December 2021

Written by Sara Paiva

The 7th edition of the IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2), the flagship technical IEEE Smart Cities event, was held in a virtual format from September 7th until September 10th, 2021. In this event, worldwide recognized specialists in the field of Smart Cities shared their latest research on trends, technologies, and solutions.

Written by Dr. Chun Sing Lai and Ms. Yifu Ding

This article describes the ten conference articles presented at IEEE ISC2 2021 related to smart energy systems. The main trends are highlighted, and a conclusion is given to examine the vision of smart energy systems.

Written by Dr. Shen Wang

Smart transportation sessions are one of the key activities of the annual IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2). This year, smart transportation sessions received the highest number of submissions among all technical sessions. Our sessions cover a wide range of topics from urban transportation infrastructure planning, to autonomous vehicle related technologies, and even include airport bottleneck analysis. There are two main trends clearly shown in our sessions this year. Firstly, the research focus of smart transportation is getting more integrated with the infrastructure design of the city. While big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are still of interest particularly in traffic prediction and autonomous driving, we have seen a rising number of research on building testbeds for demonstrating the design, or using a realistic dataset to verify the replanning of important transportation infrastructure. Secondly, the focus of smart transportation is shifting towards “human-centric”, rather than "machine-centric". Examples include a prototype system detecting driver's distraction and new communication protocols for ensuring the safety of vulnerable road users.

Written by Qi Hong Lai

According to Navigant Research reported in 2018, China continued to lead the global smart meter market with 496 million meters installed [1]. There were high-volume deployments across Japan and South Korea. The emergence of large meter tenders in India also helps to drive volumes. In Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, different small and mid-scale advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments continue to propagate. To fully utilize resources, smart meter data could be considered as a means to promote smart health development. In this article, a short overview will be given on some of the opportunities and challenges that will be faced.

Written by Georges Zissis

My name is Georges Zissis and I am the Chair of IEEE Smart Cities (SC). The IEEE SC Program brings together volunteers from 6 IEEE Organizational Units (OUs) with complementary Fields-of-Interest. IEEE SC hosts a very successful conference (ISC2-International Smart Cities Conference) with more than 200 attendees every year. It regularly organizes webinars and tutorials for training specialists from various horizons. This year, we have created an active Ambassador’s program involving more than 50 selected people worldwide to promote actions in the domain and we are planning a contest for municipalities. Look for Smart Cities involvements in major IEEE events… And I could state many other actions during the last 12 months that make the IEEE Smart Cities Program, the place to be!