Roberto Saracco (EIT ICT Labs Italy, Node Director) was invited to give a keynote at the European Conference on "Tackling societal challenges with Social Collective Intelligence and ICT!" that took place on October 3rd in Bruxelles.
The talk addressed Social Collective Intelligence in the context of Smart Cities. Roberto Saracco pointed out the change of paradigm. Great endeavor, such as the one involved in creating a Smart Cities, has always required a strong central commitment, because of the investment involved and sheer complexity that in turns required well though centralized organization. But today, even complex infrastructures can be created bottom up. New words like crowdsourcing and halo nets, open software and apps, open data framework and sensors are the right ingredients to cook a Smart City.
The event saw participation of more that 100 participants, including representatives from the European Commission. EIT ICT Labs ecosystem was represented by Italy (Trento RISE, Create-Net, University of Trento), Germany (TU Darmstadt) and France (Inria).
The conference presented the Social-IST main project outcomes (namely the White Paper on Research Challenges in Social Collective Intelligence and the Roadmap for FET Initiatives in Social Collective Intelligence) and promoted an open dialogue on how a new form of ICT can help to build a smarter society.
Social-IST is a FP7 project funded by the European Commission (DG CONNECT) under the "ICT- Future and Emerging Technologies" thematic area of the "Cooperation Programme".
