Urban Computing and Mobile Devices

IEEE Pervasive …, 2007

The planning and design of the urban landscapes have matured throughout the ages. Typical 19 th Century English industrial town were built back to back with virtually no yards and green spaces until it evolved to a healthier living environment designed by man. In those days comfort and healthy well-being was the demand in most urban and landscape planning agenda. Today, in the ever challenging globalization era, technologies have become an issue of a necessity rather than an option in the daily life of the urbanites. This phenomenon is also known as 'Urban Computing', has actually permeated most of the world's urban dwellers without realising its massive potentials. In 2003, Dan Russel, Director of the User Sciences and Experience Group at IBM's Almaden Research Center predicted that by 2010, computing will have become so naturalized within the environment that people will not even realize that they are using computers (cited in .

2007

First-generation applications: Solving problems We divide first-generation urban and mobile applications into three categories. First are systems that frame mobility as a disconnection from stable working situations. These applications try to overcome this disconnection either by providing remote mobile access to static information resources or by trying to reproduce static application contexts. For example, the Satchel system sought to give travelers easy access to electronic documents, as well as the ability to share and exchange them, by ...

Innovations in Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, 2006

In this paper we report on ongoing research in which the implications of urban scale pervasive computing (always and everywhere present) are investigated for urban life and urban design in the heritage environment of the city of Bath. We explore a theoretical framework for understanding and designing pervasive systems as an integral part of the urban landscape. We develop a framework based on Hillier's Space Syntax theories and Kostakos' PSP framework which encompasses the analysis of space and spatial patterns, alongside the consideration of personal, social and public interaction spaces to capture the complex relationship between pervasive systems, urban space in general and the impact of the deployment of pervasive systems on people's relationships to heritage and to each other. We describe these methodological issues in detail before giving examples from early studies of the types of result we are beginning to find.

2007

Abstract Only recently have researchers focused on the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles. Pervasive computing has largely been applied either in relatively homogeneous unpopulated areas--for example, sensor networks in forests--or in small-scale well-defined built environments, such as smart houses. Urban settings pose many research and deployment challenges: ownership issues are complex as are the dynamics and density of system participation.