Cognitive Technologies for Smarter Cities

Great computing technology advances during the early years of the new millennium facilitated a smarter cities vision. Smarter cities solutions focusing on specific city problem domains have proven their value in many proofs-of-concept. The insights and experiences from these experiments enable cities to deploy these types of solutions more widely with confidence. New advances in a broad range of technologies, in particular Internet of Things technologies and cognitive technologies, promise to expand the scope and the value of smarter cities solutions to greatly improve the lives of city dwellers. This tutorial gives an overview of smarter cities applications so far, and the technologies powering them. Then it proceeds to review the incipient technologies that will drive the next wave of smarter cities solutions: the Internet of Things driving cognitive computing systems. It concludes by examining two major smarter cities solution categories that promise to greatly improve the lives of city dwellers.