Call for Papers – First Workshop on Serendipity in the Smart City (September 7, 2021)

Workshop to be held adjacent to the IEEE Smart Cities Conference (ISC2) 2021

Submission deadline June 30, 2021

More details here and submission via the EDAS site.

Today, citizens can rely on applications to predict the fastest route from point A to B or consult personalized apps to suggest the best activity for a night out. City administrations and local communities also benefit from the increased predictability of urban processes and change, for example by relying on digital twins. While these systems help to reduce search costs or insecurities, they might fall prey to merely repeating historic patterns found in the data. How can we ensure that these applications still allow for serendipitous encounters instead of resulting in 'urban filter bubbles'? And to what extent current practices of data collection and predictive modeling are capable of dealing with uncertainties and unexpected events. Especially in the contemporary urban context, where resilience plays an important role, it is crucial that decision-makers are able to deal with the unexpected and not blinded by patterns from the past.

This workshop is open to all parties interested in discussing serendipity in the smart city. We welcome contributions from academics, innovators, local governments, and practitioners.

The topics of interest of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Ethical implications of predictive systems in a smart city

• Design principles for systems that engender urban serendipity

• Applications of personalization in smart cities

• Bias and inequalities in urban data

• User evaluations of urban serendipity

• Governance models of urban serendipity

• Business models for urban serendipity

• Volunteered geographic information to encourage data diversity

• Predictive and pattern modelling on open linked data

• (Open) data management

• Digital twin applications for predictive analysis

Research papers reporting original results as well as position papers proposing novel and ground-breaking ideas pertaining to the workshop topics are solicited. Accepted papers will be published in IEEE ISC2 conference proceedings.