Abstract. Cities are places where people, meet, exchange, work, live and interact. They bring people with different interests, experiences and knowledge close together. They are the centres of culture, economic development and social change. They offer many opportunities to innovate with technologies, from the infrastructures that underlie the sewers to computing in the cloud. One of the overarching goals of Intel's Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities is to integrate the technological, economic and social needs of cities in ways that are sustainable and human-centred. Our objective is to inform, develop and evaluate services that enhance the quality of living in the city.
MotivationThere are many visions of the future focusing on smart cities, future cities and ambient intelligence. An underlying theme is that cities become increasingly embedded with invisible (and some still visible) technologies, sensitive and responsive to peoples needs that deliver advanced functions, services and experiences [1], following the vision of Mark Weise [2]. Intel's Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities 5 is concerned with enhancing and changing how people live, interact and engage with cities. Our goal is to enhance city sustainability and improve citizen well being.Our perspective in the Sustainable Connected Cities Institute is to be humancentred. We have wide-ranging expertise and background in user experience, interaction design, ethnography, together with research in the built environment, commerce, engineering, anthropology, the arts, and social psychology. We also work as inter-disciplinary teams that can make a real change to enrich and extend city dwellers lives. This fits in with Bells vision for 2012 [3] of computers not just acting on our behalf and anticipating what we want but also enabling people to be more creative, using state of the art computer technologies and toolkits.