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Problem definition: By providing an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional vehicles, electric vehicles will transform urban mobility, particularly in smart cities. In practice, after an electric vehicle is plugged in, the charging station completes charging as soon as possible. Given that the procurement cost of electricity and associated emissions vary significantly during a day, substantial savings can be achieved by smart charging—delaying charging until the cost is lower. In this paper, we study smart charging as an innovative business model for utility firms. Academic/practical relevance: Utility firms are already investing in charging stations, and they can achieve significant cost savings through smart charging. Methodology: We consider a mechanism design problem in which a utility firm first announces pairs of charging price and completion time. Then, each customer selects the pair that maximizes their utility. Given the selected completion times, the utility firm solves the optimal control problem of determining the charging schedule that minimizes the cost of charging under endogenous, time-varying electricity procurement cost. We assume that there are ample parking spots with chargers at the charging station. Results: We devise an intuitive and practically implementable policy for scheduling charging of electric vehicles under given completion times. We prove that this policy is optimal if all customers arrive at the station simultaneously. We also characterize the optimal pairs of charging price and completion time. By using real electricity demand and generation data from the largest electricity market in the United States, we find that cost and emissions savings from smart charging are approximately 20% and 15%, respectively, during a typical summer month. Managerial implications: In contrast to the current practice of charging vehicles without delay, we show that it is economically and environmentally beneficial to delay charging some vehicles and to set charging prices based on customers' inconvenience cost of delays. We also find that most of the savings from implementing smart charging can be achieved during peak-demand days, highlighting the effectiveness of smart charging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact of local political fragmentation on population, employment, and per capita money income growth in 314 U.S. metropolitan areas. The results are mixed. Smaller central cities and more special district overlap are important for population growth. The findings do not generalize in regard to employment or per capita money income growth. These findings mask important regional variation: political fragmentation is largely unrelated to economic growth in midwestern and western metropolitan areas. These results partially support the hypothesis that governmental fragmentation can enhance local economic growth; however, the overall impact appears muted relative to a metropolitan area's economic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking a comparative approach, this study conducted text-mining and content analysis of smart city initiatives to evaluate the status and progress of smart city development in China and the United States. Despite sharing similarities in developing and applying technology to improve public services and promote economies, these cities have taken different approaches to building smart cities. The American cities adopted a participatory governance structure whereas the Chinese cities demonstrated a hierarchical model that highlighted a proactive role of government and lacked systematic mechanisms for stakeholder engagement. The American smart city initiatives emphasized the improvement of public services to attract businesses and the use of a collaborative approach to building digital infrastructure. With a higher level of policy support and funding support from the central government, local Chinese governments have assumed a leading role in nurturing and developing the smart technology industry, protecting the environment, and building intelligent infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A smart city plays an increasing role in citizens' daily life. A smart city has six main components, namely smart mobility, smart economy, smart governance, smart living, smart environment, and smart people. For the past several decades, government and organizations throughout the world have initiated many smart city projects. Citizens' transportation, education, investment, and other activities have been shifted from traditional to smart models through emerging technologies and the internet. In this paper, following the pioneering work of the intelligent quotient (IQ) test, we propose a framework to measure a city's intelligence level. We also propose a definition for the intelligence of an information system. To evaluate such intelligence, 382 technology indicators have been developed. We have applied smart city IQ testing on the top 100 largest cities in the United States (according to 2017 population). In addition, the smart city IQ score is designed so that it is convertible to the age of a human being. Various text mining and data mining methods (including classification) have been applied. The results of our analysis indicate that the average smart city IQ score is like that of an eight-year-old child. We also show the breakdown of IQ scores in terms of the six main components. Although the evaluation of the smart city projects in the United States is still ongoing, the results obtained so far as reported in this paper can provide important insights for research in this particular field, as well as intelligent information systems in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart buildings are complex systems, yet architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) professionals often perform their work without considering the human