Summer recap for the SMACITE project

We are finally back from a well deserved summer vacation and it is a good moment to analyze the evolution of the SMACITE project in the last months.

As you may know the SMACITE project is a 3-year project (01/06/2022 – 31/05/2025) coordinated by the University of Patras (Greece) and co-funded by the European Union promoting the development, curriculum and competencies of smart cities in the participating countries.

During the last summer many students participating in the initiative had the time to learn and develop projects in the different courses that are part of the SMACITE initiative: Smart Cities, IoT devices, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, 3D printing, … there is an abundance of content and materials in relation with many different areas that highly impact in the development of smart cities initiatives.

As part of these projects, students had, among many other things, to evaluate Smart Cities initiatives that were being developed close to their place of residence. It was a privilege to be able to review and score these projects about exotic places within the EU territory (exotic for those not in the given location of course, that is), just to mention a few:

• Burgas open standards adoption for data interchange within the context of smart cities
• The Sofia Cluster Knowledge City Project
• The SADECO project in the city of Cordoba

Taking into account the difficulty to keep track of all the modernization projects being undertaken in Europe when it comes to smart cities, it is true that most of the investment is done on traditional restoration and maintenance projects (for streets, utilities and buildings) but a lot of public funding is being placed on digitalization, public awareness and, in general, an improved way of life. For example, one specific item that may usually go unnoticed is how smart cities projects can help improve efficiency in work activities.

Smart Cities initiatives help people get faster and less stressed to the job, help improve green initiatives in otherwise “gray” cities, help people communicate with each other, reduce commuting, help waste be managed more efficiently and improve public expenditure.

Ultimately Smart Cities revolve around “making more with less”.

Now students have to undergo an exam to rate their knowledge of the subject (apart from the self evaluation that they had to overcome during the lectures), in this way we guarantee that they develop a profound understanding of the subjects dealt with during the study sessions. Really interesting are aspects like the use of digital boards for sensor reading, or the use of cloud services for typical data gathering or application deployment, or the use or resins for 3d printing, most of these subjects are of high employability and these competences are seeked in the working market throughout Europe. Students also have to undergo practical labs: virtual machine creation in the cloud, prototyping circuits with Arduino, 3d design for 3d printing, really interesting is also evaluating their job during these activities as some real good skills are detected and improved as part of this learning process. In the end their cCurriculum improves and, let's be honest, the instructor and course evaluators also learn a lot from their students, it is a win-win scenario.

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Smart_City_Nansha.jpg (license CC)