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.

Human-AI collaboration has evolved into a complex, multidimensional paradigm shaped by research in various domains. Key areas such as human-in-the-loop systems, Interactive Machine Learning (IML), Hybrid Intelligence, and Human-Agent Interaction have significantly contributed to this development. However, these fields often lack cohesion, underscoring the need for a cohesive perspective to advance. This work addresses this gap by integrating insights from diverse aspects of collaboration to present a holistic approach to fostering effective and adaptive interactions between humans and artificial agents. It emphasizes empowering end-users with greater control and involvement in decision-making processes, thereby enhancing both the levels of interactivity and adaptability within intelligent systems. Moving beyond a focus on AI training techniques, this paper presents a broader perspective on incorporating human input into AI decision-making and learning processes, highlighting the importance of flexibility in systems and user engagement. The manuscript proposes a framework encompassing five levels of human integration and examines their relationship with core collaboration aspects, including the system purpose, participant expertise, and system proactivity. By synthesizing current knowledge on human-AI collaboration and outlining essential design principles, this work aims to advance the field and foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and designers.

Organized misinformation campaigns on Twitter continue to proliferate, even as the platform acknowledges such activities through its transparency center. These deceptive initiatives significantly impact vital societal issues, including climate change, thus spurring research aimed at pinpointing and intercepting these malicious actors. Present-day algorithms for detecting bots harness an array of data drawn from user profiles, tweets, and network configurations, delivering commendable outcomes. Yet, these strategies mainly concentrate on postincident identification of malevolent users, hinging on static training datasets that categorize individuals based on historical activities. Diverging from this approach, we advocate for a forward-thinking methodology, which utilizes user data to foresee and mitigate potential threats before their realization, thereby cultivating more secure, equitable, and unbiased online communities. To this end, our proposed technique forecasts malevolent activities by tracing the projected trajectories of user embeddings before any malevolent action materializes. For validation, we employed a dynamic directed multigraph paradigm to chronicle the evolving engagements between Twitter users. When juxtaposed against the identical dataset, our technique eclipses contemporary methodologies by an impressive 40.66% in F score (F1 score) in the anticipatory identification of harmful users. Furthermore, we undertook a model evaluation exercise to gauge the efficiency of distinct system elements.

This paper investigates the challenges of designing a computer supported collaborative environment aimed at facilitating co-production processes, i.e., those collaborative processes between Public Administrations, private stakeholders and citizens that aim at the design of public services, their implementation, and their shared delivery to the community. We argue that, for such a digital platform, different types of socio-technical requirements should be considered, i.e., those related to governance models and associated collaboration dynamics; requirements that may emerge from the specific type of public service to design; as well as user and technical requirements common to all e-government platforms. This research informed the development and testing of a digital collaboration platform that offers guidance on how to organize a co-production initiative and a network of stakeholders, functionalities to support collaborative work, and enablers (in the form of reusable knowledge and digital resources) to perform the sequence of steps to produce a public service. The lessons learned from the iterative platform development process and a preliminary evaluation study conducted with three Public Administrations in different European countries pointed at specific functionalities that are perceived as most crucial and at different appropriation practices that depend on the organizational structure of the involved Public Administrations and related multi-stakeholder networks. The innovation that is brought about with respect to general-purpose platforms for computer supported cooperative work is represented by the operationalization of co-production processes, with step-by-step guidance and potential reuse (with adaptation) of ready to use resources and processes. Based on the results of our research, general guidelines are also proposed for the design of future digital platforms supporting co-production.

Energy-related occupant behaviour in the built environment is considered crucial when aiming towards Energy Efficiency (EE), especially given the notion that people are most often unaware and disengaged regarding the impacts of energy-consuming habits. In order to affect such energy-related behaviour, various approaches have been employed, being the most common the provision of recommendations towards more energy-efficient actions. In this work, the authors extend prior research findings in an effort to automatically identify the optimal Persuasion Strategy (PS), out of ten pre-selected by experts, tailored to a user (i.e., the context to trigger a message, allocate a task or providing cues to enact an action). This process aims to successfully influence the employees’ decisions about EE in tertiary buildings. The framework presented in this study utilizes cultural traits and socio-economic information. It is based on one of the largest survey datasets on this subject, comprising responses from 743 users collected through an online survey in four countries across Europe (Spain, Greece, Austria and the UK). The resulting framework was designed as a cascade of sequential data-driven prediction models. The first step employs a particular case of matrix factorisation to rank the ten PP in terms of preference for each user, followed by a random forest regression model that uses these rankings as a filtering step to compute scores for each PP and conclude with the best selection for each user. Anex-postassessment of the individual steps and the combined ensemble revealed increased accuracy over baseline non-personalised methods. Furthermore, the analysis also sheds light on important user characteristics to take into account for future interventions related to EE and the most effective persuasion strategies to adopt based on user data. Discussion and implications of the reported results are provided in the text regarding the flourishing field of personalisation to motivate pro-environmental behaviour change in tertiary buildings.