Wrk4 – The Internet of People for Smart Cities

Note:  This workshop is to be conducted as part of the main conference session

Call for Papers

Through Smart City projects, Information and Communication Technologies providers and government authorities work to develop new IoT technologies and devices that could in principle improve the management of the city infrastructure, i.e., traffic, energy flow and use, and trash collection.

But, what about the millions of people who live and work in these cities – are they now better connected to each other? In some sense, today we are enormously better connected, through online social media and business networking platforms. However, while seemingly bringing us closer together, these online networking platforms could create a distance between people at the same time by minimizing the number and the quality of face-to-face encounters.

Face-to-face meetings could bring and help develop richer, stronger, and longer lasting relationships. They provide continuous opportunities to talk, exchange ideas, thoughts, perspectives, projects, initiate collaborations, and match interests for business products and services. But, every day, we walk past 1,000s of people, if not 10s of 1000s of people, without making contact. Who are they? How could they enrich our lives, socially and even economically? So, why leave these face-to-face connections to chance and serendipity? Cities are all about sharing a physical space, be it a community or district, an office, a street, or even a coffee shop, so is the future of connecting in cities physical too?

One example of a new approach to business and social networking is using an Internet of People (IoP). It removes much of the “chance” from “chance meetings”, creating an efficient process of providing realtime information about who is nearby, using Proximity Awareness, and who is of interest, through Profile Matching. It is very much a proactive approach to connecting to people in cities, helping them to share, collaborate and work together. The IoP builds a necessary step in the digital revolution that Smart Cities are bringing through the IoT and the Internet, by defining “people” as a focal point for connections, not just “things”. Together, the Internet of Things and the Internet of People make Smart Cities even smarter, working together to greatly stimulate economic growth for the local communities that live in cities (or even outside urban areas) and the businesses that work there, through face-to-face interaction. The aim of networking through the IoP is to create a new social charter within cities that opens up an exponential number of new relationships, that are ongoing, alive, like the city itself.

The workshop will also present test case results from 2017 for the first mobile application for IoP networking, called B2B MeetUp. A cutting-edge application that works in real-time to help the right people meet each other in business or socially when nearby, both indoors or outdoors, through proximity mesh networking and proactive profile matching. The workshop will provide the audience with a hands-on roleplay experience using B2B MeetUp, in order to then discuss how such tools can shape the future of a smarter Smart City approach to building connections and relationships.

The B2B MeetUp mobile application could also be made available to the IEEE WF-IoT 2018 in Singapore to stimulate real-time networking for its international visitors, and create further feedback and discussion during the workshop.

The workshop is looking for contributions on the human side of smart cities – connecting people in cities and human gatherings like conferences by using technology, physical space properties, and human and social characteristics. An additional aspect is how humans and the ways the like to do thing might affect the evolution of smart cities.

We expect to have notable industry and Government representatives participate in the Workshop as well as individual contributors on the topic