factors of building occupants. Traditionally, the AEC industry has employed a linear design and delivery approach. As buildings become smarter, the AEC industry must adapt. To maximize human well-being and the operational performance of smart buildings, an iterative, human-centred approach must be employed. The omission of human factors in the design and delivery of smart building systems risks misalignment between occupant-user needs and the AEC industry's perception of occupant-user needs. This research proposes a human-centred approach to smart housing. The study employed a multi-phase, mixed-methods research design. Data were collected from 309 high performance housing units in the United States. Longitudinal energy use data, occupant surveys, and semi-structured interviews are the primary data inputs. Affinity diagramming was leveraged to categorize the qualitative data. The output of the affinity diagramming analysis and energy analysis led to the development of data-driven Personas that communicate smart housing user needs. While these data were gathered in the United States, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers can leverage the human-centred approach presented in this paper toward the design of other human-centred buildings and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what smartness does on the ground by examining how its anticipatory media visions have been interpreted and acted on in policy decisions and local implementations since the early 2000s. Using a comparative-historical analysis that draws on fieldwork in aspiring smart cities in the United States and Europe, we argue that the visions of smartness are neither singular nor fixed across time and space. Instead, the role of smartness in diffusing new technologies is recruited and reshaped in the present to lend legitimacy to future public and private interventions. We first demonstrate that the narrative of crisis, often associated with smartness, shifted from a pre-2008 emphasis on sustainability and climate change to a post-financial crisis engagement with entrepreneurship and platformization. We then discuss how the development of smart city initiatives has followed divergent paths in the United States and Europe, with big tech companies dominating in the former and the 'living lab' model prevailing in the latter. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating the complex relationships between anticipatory media visions of smartness and their varying, down-to-earth implementations in the built environment rather than solely focusing on the discursive appeal of techno-idealism. It also explains the enduring appeal of smartness as an urban vision, despite its various shortcomings, by revealing its adaptability to the changing social and political–economic shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on shrinking cities has significantly grown in recent years. Little work, however, has been done toward the development of a shrinking city typology, which could help inform solutions and strategies to address problems associated with population loss. With a focus on central cities, this article identifies 367 shrinking cities within the United States and categorizes them using a geographic information system to identify seven types of shrinking cities in the United States: (1) large shrinking central cities, (2) inner-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (3) outer-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (4) inner-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (5) outer-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (6) small shrinking central cities in small Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and (7) small shrinking cities in small Micropolitan Statistical Areas. The empirically generated clusters, combined with associated social and demographic information, identify separate but sometimes interrelated shrinking city types and provide a new perspective for addressing the problems faced by U.S. shrinking cities. Key Words: population decline, shrinking cities, typology, urban population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the fact that more than 1 million crimes happened in USA every year, public safety becomes one of the most important concerns. Although many public safety related applications have been commercialized, how to guarantee safely walking to a destination especially in an unfamiliar city is still challenging. To provide a safe walking navigation in smart cities, we design a novel application SPATH (the Safest PATH). To support this service, wireless cameras, existing cellular infrastructure, and vehicles with underutilized computing resources are utilized to process and transmit surveillance videos, which can be viewed by users to check the current safety status of walking paths. Noting the long-distance transmission of a large volume of videos may cause network congestion; video summarizing technology, which is realized by utilizing the underutilized computing capability in vehicles, is applied to extract valuable information from a video file while effectively compressing its data size. Since the quality of service for this application is strongly correlated with the latency of delivering videos, we formulate a latency minimization problem by jointly considering the computing resource allocation and computing task assignment. A fast iterative matching is proposed with low complexity to effectively solve the optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart cities represent a lifestyle totally based on making use of such unprecedented technological developments as Artificial Intelligence systems, the internet of things and big data, with the aim of maximizing the use of the available resources, reducing energy consumption and waste, creating an environment that enhances creation and innovation, and improving the quality of life for people by reducing the cost of living and making life