Director Strategic Partnerships at Amsterdam Economic Board
This one-day congress in Karlsruhe focuses on the topics gamification and game design as well as their impact on the areas of business, art and technology.
'Nordic Edge –Smarter Cities, Smarter Homes' is a smart cities conference and expo taking place in Stavanger, Norway on 6-7 October
Nordic Edge is an essential arena for anyone interested in making cities, communities, companies and homes smarter.
When the UK leaves the EU, Europe loses a very important country with regards to science and research. And the Netherlands loses an important ally in e.g. negotiations for the Digital Single Market.
However, chances are the UK will stay an Associated Country for subsidy programmes as Horizon 2020. The Brexit referendum outcome does affect the ICT sector directly: investors are reluctant to invest in British companies. Read more about Brexit and urban challenges in Dutch in my blog on the website of the Amsterdam Economic Board.
Following the successful OPTICITIES study visits and tutorial sessions in Bordeaux, Lyon, Madrid and Glasgow, registration for the study visit of 8 July in Birmingham is now open via http://bit.ly/1UARS21
The event is organised at the Innovation Birmingham Campus and will combine expert presentations and live demonstrations focusing on innovative urban ITS services:
* Introduction to OPTICITIES project
* Transport policy: Birmingham Connected / WMCA
* Data management / open data platform / Multimodal datasets / Potential for C-ITS
* Use of traffic prediction in OCR
* Freight journey time reliability and driver assist services
The study visit is limited to 35 persons. Registration is mandatory and participation is free of charge. City delegates could get EUROCITIES support for their travel costs, please contact the Eurocities contact person in your municipality for that. Please register as soon as possible and before 1st July 2016.
Cities that are interested in applying for financial support through the Connecting Europe Facility in order to introduce the OPTICITIES multimodal dataset and open ITS architecture are invited to sign the New Mobility Services Memorandum http://bit.ly/1MiTJuy published by the Smart Cities Action Cluster on Urban Mobility.
By signing up for the OPTICITIES Stakeholder Platform - http://www.opticities.com/stakeholder-forum/online-forum - you can download our latest technical reports and deployment guidelines on multimodal data integration in large cities, road works data collection, contractual arrangements between public and private stakeholders, Multimodal Urban Mobility Database model and architecture, assessment methodology for Transport policies in urban areas and more.
You are still in time to showcase your groundbreaking research in ICT at the WCN and Cloudscape Brazil 2016 workshops.
Deadline extended until 30 June!
EUBrasilCloudFORUM is collecting position papers from all stakeholders interested in the Workshop on Cloud Networks and Cloudscape Brazil 2016 (6-7 July, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil), the forum for EU-BR Co-operation on ICT: http://eubrasilcloudforum.eu/wcn-cloudscape-brazil-2016-csbc-2016-porto-alegre-rs-brasil
Position papers will be used to draft a research Roadmap on cloud computing, identifying collaboration needs and opportunities between Europe and Brazil for the European Commission and to the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology (MCTI), contributing to the definition of future cooperation priorities between the two regions. Position Papers will be the basis of a White Paper to be submitted to the EC and MCTI before the EU-Brazil Policy Dialogues in ICT in November 2016.
The new deadline for submission is Thursday 30 June 2016WCN & Cloudscape Brazil 2016 Focus themes:
•Legal framework for data protection in the cloud: experiences and lessons learnt from Europe and Brazil
•Security trade-off vs. performance
•Cloud & IoT - Challenges of integrating big data and IoT using cloud as an enabler
•Data streaming and big data analytic services - processing massive data in real-time
•Trustworthy cloud platforms and services
•Cross-domain orchestration and programmable networks in clouds
•Data flow and portability of data: remedies to vendor lock-in
•Building a culture of transparency for customer-friendly SLAs.
Submit your Position Paper online here________________________________________
*About* The EU-Brazil Dialogue in the Information Society [<http://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/index.cfm?pg=brazi>l\] field between the European Commission and Brazilian authorities - covering aspects of policy, regulation and research & development cooperation in the ICT sector - has been strengthened over the last years and has been made annual since 2008. By involving high-level EU and Brazilian opinion leaders, EUBrasilCloudFORUM will map the current regulatory frameworks in Europe and Brazil to support EU and Brazilian governments and funding agencies in the development of a joint ICT market for the benefit of IT providers, IT companies, research institutes as well as citizens. The EUBrasilCloudFORUM Roadmap will contribute to review new methods and processes, and to map which new technologies can ensure not only security but also interoperability between different private and public clouds, which will provide the future IT infrastructure and applications.Cloudscape Brazil 2016 is organized by EUBrasilCloudFORUM together with the Workshop on Cloud Networks (WCN) in the frame of the annual Conference of the Brazilian Computing Society (CSBC), 4-7 July 2016.
Upscaling seems to be the buzz word when speaking about smart cities today. We have an overload of pilots, in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and in the rest of the world, and everybody is struggling how to scale up and replicate what we are doing. So let’s look a bit deeper into upscaling.
That, actually, is what Willem van Winden, lector at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam Smart City’s research partner, did.With his team he studied various projects in Amsterdam Smart City, you can download his paper here. I will get back to his conclusions about how to scale up effectively, but first, I follow his vision that ‘upscaling’ itself is a quite fuzzy concept. What do we mean when we say we need to scale up a successful project? More participants? A twice as large geographical area? Do we want to do the same thing in another city? Who’s going to do it?
3 types of upscaling
Van Winden defines 3 types of upscaling, each with its own particularities: roll-out, expansion and replication.
Roll-out could be a further expansion of a solution tested in a pilot – in an organisation, in a city or in the market. This is often the case with solutions by one organisation with a sound business model, after a succesful pilot. The context has a low importance.
Expansion could mean expansion to a larger geographical area, to more functionalities or to more partners. This type of upscaling applies typically to platform solutions, where the value of the solution grows with the number of partner organisations. This is often the case to circular economy projects, where waste of one company is used as input for another company. Or for shared data projects, where the solution becomes more interesting and useful when more parties add their data. An obstacle here could be negotiations with new partners or new geographical conditions.You can see that with expansion, the number of partners and thus the context is more important than in a simple roll-out.
Replication could mean doing the same in an other part of the same city, with the same partnership, with a new partnership or in other cities. It can be done by the original partners, or by others.In this case, the context is highly important. A typical barrier, especially for data-based solutions, is the lack of standards, open data formats and protocols. And partners willing to share their data. Even if safety and security issues are tackled.
How to scale-up successfully?
So, knowing this, what can we learn from it? Firstly, before starting a pilot, it is a good idea to know what you mean by upscaling when the pilot is a success. What do you want to do if the idea really works, and who is going to do it? Here you can already see it makes sense to record accurately what you do and which partner has what role. So the thing with a lot of EU-funded projects is that they often deliver a toolkit with tools how to implement this new technology. Or a report, describing how the project milestones were reached. What, in fact, is interesting when you want to scale-up a complex pilot, is how you overcame obstacles, the roads you decided not to take, the u-turns you made, the problems you met and solved. This is the knowledge that you need when you want to scale-up a successful pilot project.
