Dear colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to the 4^th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Advances In Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2021), which is scheduled to be held on Nov. 2^nd, 2021 in Beijing, China.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the difference between smart and resilient cities more so than any other extreme events. For instance, the availability of real-time data and analytics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled the development of dashboards and platforms to help with decision-making during the pandemic. While necessary and useful, there platforms and dashboards and big data have not been helpful in addressing the resilience of the impacted communities as evident from the economic stress that every country is facing. The smart city initiatives also have not been able to enhance and improve the resilience of the critical infrastructures as well as the heightened need to adapt and mitigate climate change impacts while achieving net zero carbon.

Intelligent cities and infrastructures need to be planned and designed under the framework of resilience such that sensor technologies can aid with real-time knowledge discovery, decision-making, response and recovery in the aftermath of extreme events. This essentially requires using big data, artificial intelligence/machine learning, high performance computing, edge and cloud computing, interactive visualization, simulation and modeling in the context current and future extreme events to help cities be intelligent and resilient.

Following the successes of the last three ARIC workshops held at ACM SIGSPATIAL Conferences in 2018, 2019, and 2020 and the vision of the post-COVID era to build back better, the 4th International Workshop on Advances on Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2021) will focus on the scientific methods that will enable the next-generation cities. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for cities to increasingly become more effective in delivering basic public services, utilizing emerging technologies, to better serve its residents. This workshop is motivated by three recent advances: a technology-driven future; new regulations to combat emerging social changes; and advances in computational sciences.

Visit the workshop site for more details about this workshop: https://urbands.github.io/ARIC2021/  

Visit the ACM SIGSPATIAL site for more details about the conference: https://sigspatial2021.sigspatial.org/.  

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full research paper (8-10 pages). These papers should present a specific problem or topic and discuss methodology and findings along with future research directions.
• Short paper or application demo paper (4 pages). These papers should demonstrate existing methods, toolkits, and best practices for building intelligent and resilient cities.
• Vision or statement paper (2 pages). These papers should be more situational in their coverage and focus on future directions while identifying gaps and challenges for designing intelligent cities under the resilient framework by addressing existing policy, sociological, and technological challenges.

Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format using the ACM camera-ready templates available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. This year the workshop will provide two student paper awards.  

Submission Deadlines:

• Full paper for review: September 30^th
• Reviews to authors: October 8^th
• Camera Ready Paper: October 15^th

List of Topics

The ARIC 2021 workshop invites papers in the following topics (but not limited to):

• Data fusion techniques and analytics for prediction and forecasting across space and time
• Real-time analytics of dynamic and distributed data
• Edge and distributed computing for data mining about cyber-physical systems
• Human dynamics in the Age of Smart/Intelligent Systems
• Spatial social network analytics in the built environment
• Theoretical and practical applications of Internet of Things in urban settings
• Optimizing sensor locations for resilience informatics
• Augmented reality, simulations and 3D-geovisualization for intelligence
• Analytical frameworks for net zero carbon and energy efficiency
• AI/ML driven solutions to assess and model resilience
• Network modeling, logistics and mobility analysis to quantify resilience

Committees

Program Committee

• ZhiQiang Chen, University of Missouri - Kansas City
• Qunying Huang, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Xiao Huang, University of Arkansas
• Hamdi Kavak, George Mason University
• Anahita Khojandi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• Kuldeep R. Kurte, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Xiaohui Liu, University of Utah
• Zhenlong Li, University of South Carolina
• Avipsa Roy, UC Irvine
• Ekundayo Shittu, George Washington University
• Yao Yao, China University of Geosciences
• Joslyn Zale, University of Southern Mississippi
• Lei Zou, Texas A&M University

Organizing committee

• Bandana Kar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (karb@ornl.gov)

• Shima Mohebbi, George Mason University (smohebbi@gmu.edu)

• Guangtao Fu, University of Exeter (G.Fu@exeter.ac.uk)

• Xinyue Ye, Texas A & M University (xinyue.ye@tamu.edu)

• Olufemi A. Omitaomu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (omitaomuoa@ornl.gov)

Invited Speakers

• Jiangping Zhou, The University of Hong Kong
• Anna Nagurney, University of Massachusetts - Amherst (TBC)

Publication

ARIC 2021 proceedings will be published in ACM.

Venue

The conference organizers are monitoring the situation of COVID-19 and international travel restrictions. The final conference may be a hybrid format that would allow both physical and virtual attendance. For more information, please visit the ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference website: https://sigspatial2021.sigspatial.org/. Authors and participants will receive information about workshop format as soon as we have this information from the conference organizers.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to organizers Bandana Kar (karb@ornl.gov), Shima Mohebbi (smohebbi@gmu.edu), Guangtao Fu (G.Fu@exeter.ac.uk), Xinyue Ye (xinyue.ye@tamu.edu) and Olufemi A. Omitaomu (omitaomuoa@ornl.gov).

Sponsors