easier and safer. Smart cities have become a priority in developments strategies of many countries all over the world. This is simply because they are among the main incentives to development, as they stimulate economic growth and accommodate population growth. It is estimated that in 2025 around 10 million people will be living in 34 smart cities all over the world (Smart Cities in USA",2018), and that almost 70% of the world population will be living in such cities in 2050(Building the Future's Smart Cities, 2016). In spite of their various advantages smart cities have many national and cyber security concerns. Houses, infrastructure, transportation, communication, government services, as well as commercial and industrial services, etc. are controlled by smart systems dependent upon artificial intelligence and the internet of things. If these services are targeted by a successful cyber-attack, the consequences in that case would be unaffordable to national security and people lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the relationship between machine ethics, artificial driving intelligence, and crash algorithms. Building my argument by drawing on data collected from AUVSI, Ipsos, Nature, Pew Research Center, Perkins Coie, Statista, and YouGov, I performed analyses and made estimates regarding U.S. adults who say they would/would not want to ride in a driverless vehicle (%), statements closest to international drivers' opinion (I am in favor of self-driving cars and cannot wait to use them/I am unsure about self-driving cars, but I find the idea interesting/I am against self-driving cars and would never use them), U.S. adults that would feel (un)safe as a pedestrian in a city with self-driving cars (%), countries that are most prepared for autonomous vehicles (policy and legislation, technology and innovation, infrastructure, and consumer acceptance), and the top data infrastructure requirements in smart cities to facilitate autonomous vehicle testing (wireless connectivity to other cars, parking meters, traffic lights and other smart infrastructure, wireless connectivity to nearby towers/antennas, and data centers to perform analytics on large volumes of data received from vehicles). The data for this research were gathered via an online survey questionnaire and were analyzed through structural equation modeling on a sample of 5,400 respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the arguments within the scientific discussion on the feasibility and applicability of green logistics in Smart Cities. The purpose of the article is to study the features of green logistics and the benefits of implementing its approaches to urban development, based on the analysis of Smart City projects in the USA and the EU, and justifying on this basis the feasibility of taking into account the experience of successful examples in developing urban development strategies around the world. Systematization of literary sources regarding the use of green logistics has shown that it has wide opportunities for introducing both the management of the goods of the companies and the passenger traffic and transport of the city. It is obvious that logistics is closely linked to the structure of the city: transport networks, zones, nodes, that is, with architecture and urban planning, as well as with the environment. Since it is urgent to minimize pollution, increase the efficiency of using logistic resources, optimize the process of making managerial decisions on the use of material, financial and other resources, then there is a need to use the principles of «green logistics» in the city. So, the actuality of this scientific problem solution is caused by the need to find ways to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed measures related to the implementation of urban development projects based on the concept of Smart City, the development of IT, environmental problems. Methodological tools of the research methods were the comparative analysis methods, namely the experience of the EU and the USA in the implementation of green logistics approaches in Smart Cities. The object of research is the leading Smart Cities of the world, as they are an example for other cities to ensure the well-being of their citizens. The paper presents the results of an empirical analysis of the of green logistics issues application in Smart Cities, which has shown that most of them use logistics to movement, storage and distribution of goods, movement and storage of public, passenger transportation, placement of hazardous wastes that affect the ecosystem of the city and against the principles of sustainable development. The research empirically confirms and theoretically proves the efficiency of using green logistics in providing urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using and replicating data from BI Intelligence, Black & Veatch, ESI ThoughtLab, Grand View Research, McKinsey, PwC, and Statista, we performed analyses and made estimates regarding the most effective financing model for smart city initiatives (%), smart applications that will be relevant for cities through 2025 and top three barriers to developing smarter cities in the U.S. (%), the global smart city market (US$ bn, 2018-2025), Internet of Things connected devices installed base worldwide (2015-2025, in billions), installed base of connected things within smart cities (2015-2020, in billions), and installed base of connected things within the public service sector of smart cities (2015-2020, in millions). Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps urban reform movements onto 'long waves:' consistently patterned technological and economic cycles that repeat over time. Using the example of the United States, we argue that periodizing urban reform movements in this way reveals surprising similarities in different historical contexts. Across cycles, two tropes repeatedly appear: discourses of efficiency, that propose technological solutions to urban problems, and those of beauty, that turn to nature to improve social arrangements through design. Within cycles, reform discourses follow a similar pattern in each case: they roll out amidst the excitement of an emergent socio-technical paradigm, but, used as guidelines for its institutionalization, create new social problems even as they aim to remedy the old. In each wave planners and decision-makers try to out-engineer and out-design inequality (and other social problems), and each time they fail. We use this analytic to historicize the contemporary 'smart' and 'sustainable' city, arguing that it is only the latest in a series of beauty and efficiency solutions to urban problems, and its promises should be taken with more than a grain of salt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A milestone of Information Technology in 21st century is Internet of Things (IoT). The most significant aspect of IoT is its application in smart cities. The IoT is considered as software foundation of modern smart cities and is making revolution in the development of smart-government. The IoT is the backbone of smart cities and smart cities are the backbone of a smart-government. There are two types of smart-governments: (1) New Generation Smart-Government, (2) Extended Smart- Government. We illustrate the differences between the new generation smart-government and the extended smart-government. In this paper, a framework of new generation smart-government is proposed with inner and outer layer process. This framework is designed to illustrate the players, process and the challenges of the smart-government. Are search survey is carried out to study the challenges of smart-government from the perspectives of India, USA and Kuwait. It is observed that the challenges differ from country to country. The survey reports bring out some interesting facts that mindscaping is the biggest challenge for Kuwait, investment is the biggest challenge for India and security & privacy is the biggest challenge for USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on digital divide, the smart cities movement and impact of LinkNYC public-private partnership to replace the city's public payphones with citywide internet service in New York City on digital privacy. Topics discussed include Fourth Amendment applications to the new location tracking technologies, real-time location tracking, historical location tracking, and facial recognition technology and changes made to the LinkNYC privacy policy.

College students' attrition in engineering programs is a major problem in developed and developing countries. Outreach activities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are a powerful resource to ignite K-12 students' interest to pursue scientific and engineering careers. Here, a program on mechatronics for Malaysian high-schoolers developed at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and implemented at the National University of Malaysia is presented. The program follows a dual model where instructors and students work together on a project-based learning curriculum inspired by real-world problems. A group of Malaysian graduate students and highschool teachers was trained to serve as instructors by the New York University team. After training, the New York University team aided the instructors to administer the curriculum to 100 high-schoolers and organize a one-day exhibit for families at the National University of Malaysia. Pre- and post-assessment surveys offer evidence for the positive impact of the program on teachers' professional development and student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart Cities are designed to ubiquitously collect information about people, places, and activities and to use that data to provide more efficient services and to build resilience against disasters. Projects like the Rockefeller Foundation-funded "100 Resilient Cities" are exploring how big data can be used to design and strengthen resilience in cities around the world. Large technology companies are helping to design and secure components of the Internet of Everything, which is part of a smart city structure. Relationships between governments and citizens, as well as between individuals and businesses, will see substantial changes due to this rapidly expanding collection and use of potentially intimate information. In this dynamic environment, it is difficult to protect privacy under traditional principles that did not anticipate a sensor-connected, surveillance-laden, data-driven world of the smart city. Slow moving court cases and inflexible fair information privacy practices may be insufficient to limit and/or guide smart city implementation that respects individual privacy. Cities need a methodology that will enable a discussion of how law, regulation, and social norms can respond to the dynamic disruption that a smart city poses to the fundamental nature of privacy. This Article proposes that resilience theory can be a useful lens for this analysis. Resilience theory has multidiscipUnary roots in engineering, biology, ecology, and sociology, and is generally understood as a way to understand how systems react to extreme pressures--whether they decline and die, or whether they adapt and thrive. The theory is used to describe multiple aspects of systems and organisms, from the ability of a building to withstand an earthquake to the ability of an organism not only to survive, but to also evolve into a different and possible better state. This Article views privacy as a system and examines it through the resiliency lens, framing the question of how privacy can adapt and survive in a smart city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parkinson Disease (PD) is a severe chronic and progressive neuro-degenerative nerve disease effects the central nervous system associated with the dopamine deficiency widespread in the world. It is a worldwide public health problem