A Computing Perspective on Smart City [Guest Editorial]

The papers in this special section focus on next generation urbanization that incorporates smart city development. The development of smart cities is viewed as the key to the next generation urbanization process for improving the efficiency, reliability, and security of a traditional city. The concept of smart city includes various aspects such as environmental sustainability, social sustainability, regional competitiveness,natural resources management, cybersecurity, and quality of life improvement. With the massive deployment of networked smart devices/sensors, an unprecedentedly large amount of sensory data can be collected and processed by advanced computing paradigms, which are the enabling techniques for smart city. For example, given historical environmental, population, and economic information, salient modeling and analytics are needed to simulate the impact of potential city planning strategies, which will be critical for intelligent decision-making.