Intelligent Communities are those which have – whether through crisis or foresight – come to understand the enormous challenges of the Broadband Economy, and have taken conscious steps to create an economy capable of prospering in it. The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is compiling a list of the 21 ‘smarter cities’ worldwide and Heraklion located in Crete, Greece is the only city in Europe to be included. Other cities in that list are Toronto, Nairobi, Taipei and Rio de Janeiro. See the full list here.
“If you program a robot’s every movement”, says Gopnik of UC Berkeley, “it can’t adapt to anything unexpected”. “But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled”. The same principle applies to children, she says. That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. As Maria Montessori did, they are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy. Juárez Correa, a teacher in Mexico didn’t know it yet but applied an emerging educational philosophy based on the logic of the digital age to the classroom. Read here more about the innovative opportunities of smart technologies for children education.
The Global Urban Networks International Summer School will take place in Loughborough between 31/8/14 and 3/9/2014. It will be held in co-operation with the internationally-renowned Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network and will address the following issues:
The overall theme revolves around the role of cities in economic development e.g. London and New York or in civil liberties e.g. Geneva and Nairobi, but also around the absence of other cities on this constantly evolving world map of cities and regions. There are 6 places available for young researchers at this summer school and more details can be found here.
The term smart has received increased attention recently and has also been linked with a range of trends. Trends towards networked objects that communicate and autonomously coordinate, the Internet of Things, and the growth of big data are some fragmented manifestations of this. It is about making smarter decisions about sustainability through the use information systems at every level—organizations, networks of entitles (organizations, supply chains, resources), geographic conglomerations (cities, regions, nations), and the society. Thus, the AMCIS2014 conference (7-10/8/2014 in Georgia, US) is an opportunity for IS scholars and practitioners to contribute novel ideas to help substantively shape an ecologically sustainable society.
ICT use for smart and green regions 