Ubiquitous and socially-aware real-time urban computing platform

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This research aims at promoting viable communities through empowering residents of Canadian cities to take a vital part in enhancing the quality of service delivered out of municipal infrastructures. The quality of this infrastructure is taken for granted until it fails in some way (e.g., traffic congestions and vehicle incidents are becoming Canadian 'household' concerns). This makes the management of the civil infrastructure key to our societal and economical metabolism. This proposal contributes to the wireless cities vision, adopted in more than 25 Canadian cities, by enabling new types of value-added applications that supports emergency evacuation planning, traffic congestion management and vehicle incident management applications. The proposed platform explores aspects of "citizen science" where city residents use their portable devices to report real-time data of the civil infrastructure status. The platform exploits the convergence of social computing and networking disciplines for gathering and correlating contextual and semantic events to derive situational awareness and deliver real-time services that are most suited for city residents leading to "what you need is what you get" services. Situational content is transported to city headquarters using municipal wireless mesh networks to enhance their Return On Investment. City servers take advantage of the social relationships between city residents as well as their real-time contexts to filter and aggregate user-generated situational content. The municipal wireless network is used to transfer back situational knowledge to city residents roaming across the city (on their portable devices of mobile city residents). The platform will also study how to enable diverse groups of self-responders to self-organize temporarily in a coherent and agile manner to enable the emergence of complex collaborative behaviour.