A positive trend of the Internet age is that more data than even before is open and accessible, including from governments at all levels of jurisdiction, which enables rigorous analysis.

The scientific community has responded to city challenges by promoting the computational sustainability vision where resources consumed by a city, such as water, energy, land, food and air, can be monitored to know the accurate present picture and then optimized for resource efficiency without degrading quality of services it provides -traffic movement, water availability, sanitation, public safety, etc. Industry has joined the vision with a “smart” or “intelligent” prefix for cyber-physical systems, which involve sensing the data through physical instruments, interconnecting and integrating them from multiple sources and analyzing them for intelligent patterns. This effort needs access to city data, semantic models to abstract city domains as well as interconnect them so that advanced applications can be built by rest of the world. We will like to call cities that enable such capabilities as, “semantic cities”.
In a Semantic City, available resources are harnessed safely, sustainably and efficiently to achieve positive, measurable economic and societal outcomes. Enabling City information as a utility, through a robust (expressive, dynamic, scalable) and (critically) a sustainable technology and socially synergistic ecosystem could drive significant benefits and opportunities. Data (and then information and knowledge) from people, systems and things is the single most scalable resource available to City stakeholders to reach the objective of semantic cities.

Two major trends are supporting semantic cities – open data and semantic web. “Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control .” A number of cities and government have made their data publicly available, prominent being London (UK), Chicago (USA), Washington DC (USA), Dublin (Ireland). Semantic web as the technology to inter-connect heterogeneous data has matured and it is being increasing used in the form of Linked Open Data and formal ontologies. Thus, a playfield for more AI research-driven technologies for cities has emerged e.g., scalable, efficient, robust, optimal AI techniques.
In this context, the aims of the workshop are to:
1. Draw the attention of the AI community to the research challenges and opportunities in semantic cities.
2. Draw the attention on the multi-disciplinary dimension and its impact on semantic cities e.g., transportation, energy, water management, building, infrastructure, healthcare
3. Identify unique issues of this domain and what new (hybrid) techniques may be needed. As example, since governments and citizens are involved, data security and privacy are first-class concerns.
4. Promoting more cities to become semantic cities
5. Elaborating a (semantic data) benchmark for testing AI techniques on semantic cities
6. Provide a platform for sharing best-practices and discussion
We encourage submissions that show the relevance or application of AI technologies for computational sustainability domains. In addition to a focus on foundational technologies for semantic cities (information management, knowledge management, ontology, inference model, data integration), we want to promote illustrative use-cases using the semantic cities foundation. Examples are transportation (traffic prediction, personal travel optimization, carpool and fleet scheduling), public safety (suspicious activity detection, disaster management), healthcare (disease diagnosis and prognosis, pandemic management), water management (flood prevision, quality monitoring, fault diagnosis), food (food traceability, carbon-footprint tracking), energy (smart grid, carbon footprint tracking, electricity consumption forecasting) and buildings (energy conservation, fault detections). We also encourage submissions that address unique characteristics of standard AI enabling sustainability problems, like optimization, reasoning, planning and learning. Outside AI, we encourage submission from communities engaged in open data and corresponding standardization efforts, to make their work available at this AI forum.

Topics of interest include, but not restricted to, are:
1. Process to open city (government) data
2. Platforms to manage government data
3. Provenance, access control and privacy-preserving issues in open data
4. Data cities interoperability
5. Semantic models – especially those built collaboratively and evolving
6. Data integration and organization in semantic cities (social media feeds, sensor data)
7. Internet of Things in semantic cities
8. Robust inference models for semantic cities
9. Semantic Event detection and classification
10. Applications in semantic cities e.g., transportation, public safety, healthcare, water / energy / building management
11. Spatio-temporal reasoning, analysis and visualization
12. User interaction in exploring semantic data of cities
13. Knowledge representation and reasoning challenges
14. Knowledge acquisition, evolution and maintenance
15. Challenges with managing and integrating real-time and historical data
16. Managing “big data” using knowledge representation models
17. Integrated systems
18. Applied AI models for semantic cities
19. Issues in scaling out and applying AI techniques for semantic cities
20. Case studies, successes, lessons learnt
21. Public datasets and competitions
22. Intelligent user interface

Workshop Serie

The workshop continues the first workshop on semantic cities at AAAI 2012 (Semantic Cities 2012), which attracted 30 attendees, with background from Knowledge Representation, AI Planning and scheduling, Multi-Agent Systems, Constraints Satisfiability and Search.

Workshop Plan

Workshop Format: The workshop will consist of papers, poster presentations, demonstrations, a panel, an invited talk, and discussion sessions, in a one full day schedule. The invited talk will invite a leading expert in the field to present their research and vision of future work. The panel will focus on connecting the AI researchers to the various challenges that the targeted domain brings. The schedule will follow the schedule of the 2012 edition, all grouped by topic and type (invited talk, long, short and demonstration papers, panel).
Submission Guidelines: All papers submissions must be in IJCAI format. They can be one of two types. The first is regular research papers, which can be up to 6 pages long and are expected to present a significant contribution. The second is short submission of up to 4 pages which describes a position on the topic of the workshop or a demonstration/tool.
Submission site: Papers are to be submitted online at at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semcities13. We request interested authors to login and submit abstracts as an expression of interest before the actual deadline.


The Organizers
Co-Chairs:

Freddy Lecue
IBM Research – Smarter Cities Technology Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Email : freddy lecue at ie.ibm.com

Biplav Srivastava
IBM Research - India, New Delhi, India
Email: sbiplav at in.ibm.com

Zaiqing Nie
Microsoft Research
Email: znie at microsoft.com
Steering Committee:

Pol Mac Aonghusa, IBM Research, Ireland
Christian Guttmann, IBM Research, Australia
Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
Craig Knoblock, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, USA
Rahguram Krishnapuram, IBM Research, India
Stefan Schulte, The University of Vienna, Austria
Program Committee:

Mathieu D’Aquin, Open University, UK
Pol Mac Aonghusa, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Soren Auer, Univeristy of Leipzig, Germany
Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Fabien Gandon, INRIA, France
Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University, USA
Spyros Kotoulas, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Craig Knoblock, USC/ISI and Fetch Technologies, USA
Raghuram Krishanpuram, IBM Research, India
Freddy Lecue, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Ullas Nambiar, IBM Research, India
Jeff Z.Pan, The University of Aberdeen, UK
Francois Scharffe, LIRMM, Montpellier, France
Biplav Srivastava, IBM Research India, New Delhi, India
Rosario Usceda-Sosa, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA