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Expo Milano. Image credit: www.expo2015.org

Image credit: www.expo2015.org

Expo Milano 2015, the universal exposition focused on the theme "Feeding the Planet and Energy for Life" will take place from May 1st to October 31st, 2015. Over 20 million people are expected to visit this major event, which promises to have some very unique and innovative features.

The Expo will be a unique opportunity for Milan to promote its role of "smart city", along with the active role of its citizens, at an international level. At the Expo the digital technologies available to visitors will make the overall user experience richer and easier. They will have a possibility to use dedicated services through multimedia totems and smartphones that will guide them during the visit and that can be personalized according to the person’s interests or available time. This "smart city experience" will not be just limited to the exposition site, but can also be used when visiting the city of Milan and its surroundings.

The Expo is also transforming the city of Milan into an ideal experimental and showcase arena for projects where ICT is a key innovation enabler. The activities and investments linked to the Expo will leave a footprint in the city that will outlive the event itself and will keep Milan at the forefront of urban life experimentation and innovation.

EIT ICT Labs has selected two projects from the Action line "Urban Life and Mobility" to be showcased at the Expo, namely: the 3cixty, with particular focus on urban mobility, and the City Data Fusion, with focus on data analysis in smart cities.

3cixty is a new initiative launched in 2014 to drive European leadership in future ICT-enabled urban life and mobility solutions. The initiative will realise a platform and related service ecosystem for the provisioning of comprehensive heterogeneous city-related mobility information. Apps and services are being developed on the platform with the aim to provide visitors of Expo 2015, as well as everybody else living in or visiting Milan, with a "smart city experience".

City Data Fusion aims at enhancing the ability to feel the pulse of our cities and to deliver innovative services. It functions as a Big Data platform that collects, aggregates, analyses, semantically enriches and offers for visual analytics the city information sources. To make it happen City Data Fusion is collecting in real-time data streams of different types ranging from social networks – specifically, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare – to mobile phone networks and sensors such as traffic flow, weather and pollution sensors. The platform is particularly tailored for large-scale city events attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors in hundreds of venues. The project addresses the need of the organizers of such events to have insights about the success of the initiatives they carry on.

A lot of interesting things will happen during Expo Milano 2015, many of them starting already this year!

Keep an eye on our website to learn more!

Laura Meijere Cristanelli - EIT ICT Labs Italy

laura.meijere@eitictlabs.eu

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