Welcome Note

In-Depth Lecture: Digital Collaboration for Sustainable Urban Futures
At a time when urban areas are increasingly at the heart of global ecological, social, and economic crises, there is an urgent need for novel approaches to envisioning sustainable futures. Visions of these futures are of great importance for shaping social transformation processes and should therefore be both: a matter of collaborative practices as well as an important topic for critical reflections. At the same time, under the umbrella term of smart cities, emerging technologies and an accelerated processing of urban data currently heavily impact the ways of developing cities. 
Focussing on digital collaboration, the City Science Lab at HafenCity University Hamburg has a long record of transformative research in the context of digital cities since 2016. Based on concrete case studies and projects in the context of the City Science Lab, this in-depth lecture addresses the current shift towards people-centered smart cities and showcases concrete examples of how technology can be developed and applied for sustainable urban futures. It discusses ways of co-creating technology and collaborating digitally by e.g. co-modeling urban systems and simulating potential future scenarios. Lastly, it links such processes to new modes of participatory urban futuring. 

Workshop: up:town: Envisioning Resilient Urban Futures Through Serious Gaming
This workshop introduces ‘up:town’, a serious game developed at the City Science Lab at HafenCity University Hamburg, as a transformative methodology. It is a tool for participatory urban futuring as well as a discursive door opener. Through engaging serious gameplay, ‘up:town’ puts participants in a fictional yet realistic urban setting in a near future. Here the consequences of digital innovations and digital driven urban planning for up:towns infrastructure as well as for the social fabric are part of our day to day lives. Besieged by various social, economic and environmental 'shocks' that force them to take on different roles and engage in collaborative and participatory decision-making processes, the players experience first-hand how serious games such as 'up:town' are interesting methods for collective urban future visioning, transforming abstract data and potential future threats into experiential learning opportunities.

In-Depths Lecture: SimRa: Safety in Bicycle Traffic
Climate change and the traffic chaos in large cities can only be addressed by increasing the modal share of public transport, walking, and cycling. At the same time, many cyclists not only feel unsafe and endangered in car traffic but also become victims of accidents frequently. To change this, transportation planners need accurate insights into traffic hazards - with a particular focus on near misses and other dangerous situations.

In this talk, we will give an overview of the citizen science project SimRa, which uses a crowdsensing-based approach to collect data on dangerous situations in cycling. We will discuss how we collect data, how we assert user privacy, as well as things we discovered. We will also point out directions for further research.
 

Workshop: AI ethics: Cases of (ir)responsible AI deployment
A common criticism of AI ethics is that guiding principles are not actionable, or even “useless” and “toothless”. During this workshop, the aim is to bridge theory with practice, by discussing and reflecting on real-life cases of (un)ethical AI deployment. The workshop is structured as follows: you will get introduced to the most common principles of AI ethics, bridge them with empirical cases of incidents with AI, think of potential ways of mitigation, and reflect on the usefulness (or: uselessness) of such categorizations.

Workshop: Transforming Urban Cleanliness: Optimal Resource Allocation
As urbanization accelerates, the concept of smart cities is gaining prominence, focusing on leveraging advanced technologies to enhance the efficiency and quality of urban services. This workshop delves into applying unsupervised multi-agent systems in smart cities, particularly in scenarios requiring rapid, efficient, and autonomous decision-making. We will explore how multi-agent systems can autonomously manage emergency responses and urban maintenance tasks such as garbage collection. Maintaining city cleanliness through efficient garbage collection poses significant logistical challenges. We will investigate how multi-agent systems can optimize routes and schedules for garbage collection units, ensuring that resources are used efficiently while maintaining high standards of urban cleanliness. The focus will be on decentralized decision-making processes, where agents learn and adapt based on environmental feedback, enabling them to operate without centralized control.

This workshop will provide insights into the latest advancements in multi-agent systems, showcase practical implementations, and discuss potential challenges and future directions. Attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of how unsupervised multiagent systems can transform smart city operations, leading to more resilient, responsive, and sustainable urban environments.

