Making Sense of the Urban Future: Recommendation Systems in Smart Cities

Abstract

A large variety of Recommender Systems today can help users to understand and make sense of certain aspects of their cities, for example events, restaurants, government services, or transport.With the rise of the Smart Cities concept, more city operations and services will be made available by integrating multiple information systems from all types of city systems. The development of Smart Cities solutions will open up an exciting space for urban recommendations on a new and complex scale, which is the topic of this position paper. Most work today focuses on individual services,such as recommendations for places, routes, or activities, but nothing yet makes use of the vast and complex available information and service space. Recommendations in smart cities can be a fruitful area to explore in order to drive recommendations away from single-item or single-domain systems and towards multi-source,multi-faceted, multi-stakeholder, multi-level, multi-dimensional,and integrated recommendations that explore and combine the rich data and services that cities have to offer. Apart from giving recommendations, suggestions, and decision support for daily life of citizens, such systems can also be a main building block towards smart cities, making cities and their citizens more green, sustain-able, climate-aware, and ultimately, more liveable. The ambition we are sketching here shows integrated recommender systems in smart cities to be a highly complex and multidisciplinary challenge,with considerable input and output data and algorithmic complexity within a complex domain.