Smart Cities as a university common talk: The case of UNIZA

Abstract

The “Smart Cities” topic has recently become the topic number one in the agenda of both national and international research and development projects. This paper has been written with motivation to present various ideas of experts and professionals from an academic environment that represent different scientific fields of work such as telecommunications, control engineering, traffic engineering, information and communication technologies, etc. The authors believe that using the case of the University of Žilina (UNIZA) the multidisciplinary and synergic character of the topic may be emphasized sufficiently. Therefore a special content form of the paper has been used, based on the “question-answer” pattern. Traditionally prepared papers usually follow one of two possible lines: integration dimension - from research mono-thematically oriented on one technology only up to the fully integrated approach, or socio-technical dimension- from solution of purely technical problems up to the socio-technical perspectives and position of a human in the whole chain. This paper aims to raise a set of key questions representing the most urgent problems of today's smart city agenda and answers to them.