Smart City and Informatization, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Smart City is a concept in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is employed to achieve sustainable urban spaces through the availability of so-called smart products and services, while transforming existing government and governance models and practices (e-government, e-governance and e-democracy). Smart Cities have been seen as the solution to face the challenges of today's urban spaces, including social, environmental, and economical.

Today, several cities have already started the process of becoming smart, but this is a never-ending task. The research community, political personnel as well as the private sector are now learning with those cities that have already started the process, mainly by positioning the citizens at the center of the transformation (citizen-centric). Consequently, the research community and private companies have been researching and working towards the offering of new and improved solutions to approach the transformation through the use of new infrastructures, architectures, services, and devices.

The smart city concept requires the employment of different technologies (IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Social Sensing, Crowd Sensing, etc.) in different applications domains (healthcare, transportation, education, energy generation, etc.), while keeping social cohesion, sustainability and improving competitiveness. Hence, several challenges are emerging such as security and privacy issues, services scalability and interoperability while engaging with citizens and addressing info-exclusion.

Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to address the latest research results on citizen-centric smart cities with a special focus on the citizens’ and social sciences’ roles without forgetting technical issues such as security and privacy aspects.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas for Smart Cities:

• Social engagement and participation;
• Social sensing;
• Crowdsensing;
• Smart mobility;
• Citizen-centric products, services, and applications for smart cities;
• Public institutions and private sector informatization;
• Smart governance;
• e-government, e-governance and e-democracy;
• Digitalization of city systems and services;
• New architectures and frameworks for smart cities;
• Mobile broadband and 5G for smart cities;
• Blockchain applied to the smart city domain;
• Cloud and Edge computing;
• Digital twins applied to smart cities;
• Smart environments in the context of smart cities;
• Big data analytics for smart cities;
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence for smart cities;
• Edge and cloud computing for smart cities;
• Smart city applications.

Prof. Dr. António Pereira
Dr. Nuno Alexandre Ribeiro Costa
Prof. Dr. Antonio Fernández-Caballero
Guest Editors

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• smart cities
• social sensing
• crowd sensing
• digitalization
• smart governance
• smart services
• smart products

• Smart City and Informatization in Applied Sciences (4 articles)