Smart Cities & Communities

Challenge

Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) are becoming more widespread. Data-collecting technologies help city planners, programmers, policy-makers base their decisions on the most up-to-date and accurate information. As major centres like New York, Singapore, and Seoul achieve global recognition for their use of data-sharing and sensing technologies (sensors, cameras, and connected devices), smaller centres, like London Ontario, are following suit. Despite their considerable advantages, SCCs present certain risks to citizens. For example, a key and pressing issue is the use of citizen data without oversight and consideration for privacy rights.

Aim

Led by Ayan Sadhu, PhD, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Western University, the team explored the emerging social, ethical, economic, and technical challenges by adopting a collaborative and interdisciplinary framework for research, where experts across the university and the world, industry partners, local organizations, government agencies, stakeholders, and policymakers collaborated to identify solutions and to mitigate potential risks. Team activities, included an interdisciplinary lecture series, graduate seminars, outreach events, and industry workshops. Scholarly outputs aimed to complement Western’s new Smart City educational program and the SCC laboratory, which integrates industry and government partners and researchers in engineering, ethics, information studies, and law. Ultimately, the goal was to help communities and their leaders create a blueprint for an ethical, technologically-driven future.

Impact

Highlights of successes include:

    • Over $440K CAD in grants & awards
    • A cutting-edge data-to-decision tool that could change the future of cities
    • New discoveries in self-automation & sensing technologies
    • Key partnership with the City of London

Read more about our progress here.