The Summer School on Intelligent Services for Digital Cities took place in Trento from September 2nd to 6th. It was led by Trento RISE and promoted by DFKI, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Luleå University of Technology, Aalto University, University of Bologna and Siemens, as part of the "Future Urban Life & Mobility" programme of the EIT ICT Labs.
The school brought together students, researchers, industrial partners as well as municipalities to explore and experiment on novel technologies for digital cities. Students from master and Ph.D. programmes throughout Europe spent an intensive week on the creation of new ideas and systems in the area of smart digital city applications. They used technologies developed by the partner institutions and created ideas and proposals for new innovative services for digital cities. Participating municipalities provided the background information from real world problems.
As a result of a competition organized within the programme, two students’ teams have been selected as winning teams: “Intellivent” and “Fokus”. They will be coached and will get access to investors that will support the development of their innovative businesses. The results will be presented next November, during a Demo Day at EIT ICT Labs Co-Location Centre in Berlin.
“The ISDC Summer School Trento was a great experience” – says Ulrike Hinz from Berlin School of Economics and Law (BSEL) who represented “Fokus” group - “The school gave a possibility to further develop my project skills and working in an interdisciplinary group and to learn more about smart cities”.
For Roman Chirikov, who is doing a PhD programme between Ufa State Aviation Technical University in Russia and University of Trento, pointed out that ISDC2013 Summer Shool “helped me to develop objective thinking and communication skills”.
According to Marco Pistore, organizer of the school and expert of smart cities at Trento RISE, “one week is a very short time for students to get acquainted with the problems of digital cities, to learn new technologies, and to come up with new ideas of useful services”. At the same time the school represented “an experiment that has been very successful: 30 very motivated and enthusiastic students, who managed to establish strong collaborations not only in the teams, but also across them”. The school has also been an important result for Trento: “Most of the teams have decided to place their services in the city of Trento – Pistore said – and to base their solutions on the local platforms for open data and open services”.
Gilles Betis, Action Line Leader for Future Urban Life & Mobility, pointed out that all students “tried to develop original approaches based on business and technical analysis of problems to be solved in European cities, where ICT technologies will help to leverage on set-up of new usages and behaviors. B2C or B2B strategies where explored, and interesting mock-ups were presented. It is expected now that a dedicated coaching will provide the two winning teams with the capability to rapidly refine their societal, business and technical offer vision, and will allow to create in a very near future two new innovative ICT actors in Europe”.
