Dear Colleagues,

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming increasingly pervasive in urban environments and providing the necessary basis for sustainability and resilience of the smart future cities. ICT, as the prime enabler for smart cities, transforms application-specific data into useful information and knowledge. This unique possibility of realisation of smart cities is being enabled by smarter “Internet of Things” (IoT), i.e., smart phones, sensor nets, smart household appliances, etc., and making efficient use of ever-increasing city data. New models of urban governance are also required to handle to complexity of city processes supporting the application of new information intelligence for decision making and policy development.

ICT tools for a smart city often deal with different application domains, e.g., land use, transport, energy, environment, health and rarely provide the essential integrated information perspective to deal with sustainability and socio-economic development, citizens’ quality of life and sustainability of the city. Smart cities can benefit from such data (often open data) and information using Big, and often real-time cross-thematic, data collection, processing, integration and sharing through inter-operable information services. However, such information utilisation requires appropriate software tools, services and technologies to collect, store, analyse and visualise large amounts of data from the city environment, as well as new models of open integrated and participatory urban governance linking citizens and various departments and agencies at city scale to generate new knowledge and support decision making.

In the above context, the real value of smart city data is gained by new knowledge generation and by performing context based data processing and analytics using various data mining, machine learning or statistical methods. This becomes challenging when applied to large scale or real time data and, hence, requires appropriate tools and techniques to be applied to process and generate required information. In addition, privacy and security issues must be dealt to avoid sharing intrusive details of participants. Topics of interest in the Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• Smart Mobility
• Smart Energy Grids
• Smart Homes
• Smart Urban Governance
• Internet of Things and Big Data
• Smart and Intelligent Urban Data Analytics
• Context Aware Systems for Smart Cities
• Smart Cities Big Data Management
• Smart Cities Data Analytics
• Data Harmonisation, Integration and Processing
• Smart Health
• Software Technologies for Smart Cities
• Environmental Modelling and Applications
• Smart Cities Cross-thematic Applications
• Public Participation and Crowd Sourcing
• Smart Buildings and Building Information Modeling (BIM)
• Connected Living Labs
• Smart Data Security and Privacy Aspects

Paper Solicitation

This issue is an open Special Issue, where everyone is encouraged to submit papers. We will solicit papers in two ways: Workshop and open call-for-papers.

1. Selected Papers from The 3rd International Workshop on Smart City Clouds: Technologies, Systems and Applications (SCCTSA 2016). This workshop covers theoretical and industrial research and results on smart city systems, tools and technologies which use cloud computing as underlying storage and processing infrastructure. It provides a platform for researchers, scholars and practitioners to exchange new ideas for solving complex societal challenges faced by cities. The website containing information about the SCCTSA 2016 workshop is: http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/et/research/cccs/events/scctsa2016.aspx High quality papers accepted from the workshop will be selected, based on the reviews and presentation during the workshop. Each selected paper must be substantially extended, with at least 50% development from the workshop version.
2. Open Call-For-Papers: We also plan to send an open call-for-papers (CFP) to various smart city networks, projects and relevant mailing lists of researchers globally. It is expected that there will be number of papers submitted via the open call for papers. Each paper (including the selected papers from the workshop) will go through a rigorous peer-review process by at least three experts. The acceptance rate will be fairly low as we regard quality as our top priority. Submitted papers must represent original unpublished research that is not currently under review for any other conference or journal.

Dr. Zaheer Khan
Assoc. Prof. David Ludlow
Dr. Kamran Munir
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Smart cities
• Internet of Things
• Big Data
• Cloud computing
• Open governance