In-Depths Lecture: Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence in Administration and Smart Cities

This lecture explores current and future applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in administration and Smart Cities. It showcases examples of existing AI use and its potential to enhance efficiency. Additionally, it presents initial ideas for generating use cases and outlines the legal considerations that must be taken into account.

Keynote: Human versus machine intelligence: Solving complex and dynamic real-world
Assessing human intelligence has a long history in the field of psychology. However, when it comes to machines we often struggle to decide whether to call a system intelligent or not. Many of the tasks that are used for conventional intelligence ("IQ") tests are very easy to solve for computers. Even multiple tasks can be solved by collections of "savants", as long as the tasks are predictable. This either means that we have to start calling powerful machines "intelligent" or that we are missing something decisive in our conventional intelligence measures for humans. A crucial ingredient that typically goes missing is the human ability to solve complex and rapidly changing problems in real-world environments.

In-Depth Lecture: Digital Collaboration for Sustainable Urban Futures
At a time when urban areas are increasingly at the heart of global ecological, social, and economic crises, there is an urgent need for novel approaches to envisioning sustainable futures. Visions of these futures are of great importance for shaping social transformation processes and should therefore be both: a matter of collaborative practices as well as an important topic for critical reflections. At the same time, under the umbrella term of smart cities, emerging technologies and an accelerated processing of urban data currently heavily impact the ways of developing cities.
Focussing on digital collaboration, the City Science Lab at HafenCity University Hamburg has a long record of transformative research in the context of digital cities since 2016. Based on concrete case studies and projects in the context of the City Science Lab, this in-depth lecture addresses the current shift towards people-centered smart cities and showcases concrete examples of how technology can be developed and applied for sustainable urban futures. It discusses ways of co-creating technology and collaborating digitally by e.g. co-modeling urban systems and simulating potential future scenarios. Lastly, it links such processes to new modes of participatory urban futuring.

Workshop: up:town: Envisioning Resilient Urban Futures Through Serious Gaming
This workshop introduces ‘up:town’, a serious game developed at the City Science Lab at HafenCity University Hamburg, as a transformative methodology. It is a tool for participatory urban futuring as well as a discursive door opener. Through engaging serious gameplay, ‘up:town’ puts participants in a fictional yet realistic urban setting in a near future. Here the consequences of digital innovations and digital driven urban planning for up:towns infrastructure as well as for the social fabric are part of our day to day lives. Besieged by various social, economic and environmental 'shocks' that force them to take on different roles and engage in collaborative and participatory decision-making processes, the players experience first-hand how serious games such as 'up:town' are interesting methods for collective urban future visioning, transforming abstract data and potential future threats into experiential learning opportunities.

Talk: Smart City Berlin TXL
The presentation gives an overview of the Smart City activities in Berlin TXL. The vision of the Smart City for the new neighborhoods will be presented, as well as the planned steps and current developments. An insight into realized use cases and the technical infrastructure of the FUTR HUB shows how Smart City applications are already helping with the planning, operation and construction of a new future quarter.

Keynote: Machine learning for urban climate change mitigation

More than 1000 cities worldwide have committed addressing climate change, and many are interested in using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Machine learning methods are only starting to be used in this context, for instance some city governments are exploring ML's potential to efficiently monitor, optimize, or forecast aspects relevant to climate change mitigation efforts. This talk will present a survey of the research landscape of more than 2000 papers, provide a deeper dive into specific approaches, and discuss whether ML can be regarded as a lever to help with reducing emissions in urban areas.

Welcome Note

Keynote: NebulaStream – Data Stream Processing in Massively Distributed Heterogeneous Environments
Modern data-driven applications arising in such domains as smart manufacturing, healthcare, and the Internet of Things, pose new challenges to data processing systems. Traditional stream processing systems, such as Flink, Spark, or Kafka Streams are ill-suited to cope with the massive scale of distribution, the heterogeneous computing landscape, and the requirement for timely processing and actuation. Classical approaches like managed runtimes, interpretation-based query processing, and the optimization of single queries that neglect interactions, greatly limit throughput, latency, energy-efficiency, and the general usability of these systems for emerging applications involving distributed data processing at scale in a sensor-edge-cloud-environment.

