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Smart Mobility is an important component of Smart Cities with most of the current approaches focusing on crash incidents for safety within Smart Mobility. The Safe Community System (SCS) aims to collect and provide information to city residents about events beyond crash incidents using mobile technology. The work reported in this manuscript aims to manage and provide information to residents in a meaningful way to support their decision making. This paper describes our efforts in extending an initial proof-of-concept of the SCS by establishing a Safety Index (SI)-a derived metric that aggregates the value of resident-submitted reports to generate real-time safety levels for streets within a city considering the lifespan and verification of these reports. The SCS mobile application has been refined to provide further information about a specific incident. The SCS updated design also proposes a Safe Path Algorithm (SPA) which is a modified Dijkstra’s algorithm that uses the SI to compute a safe path for the resident. The goal of the SCS is to support resident’s decision-making when choosing a route and thus fostering safety for Smart Mobility. Efforts like the SCS contribute to converting cities to Smart Cities.

Older adults are a population underserved by technology that faces unique challenges when commuting in urban areas due to a decrease in their physical and cognitive skills associated with aging (e.g., a decline in their sight, slower reflexes, loss of hearing, fear of getting lost or disoriented, fear of falling). Smart Cities aim to provide a high quality of life to residents regardless of the special needs they may have. This paper describes our recent efforts in increasing our understanding of seniors’ mobility needs and how to address them through technology, and in particular the development of the Urban Connector. Urban Connector is a product of our interdisciplinary research efforts aiming to address mobility challenges of seniors in El Paso, a city in the U.S. Southwest and validated in New York, a city in the U.S. Northeast. The Urban Connector is a mobile application which design follows recommendations for the development of technology catered to seniors. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Urban connector to address mobility needs of seniors through technology, an evaluation with 38 beta-testers was performed. The results of this evaluation are presented in this paper along with our future efforts based on these results. The Urban Connector contributes to efforts to foster the use of technology aiming to bridge the generational digital divide and support the creation of more inclusive, sustainable, smart cities.

This paper describes the Safe Commuting System (SCS) which aims to improve the safety of commuters in urban areas using both historical and real-time crowdsourced data (through mobile devices) about safety incidents. The SCS informs commuters about at-risk areas and will provide alternative commuting routes. The current SCS implementation includes a mobile device application that enables the collection of crowdsourced data and user notifications about safety incidents in the proximity. The crowdsourced information serves two main functions: alerting users about safety incidents and assisting residents in decision-making about safe mobility. The current SCS prototype enables the collection of data including emergency alerts through a panic button and safety incidents through user reports. User reports are organized into three different categories: (1) criminal activity, (2) perceived danger, and (3) suspicious activities. Future work includes the generation of safe routes for commuters. The SCS system can be considered a Smart Cities solution in the Smart Mobility area, given that the proposed use of technology and data fosters the safety of commuters, and thus contributes to an improved quality of life. Efforts towards informing and collecting relevant information for mobility are important to address the demands of urban areas and convert them into Smart Cities.

Flooding hinders the ability of residents to move through-out urban areas. Current weather information systems provide weather forecasts with a granularity too coarse to inform city residents of floods at a street level. Reliable real-time data is also limited in some cities and only a few systems enable users to report flooding events. This research project aims to inform residents about flooding events through the Flooding Alert System (FAS), which seamlessly integrates real-time data, crowdsourced data, historical data and provides timely and precise information to users so that they can make informed decisions during these events. The proposed Smart Cities solution, uses Internet of Things sensors equipped with an image processing algorithm for approximating the water level at at-risk areas. In adittion, a mobile application allows users to report and receive alerts of nearby flooding events as they occur. The expected products will be piloted in Guadalajara, JAL, MX. Transferability of our solution is planned to be evaluated through the application of these products in El Paso, TX, USA.

