As world populations concentrate in urban areas, communities worldwide face new challenges. On the one hand, cities face overcrowding, physical and environmental resource constraints and increasing pressure on the part of governments and businesses toward ensuring continuing economic growth. On the other hand, rural areas may become depopulated and have a hard time keeping up with changes in business technology and management. Connected Communities is an emerging research area investigating design, deployment and management techniques for establishing and maintaining an ICT infrastructure supporting a highly connected, data-intensive and sustainable urban community. It also considers BURD - Bridging the Urban Rural Divide - looking at means to leverage the advances in wireless and mobile communications to engage and sustain rural communities.

A major objective of this research is this enabling urban and rural ICT infrastructures to seamlessly support all processes and services needed for citizens’ safety, health, security and quality of life. Desirable properties of the ICT infrastructure underlying such services include (i) full scalability by elastic allocation of resources (such as sensors, actuators, virtual network and computing devices) (ii) sustainability and energy-efficiency (iii) effective realtime monitoring and control (iv) certifiable security and privacy. For example, supporting people mobility across BURD spaces requires handling in an integrated manner historic and real-time sensor data on traffic and road conditions, open data on weather, and user feedback, reconciling the need for high density of sensor network with its sustainability energy and maintenance-wise.

The ACM TOIT Special Issue on “Emerging Technologies for Connected Communities” aims to provide a unique opportunity for presenting highly innovative research, unlocking the huge potential of ICT infrastructure toward establishing and running communities supporting participation, prosperity, sustainability, health and well-being. We list below some indicative topics of interest organized by themes.

Connected Communities Infrastructure and Supporting Technologies:
====================================================
Internet of Everything (Iox) And Anything/Everything As A Service (Xaas) For Connected Communities
Sustainable Large-Scale Sensor Networks For Urban Environments
High Performance Computing/Networking For Sensor Data Processing
Service Frameworks for Connected Communities
Privacy-Preservation In The Urban Infrastructure
Security and Resilience Of The Communications Infrastructure

Connected Communities Service Frameworks and Protocols to Integrate Rural Communities:
======================================================================
Solutions for Urban Data Storage and Access
IoT-to-BURD Supply Chain
Ontology-Based Fusion of Smart City Datasets
Connected Community Governance and Management

Connected Communities Applications:
=============================
Citizen Participation and E-Democracy
Healthcare and Lifestyle Data Processing and Analysis
Support for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Cloud-Based Analytics for Urban Decision-Making
Real-Time Scalable Analytics for Large-Scale Datasets