Ethics of Smart Cities: Towards Value-Sensitive Design and Co-Evolving City Life

Helbing, Dirk; Fanitabasi, Farzam; Giannotti, Fosca; Hänggli, Regula; Hausladen, Carina Ines; Hoven, Jeroen van den; Mahajan, Sachit; Pedreschi, Dino; Pournaras, Evangelos

doi:10.3390/su132011162

Cited by 41 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 115 publications

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“…At the same time, the DT also offers an opportunity to overcome the heterogeneity of sources from IoT to remote sensing without loss of accuracy. Lastly, DTs building on top of heterogeneous sources can represent abstract concepts that have no physical counterpart such as the livability and sustainability of a city [454] or the spatial movement of traffic jams [252].…”

Section: Smart Cities Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

et al. 2022

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Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT) in the real world via models, simulations, (remotely) sensed data, context awareness, and interactions. However, interaction requires appropriate interfaces to address the complexity of the city. Ultimately, leveraging the potential of Smart Cities requires going beyond assembling the DT to be comprehensive and accessible. Situated Analytics allows for the anchoring of city information in its spatial context. We advance the concept of embedding the DT into the PT through Situated Analytics to form Fused Twins (FTs). This fusion allows access to data in the location that it is generated in in an embodied context that can make the data more understandable. Prototypes of FTs are rapidly emerging from different domains, but Smart Cities represent the context with the most potential for FTs in the future. This paper reviews DTs, Situated Analytics, and Smart Cities as the foundations of FTs. Regarding DTs, we define five components (physical, data, analytical, virtual, and Connection Environments) that we relate to several cognates (i.e., similar but different terms) from existing literature. Regarding Situated Analytics, we review the effects of user embodiment on cognition and cognitive load. Finally, we classify existing partial examples of FTs from the literature and address their construction from Augmented Reality, Geographic Information Systems, Building/City Information Models, and DTs and provide an overview of future directions.

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Section: Smart Cities Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

et al. 2022

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“…Of the ethical dilemmas that come with smart grids, privacy is of high concern and discussed throughout the literature [6]- [11]. Most of the public concern is around data collection and anonymity [7].…”

Section: Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, an important ethical consideration is the potential monetization and exploitation of the collected data. The information derived from this data, such as appliance use and condition, can lend itself to targeted advertisements as well as other manipulation [7], [5], [11]. This topic is closely tied to data control and access, and so, by giving the consumers the ability to control their data, the risk of monetization and exploitation is mitigated.…”

Section: Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This topic is closely tied to data control and access, and so, by giving the consumers the ability to control their data, the risk of monetization and exploitation is mitigated. This is furthered by ideas such as network operators hosting the data or self-storage solutions [7], [11]. The argument for network operators relies on non-profit public organizations and thus any benefit from monetization would be reinvested into the network, however, this only discourages monetization rather than prevent it.…”

Section: Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Smart Grid Systems Code of Ethics

Beserra

2022

WFEESS

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The use of smart technology in the electrical distribution industry provides the opportunity to better support the addition of renewable technology. These smart grids utilise enhanced communication systems to enable an intelligent response to changes in the network. However, with them comes ethical concerns that should be addressed during development and operation. This paper investigates these concerns and aims to produce a code of ethics that can be used to guide decision making throughout the smart grid lifecycle. These principles draw from concerns around privacy, socio-political impacts, and safety and security. The result is a set of six principles that address these main issues and are demonstrated in a hypothetical case study.

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“…The issue here is not just the lack of data. Important qualities relevant for humans, such as consciousness, dignity, creativity, freedom, meaning, values, and being social are hardly quantifiable, if at all [118].…”

Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting Real: The Challenge of Building and Validating a Large-Scale Digital Twin of Barcelona’s Traffic with Empirical Data

Sánchez-Vaquerizo

2021

IJGI

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Large-scale microsimulations are increasingly resourceful tools for analysing in detail citywide effects and alternative scenarios of our policy decisions, approximating the ideal of ‘urban digital twins’. Yet, these models are costly and impractical, and there are surprisingly few published examples robustly validated with empirical data. This paper, therefore, presents a new large-scale agent-based traffic microsimulation for the Barcelona urban area using SUMO to show the possibilities and challenges of building these scenarios based on novel fine-grained empirical big data. It combines novel mobility data from real cell phone records with conventional surveys to calibrate the model comparing two different dynamic assignment methods for getting an operationally realistic and efficient simulation. Including through traffic and the use of a stochastic adaptive routing approach results in a larger 24-hour model closer to reality. Based on an extensive multi-scalar evaluation including traffic counts, hourly distribution of trips, and macroscopic metrics, this model expands and outperforms previous large-scale scenarios, which provides new operational opportunities in city co-creation and policy. The novelty of this work relies on the effective modelling approach using newly available data and the realistic robust evaluation. This allows the identification of the fundamental challenges of simulation to accurately capture real-world dynamical systems and to their predictive power at a large scale, even when fed by big data, as envisioned by the digital twin concept applied to smart cities.

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Ethics of Smart Cities: Towards Value-Sensitive Design and Co-Evolving City Life

Cited by 41 publications

References 115 publications

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

Smart Grid Systems Code of Ethics

Getting Real: The Challenge of Building and Validating a Large-Scale Digital Twin of Barcelona’s Traffic with Empirical Data

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