What lessons can we learn from real-world implementations that successfully navigate the interesting tension between top down versus bottom up design of urban technology?

On October 22-23^rd, Intel  will explore this and other questions pertaining to the challenges facing future cities as paty of its 2013  European Research and Innovation Conference (ERIC), which will hosted together with the annual Research at Intel Europe (R@IE) showcase in Nice, France, close to the home to Intel’s High Performance Computing and Wireless Labs.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Building a Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive society through Research and Innovation partnership” and there will be a number of distinct focus areas included within the event: Networking, Mobility, HPC Exascale, Connected Cities and System on Chip (SoC) Architecture.

For the third year running, David Prendergast, an ICRI Cities Principal Investigator is responsible for organising the Connected Cities and Communities track in the conference. The theme for 2013 is “City Life” and speakers have been asked to provide insights around how we synthesise scalable city platforms with local community needs, practices and aspirations.  What lessons can we learn from the recipes that have worked over time?

Selected partners from the Intel research ecosystem, including Academic and Intel Researchers as well as leading thinkers and practitioners in the area of future cities are invited to speak in order to bring together a potent mixture of perspectives, approaches and challenging discussions. Speakers and delegates have ample opportunities to network with experts across academia, industry & government organizations as well as press and analysts from around the world.

Attendance is by invitation only and whilst places are very limited, ICRI Cities has access to a small number of spaces that it can make available to potential delegates. Readers are welcome to register their interest by contacting david.k.prendergast@intel.com.

Vaiva Kalnikaite and Sarah Gallacher, both from ICRI-Cities at UCL in London will jointly present their work on gathering and representing community data using novel input and visualisation mediums.  The presentation will include details of two in the wild studies that were conducted at two scales within a city environment – 1) in a “dead” workplace building and 2) in a “divided” community.  The first study looks at how lightweight and playful technology interventions can encourage greater levels of social connectedness within a “dead” workplace environment where physical interactions and a sense of community are typically low.  The second study looks at how a technology intervention has been used to challenge the strongly held belief of a social divide in an urban community.

Conference Schedule

Day 1 – Tuesday 22 October

Day 2 – Wednesday 23^rd October