AAAI 2015 Workshop On AI For Cities

Almost half of humanity today lives in urban environments and that number will grow to 80% or more by the middle of this century in different parts of the world. Cities are thus the loci of resource consumption, economic activity, social interactions, and education and innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability problems but also where those problems must be solved. Cities are also an enormous forum for policy making, as well as an apparently unbounded source of digital data of a wide nature. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to play a central role in tackling the underlying hard computational, decision making, and statistical problems of cities.

With this in mind, CUSP has proposed a worskshop to bring together AI researchers who work on urban informatics and domain experts from city agencies in order to: i) identify and characterize the prototypical AI problems that cities face, ii) discuss data access, open platforms, and dissemination of information, iii) present recent research in this nascent subfield, and iv) strengthen the path from research to decision and policy making. The workshop will be held on January 25-26, 2015, in Austin, Texas.

Topics include
Spatiotemporal inference of urban processes (social or natural)
Energy consumption/disaggregation models of large urban areas
Planning/Scheduling for city operations
Decision making for urban science and for city policy
AI models of transportation and utilities networks
Resource allocation in urban systems
Event detection of urban activity and processes
Active learning, sampling biases and dataset shift in city data
Multi-agent simulations of urban processes
Visualization and city operational systems
Cross-city comparative analysis
Improving public health systems in cities
Crowdsourcing for urban science and decision making
Open data platforms and data access tools for data science

Agenda

09:00 – 09:30 - Introduction and opening remarks
09:30 – 10:00 - Invited talk – Juliana Freire, NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering
10:00 – 10:30 - Invited talk – Autonomous Machines and Robots in Cities – Manuela Veloso, CMU
10:30 – 11:00 - Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00 - Paper Presentations
12:00 – 01:30 - Lunch Break
01:30 – 02:00 - Invited Talk – Mike Flowers, NYU CUSP
02:00 – 02:30 - Paper Presentations
02:30 – 03:00 - Panel Discussions
03:00 – 03:30 - Data access – city data portals, initiatives, and restrictions
03:30 – 04:00 - Coffee Break
04:00 – 04:30 - Data access – city data portals, initiatives, and restrictions
04:30 – 05:00 - Open discussion and concluding remarks
05:00 – 06:00 - Social event

Submission Requirements

Papers must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style. Regular research papers (submitted and final), presenting a significant contribution, may be no longer than 7 pages, with page 7 including only references. Short papers (submitted and final), describing a position on the topic of the workshop or a demonstration/tool, may be no longer than 4 pages, including references.

Submissions are to be made online at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ai4cities. We request that interested authors log in and submit abstracts as an expression of interest before the final deadline.

Important Dates

10/14/2014 - Paper Submission deadline
11/14/2014 - Notification of decisions
11/25/2014 - Camera-ready due

Organizing Committee

Theo Damoulas - damoulas@nyu.edu
Research Assistant Professor, New York University, Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP)
Brooklyn, USA

Biplav Srivastava - sbiplav@in.ibm.com
Senior Researcher, IBM Master Inventor, IBM Research
New Delhi, India

Sheila McIraith - sheila@cs.toronto.edu
Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Freddy Lecue - freddy.lecue@ie.ibm.com
Research Scientist, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Center
Dublin, Ireland

Related Work

Workshop on Semantics for Smarter Cities
In conjunction with 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2014)
Payam Barnaghi, Jan Holler, Biplav Srivastava, John Davies, John Breslin, and Tope Omitola
Riva del Garda, Italy – 20 October, 2014

Workshop on Semantic Cities
In conjunction with Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI-14)
Mark Fox, Freddy Lecue, Sheila McIlraith, Biplav Srivastava and Rosario Usceda-Sosa
Québec City, Québec, Canada – July 27-31, 2014

Workshop on Inclusive Web Programming – Programming on the Web with Open Data for Societal Applications
In conjunction with 36th International Conference on Software Engineering
Biplav Srivastava and Neeta Verma
Hyderabad, India – May 31-June 4, 2014

Workshop on Semantic Cities
In conjunction with International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-13)
Freddy Lecue Biplav Srivastava, and Ziaqing Nie
Beijing, China – Aug 3-5, 2013

The Semantic Smart City Workshop (SemCity-13)
In conjunction with International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS-13)
Tope Omitola, John Breslin, Biplav Srivastava, and John Davies
Madrid, Spain – June 12-14, 2013

Workshop on Semantic Cities
In conjunction with 26th Conference of Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12)
Biplav Srivastava, Freddy Lecue, and Anupam Joshi
Toronto, Canada – July 22-26, 2012

AI for an Intelligent Planet
In conjunction with 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11)
Biplav Srivastava, Carla Gomes, and Anand Ranganathan
Barcelona, Spain – July 16-22, 2011