The introduction of the Information and Communication Technologies throughout the last decades has created a trend of providing daily objects with smartness, aiming to make human life more comfortable. The paradigm of Smart Cities arises as a response to the goal of creating the city of the future, where (1) the well-being and rights of their citizens are guaranteed, (2) industry and (3) urban planning is assessed from an environmental and sustainable viewpoint. Smart Cities still face some challenges in their implementation, but gradually more research projects of Smart Cities are funded and executed. Moreover, cities from all around the globe are implementing Smart City features to improve services or the quality of life of their citizens. Through this article, (1) we go through various definitions of Smart Cities in the literature, (2) we review the technologies and methodologies used nowadays, (3) we summarise the different domains of applications where these technologies and methodologies are applied (e.g. health and education), (4) we show the cities that have integrated the Smart City paradigm in their daily functioning and (5) we provide a review of the open research challenges. Finally, we discuss about the future opportunities for Smart Cities and the issues that must be tackled in order to move towards the cities of the future.
Data science projects represent a greater challenge than software engineering for organizations pursuing their adoption. The diverse stakeholders involved emphasize the need for a collaborative culture in organizations. This article aims to offer joint insights into the role of MLOps and AIOps methodologies for raising the success of data science projects in various fields, ranging from pure research to more traditional industries. We analyze the open issues, opportunities, and future trends organizations face when implementing MLOps and AIOps. Then, the frameworks and architectures that promote these paradigms are presented, as are the different fields in which they are being utilized. This systematic review was conducted using an automated procedure that identified 44,903 records, which were filtered down to 93 studies. These articles are meant to better clarify the problem at hand and highlight the future areas in both research and industry in which MLOPs and AIOps are thriving. Our findings indicate that AIOps flourish in challenging circumstances like those presented by 5G and 6G technologies, whereas MLOps is more prevalent in traditional industrial environments. The use of AIOps in certain stages of the ML lifecycle, such as deployment, remains underrepresented in scientific literature.
As the average age of the urban population increases, cities must adapt to improve the quality of life of their citizens. The City4Age H2020 project is working on the early detection of the risks related to mild cognitive impairment and frailty and on providing meaningful interventions that prevent these risks. As part of the risk detection process, we have developed a multilevel conceptual model that describes the user behaviour using actions, activities, and intra- and inter-activity behaviour. Using this conceptual model, we have created a deep learning architecture based on long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) that models the inter-activity behaviour. The presented architecture offers a probabilistic model that allows us to predict the user’s next actions and to identify anomalous user behaviours.
The ever-growing life expectancy of people requires the adoption of proper solutions for addressing the particular needs of elderly people in a sustainable way, both from service provision and economic point of view. Mild cognitive impairments and frailty are typical examples of elderly conditions which, if not timely addressed, can turn out into more complex diseases that are harder and costlier to treat. Information and communication technologies, and in particular Internet of Things technologies, can foster the creation of monitoring and intervention systems, both on an ambient-assisted living and smart city scope, for early detecting behavioral changes in elderly people. This allows to timely detect any potential risky situation and properly intervene, with benefits in terms of treatment's costs. In this context, as part of the H2020-funded City4Age project, this paper presents the data capturing and data management layers of the whole City4Age platform. In particular, this paper deals with an unobtrusive data gathering system implementation to collect data about daily activities of elderly people, and with the implementation of the related linked open data (LOD)-based data management system. The collected data are then used by other layers of the platform to perform risk detection algorithms and generate the proper customized interventions. Through the validation of some use-cases, it is demonstrated how this scalable approach, also characterized by unobtrusive and low-cost sensing technologies, can produce data with a high level of abstraction useful to define a risk profile of each elderly person.