Many older adults or seniors face mobility issues as they age, for example, switching from driving to using carpool, taxi, or staying on fixed routes. Seniors require responsive transportation services to attend activities. Unfortunately, there are limited tools to assist seniors to find the most appropriate transportation options given their mobility needs (e.g., inability to walk long distances, use of a cane). Mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc.) have demonstrated to be a useful tool to provide real-time information that has the potential to assist seniors with mobility challenges. This paper focuses on investigating senior citizens’ mobility needs in El Paso, Texas and New York City, New York in order to define the requirements and recommendations for an ad-hoc solution on smart mobility for seniors, using state-of-the-art mobile technologies. In order to identify the main concerns and requirements to assist in mobility of seniors, a survey was conducted at various senior recreation centers across El Paso and New York City with a total of 458 and 61 responses, respectively. Survey results indicate that: (i) the most required assistance for seniors is the avoidance of traffic congestion; (ii) the majority of seniors who own mobile devices are not using the available applications or functions to meet their mobility needs; and (iii) seniors indicated that they prefer mobile applications that are easy and intuitive to use. These findings provide additional insights to those from previous surveys. We provide recommendations for researchers and developers interested in creating solutions for mobility of seniors based on these findings and the interactions with seniors when the survey was performed.

Preparing the next generation of engineers, scientists and decision makers requires the development of new teaching strategies that follow smart cities philosophy: collaborative, inclusive and focused on specific needs of the region. The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), USA and University of Guadalajara (UdeG), Mexico, addressed the challenge of creating a new international course on smart cities study abroad program that leverages the long-term relationship of UTEP with Czech Technical University (CTU), Czech Republic, and industry partners in El Paso and Guadalajara, especially IBM Mexico. This program is highly interdisciplinary, involving four departments in the College of Engineering at UTEP and the Department of Information Systems, Centro Universitario de Ciencias Economico Administrativas at UdeG. Input from city officials in Guadalajara and El Paso along with industry partners was key in designing this novel program. Thirty-two students from UTEP and 32 from UdeG have successfully completed this program which will launch again on its third edition this year. The program included problem-based learning strategies as well as cultural, industry-led activities, culminating in a Smart Cities Hackathon competition. This articles reports on the planning, development and results of this study abroad program, challenges and lessons learned.

Transportation performance measures are defined as quantitative and qualitative indicators that rely on data or information to explain mobility, traffic congestion, safety, environmental sustainability and other factors. Although performance measures have been used for freeways and other highways, not many have been specified and applied to the freight transportation system. Under the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act), state transportation agencies and metropolitan planning organizations in the United States are implementing freight performance measurement systems for performance assessment. This research aims to expand the existing freight performance measures and organize them into a integrated framework. The proposed framework consists of four criteria: safety, mobility, traffic congestion, and environmental sustainability. Each criterion consists of several qualitative and quantitative indicators. To address the challenge of integrating freight data of different sources and formats, an ontology-based approach has been proposed, implemented and. The Freight Performance Ontology was created using a bottom-up, data-driven approach, that included an initial concept map used to verify the conceptualization with domain experts before formalizing it in an ontology. The proposed ontology framework addresses specific metrics for the U.S. — Mexico border region in El Paso, TX. However, the proposed framework is generic and can be extended to integrate and aggregate data on a larger scale such as a state or country. Freight Performance is a foundational piece of Smart Mobility, and by integrating heterogeneous data, it provides a way to evaluate and improve services in Smart Cities.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers defines a smart city as a city that brings together technology, government and society to enable the following characteristics: smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance1. This and other definitions for smart cities emphasize the need for interoperability between systems. Interoperabilty between systems is highly influenced by the ability of sharing and exchanging data across different tools and platforms. Living labs aim to support an agile development and implementation of technology to accelerate innovation in cities [1]. The University of Guadalajara (UDG) Living Lab aims to provide fast prototyping of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, open data repositories based in open standards, data analytics and visualization tools to support the development of smart cities solutions. UDG Living Lab was designed with the following principles: scalability, interoperability, modularity, resilience, and security [2].

A smart city is characterized by its ability to integrate people, technology and information to create a sustainable and resilient infrastructure that provides high quality services for residents. Transforming a city into a smart city requires collaborative efforts between government, industry, practitioners, residents and researchers.

The creation of biodiversity models requires the integration and manipulation of decoupled datasets across different domains of knowledge. This paper describes our experience in the development of the ELSEWeb framework, which aims to facilitate the integration of environmental data for the generation of species distribution models. We discuss the architecture of this framework, including the user interface and the lessons learned from this collaborative, multidisciplinary effort.