At BIFOLD / TU Berlin, we are researching and building NebulaStream, a novel data-stream processing system for massively distributed, heterogeneous environments. NebulaStream supports (potentially resource-constrained) heterogeneous devices, a hierarchical topology (with the distribution of computation and data flow in a cloud-edge-continuum), and the sharing of computations and data across multiple concurrent queries. The key distinguishing features of NebulaStream from a technological perspective, include the following: 

1. An incremental and continuous query optimizer that considers the sharing of computation and intermediate results in conjunction with the placement of operations in a massively distributed, heterogeneous cloud-edge continuum.
2. A compilation-based approach for streaming queries, which avoids the need for managed runtimes and ensures excellent throughput, latency, and energy-efficiency across the board, from small embedded devices to powerful processors.
3. A distributed runtime that supports on-demand in-network processing on a hierarchical topology of heterogeneous devices in an efficient and fault-tolerant way.

In this talk, we will describe several challenges arising due to novel applications and architectures for distributed data stream processing. We will present NebulaStream, an innovative open-source system, currently being built to address these challenges. In addition, we will describe NebulaStream’s design principles, architecture, performance, application scenarios, as well as the current status of the open-source development.

In-Depths Lecture: Towards Accurate Open Source Map Services
Map services, including routing, searching, and prediction, have empowered a variety of ubiquitous services and applications, including transportation, location-based services, ride-sharing, and delivery industry. Though there is extensive research in academia and industry for developing efficient algorithms for such services, all algorithms have the implicit assumption that the underlying map is accurate. 
Unfortunately, this assumption is not always true. Maps suffer from all sorts of inaccuracy that significantly impact the accuracy of map services. This talk will go through our recent efforts to significantly boost the accuracy of current and future map services, through exploiting two orthogonal directions. First, building accurate maps, with a broad definition of a map that goes beyond the traditional map topology to a more rich definition that includes traffic-related metadata, without which, most of map services will have low accuracy. 
Second, developing new techniques that would increase the accuracy of query processors over the accurately built maps. The talk will also serve as a call to the community to join arms and collaborate in building the most comprehensive worldwide open source accurate maps and map services.

Welcome Note
 

Workshop (in German):  Künstliche Intelligenz in der öffentlichen Verwaltung / Use of AI in Public Administration

Im CityLAB Berlin arbeiten wir gemeinsam mit der Berliner Verwaltung daran, das Potenzial neuer Technologien für die Stadt auszuloten und zu erproben. In diesem Workshop wollen wir Ideen entwickeln, wie Künstliche Intelligenz eingesetzt werden kann, um neue Services für Bürger:innen zu entwickeln und die Verwaltungsarbeit effizienter zu machen.

Keynote: (Digital) Visual Property. The Homophily of the Smart City as a Techno-Material Construct

“Home” as an assemblage of interior and exterior spaces extends far beyond the actual apartment, once it is set in a highly controlled, surveilled and serviced urban environment. While Songdo Smart City can be read as a continuation of modernist South Korean Apatu (Apartment) Urbanism, its digitalization adds a new quality of feeling of belonging or propriety beyond the ownership of the individual apartment. Its morphology as an island and archipelago and its highly surveilled and ICT-controlled private, collective and public spaces, extend the impression of propriety (versus simple ownership) beyond the apartment and the semi-gated housing compound to the city itself. The talk is based on research conducted in the CRC 1265 Refiguration of Spaces within the sub-project B03 with Martina Löw.

In-depths Lecture: AI for the public interest

This session will present how AI for the public interest can be understood and give examples of use cases. It will explain what „the public interest“ means from a theoretical perspectives and connects it with AI systems development and implementation in practice. The lecture gives an overview of application fields, potentials and challenges of AI in the public interest. Finally, this session will provide critical reflection on AI development in general, since AI in the public interest is rather a niche than a mainstream phenomenon.