of huge measurement. It is a familiar statistic that around one million people suffer from PD in the United States of America and as a whole around 5 million people suffering from PD worldwide. Therefore, it is vital challenge to predict PD in early stages so that initial plan for the needed treatment can be made. However, imbalanced nature of data sets hampered the mining of medical resource data. In this paper, we proposed an approach for detecting and tracking PD intensity using enhanced SMOTE and XGBoost in Fog Computing on UCI's Parkinson's Telemonitoring Voice Data Set of individuals. Numerous investigations were executed and the results of the proposed framework achieve 96.43% accuracy on test set and 99.49% accuracy on full set in detecting PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Four scenarios of aging in smart environments in 2050. • Explores the confluence of the aging of society and the increasing use of sensing technology in spaces and bodies. • Each scenario is depicted with a description, narrative, and summary key features. • Analysis of four scenarios with focus on future challenges facing society and opportunities for technological innovation. • Recommendations for the use of the scenarios by business, government, community, research, and non-profit audiences. The population of the United States is getting older. Unlike other countries with aging populations, however, the state of aging in the United States is in crisis. Healthcare and social reforms will likely be necessary in the coming decades to address structural issues with retirement, socio-economic inequality, and the high cost of healthcare. In the meantime, AI-enabled smart technologies and environments are being rapidly developed to assist overwhelmed caretakers, enable access to healthcare providers, address isolation and depression among older adults, and provide mobility to and from essential services in sprawling suburbs and rural areas. This study utilizes a participatory, intuitive logics approach to construct scenarios of aging in smart environments in 2050 that illuminate the uncertainties, challenges, and opportunities presented by the coming confluence of two mega trends: an aging population and increasingly sensed people and environments. The results include four scenarios including descriptions and key features, and with narratives available in the appendix. In the discussion, we reflect on five provocations distilled from expert interviews to illustrate what aging might look like in 2050 from a variety of socio-economic vantage points and mediated by technological capabilities and arrangements born of differing policy, economic, and societal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known why cities adopt smart technologies. This study is the first to develop and test a managerial contingency theory to explain variations in the adoption of smart city technologies. The theory is tested using the Akaike Information Criterion Stepwise OLS regression model with data from 329 cities in the United States and 13 smart city technologies. The study finds that adoption of smart city technologies is indeed contingent with managerial incentives, constraints and context. Funding from state governments, availability of technical assistance and city branding have positive and statistically significant effects on smart technology adoption. Conversely, lack of leadership, legacy systems and lack of understanding of technology have negative and statistically significant effects. Demography, geography and form of government are also associated with technology adoption. Managerial contingency theory opens a new field of research on smart cities. • We study variation in smart cities using OLS model on 329 US cities. • Smart cities vary with incentives, constraints and context of city managers. • State funding, technical support and city branding have positive effects. • Lack of leadership, legacy systems and lack of understanding have negative effects. • Demography, geography and form of government vary with smart cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many local governments have started using smartphone applications to more effectively inform and communicate with citizens. This trend is of interest, as cities can only be smart if they are responsive to their citizens. In this paper, the intention to use such a mobile application among adult residents (n = 420) of a mid-sized city in the southeastern United States was examined using hierarchical linear regression analysis. The regression model that was tested indicated significant predictors of the intention to use the app in order to report municipal problems, such as power outages, and to request services for one's home or community, including: Performance expectancy (e.g., citizens' beliefs that the app would be efficient, helpful, convenient), effort expectancy (citizens' beliefs about difficulty of using the app), social influence, perceived cost (e.g., privacy loss, storage space, unwanted notifications), and prior use of city apps. Consistent with current research on technology adoption, performance expectancy had the strongest influence on app-use intentions. Additionally, citizens' trust in their city government's ability to effectively manage an app was a weak, positive predictor of app-use intentions; general trust in the city government did not predict app-use intentions. Implications for city governments and city app developers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers U.S. transportation industry news briefs as of May 2016. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced finalists for the Smart City Challenge of the Department of Transportation. Sam Schwartz Engineering won three 2016 Engineering Excellence Awards from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC). Trafficware Group Inc. has been awarded the citywide project to upgrade the central traffic management system in Houston, Texas.