Smart Cities, Big Data and Cyber Security

• Urban Dashboards
  An RR&S Associate is involved in leading the development of an urban dashboard for the greater Amsterdam region in the Randstad, Netherlands. Data have been collected at all levels of scale and time intervals from sub-parts of the city region down to the household and for times ranging from continuous monitoring of social media communication to annual and decadal intervals. The project will create the data management system for the dashboard, which is expected to more than incrementally improve the efficiency and equity of urban services. Concurrently, several RR&S Associates are working on novel ways to collect and relay data necessary for seamless and efficient operation of a dashboard ranging from the use of micro-censors in the city water flow systems to detect and report breakdowns to measuring the use level of public areas in cities using data from social media. 
  
• Mitigating Cyber Security Issues
  Cyber security becomes a major problem in the development and application of urban dashboards, which rely on a multitude of data sets and which may contain identifying information. RR&S Associates have been involved in analysis and advising policy and management options on the privacy issues revolving around the institutional and technical barriers to privacy protection in the era of “Big Data” 
  
• Resident Sample Survey for Karachi (Pakistan) and Dissemination of the Results
  RR&S Associates provided technical assistance to the University of Karachi (Pakistan) to strengthen social and policy research skills of its graduate students and faculty. The assistance focused on analytical methodological applications in the context of conducting a city-wide representative resident survey. The data collected served as a basis for students and faculty to conduct analyses and write research papers presented at a major international research conference on mega cities that focused on the mega city of Karachi. The presentations fueled understanding of Karachi urban problems including managerial and policy issues and informed the public and urban officials in new and action-provoking ways. This study has become a model for resident needs surveys in mega cities of the developing world.