Urban Sensors: Exploiting the opportunties

Smart Cities are becoming ever more ubiquitous worldwide, finding ways to better manage, visualise and predict cities. There are two key technological frameworks that enable Smart Cities to function and have been rapidly increasing in presence as a result of Smart Cities; big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Emerging Smart Cities will generate an enormous amount of data, sensed by new and existing technologies, making it the perfect time to exploit these opportunities. This abstract will briefly cover what I aim to achieve during my PhD, which will completed by academic publications.
The first aspect of my PhD will be to exploit the opportunities by visualising rich and contextual spatial data, which seem to be difficult to acquire. Through my industrial sponsor, I will be able to access detailed information regarding the spatial and temporal movements of visitors in the Costa del Sol, in the south of Spain. For this, I will aim to use a method, vector fields, which has traditionally been used to track the movement of transport and animals as well as the movement of people. Understanding the movements of visitors within a city region can be beneficial to urban planners. For example, this information could be used by city officials to increase the efficiency of urban transport by adapting their routes and schedules based on real-time activity, or it could be used to better the security, where police officers are re-directed to where crime is most likely to happen in the active areas of the city.
This then relates to more future aspects of my research which may focus on how this improved visualisation and understanding of city dynamics from the emergence of this new, ubiquitous information could bridge the gap between data science and policy making. Firstly, I would focus on the application on these sensors and how they could be used to better the performance of cities. For example, sensors and other wireless technologies could be used to better the efficiency of natural resources, medical care, transport systems, agriculture systems, education, efficiency of structures and buildings, energy, waste management, and many more.
Finally, sensors may directly collect the information to enable city officials, business owners and individuals to better the performance of the city, but, how is it monitored and tracked? This would be my next focus of research. Urban dashboards are claimed to be an answer, providing a summary of critical information about the city's performance at a glance, without having the need of any specialist programing skills to be able to understand. Urban dashboards are inclusive, encouraging citizens to participate as they now become data generators and analysers, rather than approaching from a traditional top-down approach. As these urban dashboards to not need any specialist skills to understand, this is how the gap between data science and policy making can be bridged, and the decisions at the city scale can now be made based on evidence, reducing the uncertainty as there would be data to track the progress of a city both historically and compared to other cities.