Scope

The term “smart city” has recently re-emerged in the recent with a focus on data analytics facilitated through the Internet of Things technology. For many large corporations such as IBM, SAP, Intel, Cisco, and Siemens, just to name a few, the concept of a smart city is an opportunity to deliver an integrated technology platform to serve a vast area of technology needs ranging from data collection to identifying and presenting actionable insight. From a practical perspective there is need to customize and further advance technology to address needs in application specific domains such as transportation, traffic, and waste management. Heavy research and development investment has become available through different parties including government agencies, large-scale industrial entities and local city governments pertaining to smart cities. The estimated global smart cities market will be values at US$1.565 trillion in 2020. It is estimated that over 26 global cities will move towards the concept of smart cities by 2025. One of the major driving forces in the smart city paradigm is the notion of Internet of Things (IOT). IOT is often defined as an intertwined network of objects that act as independent or semi-independent operational agents that interact with their environment and each other. The Internet of Things pulls together research from different areas such as embedded systems, ubiquitous computing and large scale data analytics. Research in IOT and applications of IOT in the domain of smart cities has led to theories and methodologies to 1) collect data from the broader city environment and community and any phenomenon that is linked with them, and 2) analyze data using intelligent data analytics techniques to deliver knowledge and actionable insight; 3) deploy the right socio-technical solutions to fulfil the objective of smart cities, i.e., improve the quality of citizens’ life. This special issue focuses on the interplay between Smart Cities and IoT technology. In particular, this issue will solicit papers on theories, methodologies, techniques and tools that, in practice, can aid cities to provide better services, to efficiently manage resources and energy, to refine their strategies, to improve health services, to react to an outbreak, among other use cases. This special issue encourages the submission of high quality papers from multiple disciplines as well as inter-disciplinary research with a strong application element that gives evidence of the improvement of smart city scenarios using IoT technologies. This special issue also encourages submissions from work that use open data within cities and develop intelligent techniques based on open data. .

Paper Submission Details

Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 50% new material to be considered for the special issue. All papers are to be submitted through the journal editorial submission system. At the beginning of the submission process in the submission system, authors need to select "Synergies of Smart Cities and Internet of Things" as the article title. All manuscripts must be prepared according to the journal publication guidelines which can also be found on the website provided above. Papers will be evaluated following the journal's standard review process.

Guest Editors (alphabetical)

Mohsen Asadi is an assistant professor of computer engineering faculty, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. His research concentrates on big data analytics, streaming analytics, and Internet of Things having seven submitted patents on different data analytics topics. Previously he works at SAP as a senior applied software engineer working on big data and geo analytics tools. He graduated his PhD from Simon Fraser University, where he published more than 10 journal papers and more than 20 conferences papers in reputed venues. He can be reached at masadi@sfu.ca .

Ebrahim Bagheri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ryerson University, a Canada Research Chair in Software and Semantic Computing and an NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Social Media Analytics. He is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He currently leads projects worth over $4M CAD on various aspects of social and semantic computing. He can be reached at bagheri@ryerson.ca

Mohammad Hossein Yaghmaee Moghaddam is a Full Professor in the Computer Engineering Department, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM). His research interests are in Internet of Things and Smart Cities , Smart Grid, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Cloud/Fog Computing. He is an IEEE Senior member and head of the IP-PBX type approval lab in the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. He currently leads some projects on smart energy monitoring and smart grid. He is the author of some books on Smart Grid, TCP/IP and Smart City in Persian language.