Section: New Results

Urban Civics: An IoT Middleware for Democratizing Crowdsensed Data in Smart Societies

Participants : Valérie Issarny, Fadwa Rebhi, Animesh Pathak, Sara Hachem.

The growth of our cities comes along with the aggravation of urban nuisances (e.g., air pollution), which significantly alters the citizens' quality of life and especially their health. It then becomes essential to ensure the growth of cities is both environmentally and socially sustainable. As computer scientists, it is our vision that ICT shall play a key role in achieving the above sustainability requirements, as already put forward by the smart city/society concept. However, smart cities have mostly emphasized the big data dimension and related knowledge engineering to ease the management of the city's infrastructure and resources. While this is an important part of smart cities, we believe that ICT should be leveraged to promote participatory democracy so that citizens and government can communicate openly about the issues facing their societies as much as about their solutions. Toward that goal, we have introduced the Urban Civics middleware, which addresses three complementary research questions underlying participatory democracy from an ICT perspective [20] , [21] :

(RQ1) How to leverage the richness of urban sensors of the new digital era that features the Internet of Things, open data, social networking, and mobile computing to serve both citizens and government with better insights? Our answer lies in connecting those various data sources where probabilistic protocols combined with semantic technology allow for an urban-scale middleware solution.

(RQ2) How to assimilate urban data so as to generate explanatory city models to inform urban problem solving? Our solution leverages data assimilation (developed by the Inria CLIME team) that has proven successful in geosciences and paves the way to the comprehensive integration of heterogeneous data sources whose accuracy may vary significantly.

(RQ3) How to integrate the solutions to the above into a scalable urban middleware and further ensure citizen participation? Building on our past experience in developing middleware solutions for the mobile environment and especially the – mobile – Internet of Things, we have conceived and introduced the architecture of Urban Civics, a novel IoT middleware solution for democratizing crowd-sensed data in smart societie. We are in particular confident that, in addition to leveraging existing incentive mechanisms, the citizen participation will also be prompted by the very nature of participatory democracy. However, such an assumption needs to be validated through actual experiments at an urban scale for which we deploy use cases in the Paris and San Francisco Bay areas.