Public space serves as opportunities for everyday engagement including cultural activities and social interactions. The co-presence of diverse groups and activities is seen as an important building block of social cohesion. This review synthesised the empirical evidence to understand the relationship between public space and social cohesion. Databases searched included Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed with the inclusion of peer reviewed articles published in English, between 2000 and 2023 (till 22nd February 2023). A total of 63 published studies were identified. A variety of physical aspects of different public spaces was found to potentially encourage social interaction and cohesion, i.e., accessibility, mixed land use, presence of street furniture, etc. Furthermore, such impact was found to be affected by a range of sociodemographic factors, for example ethnicity, age, and length of residence, and perceptual factors such as safety perception, visual perceptions, and place attachment. Overall, research exploring the relationship between public space and social cohesion has occurred within disciplinary silos, posing a significant challenge in conceptualising this relationship. The recognition of these findings bridges the research effort in understanding the social mechanism between people and space across research agendas including urban design and planning, sociology, environmental psychology, public health, and human geography. We describe future work in studying the intangible aspects of urban space in the directions of assessing the social performance of public space and devising interventions to promote social interaction and foster social cohesion.

Rice is one of the foremost food grains that dispenses sustenance to about half of the world’s population. It is cultivated all over the world. The leaf disease detection of this crop is one of the chronic agricultural obstacles that farmers and planting experts have been struggling with for a long time. As a result of the leaf diseases, producing the amount of rice required to feed the world’s rising population has become very challenging. Hence, automatically detecting rice leaf diseases is an inevitable task to increase productivity. Numerous deep learning based methods have been proposed for rice leaf disease detection, which we found rather inefficient considering the size of the models. In this article, we introduce a lightweight deep Convolutional Neural Network (dCNN) based method for rice leaf disease detection, that outperforms contemporary state-of-the-art methods and showcases competitive performance against 21 established benchmark architectures, including AlexNet, MobileNet, ResNet50, DenseNet121, ResNeXt50, ShuffleNet, ConvNext, EfficientNet, GogoleNet, SwinTransformer, VisionTransformer, and MaxVit, to name a few, with significantly lower trainable parameters. Notably, our method achieves an accuracy score of 99.81%, a precision score of 0.99828, a recall score of 0.99826, and an f1-score of 0.99827. Moreover, we enhance the rice leaf disease dataset by merging two existing datasets and supplemented them with an additional 95 manually annotated images gathered from publicly available sources on the internet. We also develop a comprehensive crop health monitoring system for farmers, and develop an open API for the automatic annotation of new instances, benefiting the research community at large.

Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies used in developing smart cities solutions, Machine Learning (ML) and recently Deep Learning (DL), rely more on utilising best representative training datasets and features engineering and less on the available domain expertise. We argue that such an approach to solution development makes the outcome of solutions less explainable, i.e., it is often not possible to explain the results of the model. There is a growing concern among policymakers in cities with this lack of explainability of AI solutions, and this is considered a major hindrance in the wider acceptability and trust in such AI-based solutions. In this work, we survey the concept of ‘explainable deep learning’ as a subset of the ‘explainable AI’ problem and propose a new solution using Semantic Web technologies, demonstrated with a smart cities flood monitoring application in the context of a European Commission-funded project. Monitoring of gullies and drainage in crucial geographical areas susceptible to flooding issues is an important aspect of any flood monitoring solution. Typical solutions for this problem involve the use of cameras to capture images showing the affected areas in real-time with different objects such as leaves, plastic bottles etc., and building a DL-based classifier to detect such objects and classify blockages based on the presence and coverage of these objects in the images. In this work, we uniquely propose an Explainable AI solution using DL and Semantic Web technologies to build a hybrid classifier. In this hybrid classifier, the DL component detects object presence and coverage level and semantic rules designed with close consultation with experts carry out the classification. By using the expert knowledge in the flooding context, our hybrid classifier provides the flexibility on categorising the image using objects and their coverage relationships. The experimental results demonstrated with a real-world use case showed that this hybrid approach of image classification has on average 11% improvement (F-Measure) in image classification performance compared to DL-only classifier. It also has the distinct advantage of integrating experts’ knowledge on defining the decision-making rules to represent the complex circumstances and using such knowledge to explain the results.

Citizen Science, or the participation of non-professional scientists in a scientific project, has a long history—in many ways, the modern scientific revolution is thanks to the effort of citizen scientists. Like science itself, citizen science is influenced by technological and societal advances, such as the rapid increase in levels of education during the latter part of the twentieth century, or the very recent growth of the bidirectional social web (Web 2.0), cloud services and smartphones. These transitions have ushered in, over the past decade, a rapid growth in the involvement of many millions of people in data collection and analysis of information as part of scientific projects. This chapter provides an overview of the field of citizen science and its contribution to the observation of the Earth, often not through remote sensing but a much closer relationship with the local environment. The chapter suggests that, together with remote Earth Observations, citizen science can play a critical role in understanding and addressing local and global challenges.

The impact of Crowdsourcing and citizen science activities on academia, businesses, governance and society has been enormous. This is more prevalent today with citizens and communities collaborating with organizations, businesses and authorities to contribute in a variety of manners, starting from mere data providers to being key stakeholders in various decision-making processes. The “Crowdsourcing for observations from Satellites” project is a recently concluded study supported by demonstration projects funded by European Space Agency (ESA). The objective of the project was to investigate the different facets of how crowdsourcing and citizen science impact upon the validation, use and enhancement of Observations from Satellites (OS) products and services. This paper presents our findings in a stakeholder analysis activity involving participants who are experts in crowdsourcing, citizen science for Earth Observations. The activity identified three critical areas that needs attention by the community as well as provides suggestions to potentially help in addressing some of the challenges identified.