Urban and Mobile Computing

_DESCRIPTION

Urban computing is an emerging area that aims to give to the users, innovative and most complete experiences of urban space through new computer applications. Public spaces, and even transport systems, increasingly incorporate a greater number of computing devices.

Wireless and mobile networks are also ubiquitous and people increasingly use personal computing devices and electronic communication. This new technological environment is changing the way how we use and interact with the urban space, and suggests the creation of new applications that allow people to perceive and use the space of more rich and diverse way.

Furthermore, the ability to fully exploit this technological environment requires that every moment we need to known the situation of users in the urban space and the state of their own spaces. Among others, modelling the dynamic of space is currently understood as fundamental to the development of intelligent spaces.

Understanding how cities change over time and how they are used by the citizens allows the creation of new views of the urban space and may contribute to help in activities such as planning or the design of new infrastructure. In this context, some current research challenges include the monitoring of public spaces in real time and their data collection, data fusion, the cooperative construction of maps, and visualization of the city dynamic’s.

In the CCG, the area of Mobile and Urban Computing maintains a strong connection with the Research Group on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems of University of Minho, as well the development of regular activities in collaboration with other research laboratories and universities. This cooperation allows the adoption of a strongly approach to multi-disciplinary problems found in various projects, and also contributes to the identification of relevant research challenges to the researchers involved.

As examples of activities in this area we can refer the research on real-time monitoring systems to indoor and outdoor spaces and the development of intelligent context-aware systems for public transport.

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