Smart cities: Intelligent environments and dumb people? Panel summary

Abstract

Pervasive and mobile computing technologies can make our everyday living environments and our cities "smart", i.e., capable of reaching awareness of physical and social processes and of dynamically affecting them in a purposeful way. In general, living in a smart environment and being made part of its activities somehow make us - as individuals - smarter as well, by increasing our perceptory and social capabilities. However, a potential risk could be to start delegating too much to the environment itself, losing in critical attention, abandoning individual decision making for relying on collective computational governance of our activity, and in the end also losing awareness of environmental and social processes. The panel intends to discuss the above issues with the help of relevant researchers in the area of pervasive computing, smart environments, collective intelligence.