This paper introduces PAVE (Pedestrian Awareness Via Edge analytics), a scalable real-time video analytics system that uses street cameras to enhance pedestrian safety while preserving their privacy. PAVE processes live camera streams on an edge server to track pedestrians and vehicles in real-time, predict vehicles' trajectories, and identify danger zones where pedestrians are present. The coordinates of these zones are sent to pedestrians' mobile devices via a custom iOS app, which locally determines if they are at risk without sharing any data with the edge server, hence preserving privacy. Moreover, anonymized metadata, including real-time location and speed/direction of pedestrians and vehicles, are visualized on a public map. PAVE's effectiveness was validated through deployment on the NSF COSMOS testbed, processing live video from cameras in diverse urban environments. Live field tests show that PAVE can alert at-risk pedestrians ~0.9 s before a vehicle reaches them. Through extensive profiling, we show that optimizing memory/compute configuration per pipeline stage can reduce latency by up to 10× compared to the default operating system configurations.

We showcase the workflow of PAVE (Pedestrian Awareness Via Edge analytics), a scalable system for real-time video analytics that leverages street cameras to improve pedestrians' safety while maintaining their privacy. PAVE distributes computation across edge servers and end-user mobile devices. Cameras' live streams are processed at the edge to forecast vehicles' trajectories and detect danger zones. Pedestrians' mobile devices then locally determine if the user is inside a danger zone and trigger timely alerts via a custom iOS app. In addition, anonymized metadata, such as pedestrian and vehicle positions, speeds, and directions, are aggregated and displayed on a public map for broader situational awareness. We evaluated PAVE's performance through implementation on the NSF COSMOS testbed's edge server while processing real-time video stream from cameras in diverse urban environments. Live field tests at an intersection in New York City show that PAVE can alert at-risk pedestrians about 0.9 s before a vehicle reaches them. With low-latency cameras, this lead time extends to around 1.6 s which is within the 1–2 s window pedestrians typically need to react.

A quarter of global greenhouse emissions come from transport, with modern cities producing more than 60% of these emissions. To reduce carbon footprint, several solutions on soft mobility (e.g., optimizing electric vehicles locations) have been proposed using IoT resources and AI techniques. However, these solutions either lack replicability since they ignore city’s needs per area and economic restrictions or lack algorithmic fairness since they account no social criteria (e.g., disabled, age, gender). In this work, we developed AI-based methods to automatically detect the different areas (e.g., rural, urban) and propose two heuristics which incorporate social, environmental and economic criteria of the area in their decision making in the form of sustainability policy templates. Our heuristics solve the p-median problem; they minimize the distance of stations to important points constrained by the cost of new stations. We show that our proposed solution is able to disperse the new stations within the city while covering local neighbourhoods. This work is replicated in two big European cities adapted to different open data and demonstrated by a dedicated visual dashboard.

Crowded metropolises present unique challenges to the potential deployment of autonomous vehicles. Safety of pedestrians cannot be compromised and personal privacy must be preserved. Smart city intersections will be at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered citizen-friendly traffic management systems for such metropolises. Hence, the main objective of this work is to develop an experimentation framework for designing applications in support of secure and efficient traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated a camera and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with an Eclipse sensiNact data platform provided by Kentyou. We use this pipeline to collect and analyze video streams in real-time to support smart city applications. In this demo, we present a video analytics pipeline that analyzes the video stream from a COSMOS' street-level camera to extract traffic/crowd-related information and sends it to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment. This is done without sending the raw video, in order to avoid violating pedestrians' privacy.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a well-studied scientific area that has gained much traction with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT). Despite the interest in HAR for a wide spectrum of domains (technological, medical, etc.) only a few works exist, which study the variability in IoT data. To correctly perceive this variability, it is essential to dynamically model the evolving context of daily-life activities. Additionally, it is required to reduce the calculation cost of HAR, which is crucial for security and real-time applications. For the purpose of dynamically modeling, three context-aware approaches are formalized along with a context-free baseline. This study demonstrates improvements in terms of both of accuracy and calculation cost by considering variability in IoT data; our experimental study on real datasets reduced calculation cost by 20% while increasing accuracy by 20%.

Indoor occupancy estimation is a critical analytical task for several applications (e.g., social isolation of elderlies). The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices enabled the occupancy estimation, as it provided access to a mass amount of data. Several works have been proposed exploiting the IoT Passive Inference (PIR) or environmental (e.g., CO2) features. These works however are traditionally selecting the feature space at the learning phase and passively using it over time. Hence, they ignore the dynamics of indoor occupancy, such as the location of the occupant or his motion patterns, leading to a decreasing accuracy over time. In this paper, we study those dynamics and show that motion patterns, along with environmental features favor the occupancy estimation. We design a Location-Aware Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which dynamically adapts the feature space based on the occupant's location. Our experiments on real data show that Location-Aware HMM can reach up to 10% better accuracy than Conventional HMM.

The world is facing several challenges that must be dealt within the coming years such as efficient energy management, need for economic growth, security and quality of life of its habitants. The increasing concentration of the world population into urban areas puts the cities in the center of the preoccupations and makes them important actors for the world's sustainable development strategy. ICT has a substantial potential to help cities to respond to the growing demands of more efficient, sustainable, and increased quality of life in the cities, thus to make them “smarter”. Smartness is directly proportional with the “awareness”. Cyber-physical systems can extract the awareness information from the physical world and process this information in the cyber-world. Thus, a holistic integrated approach, from the physical to the cyber-world is necessary for a successful and sustainable smart city outcome. This paper introduces important research challenges that we believe will be important in the coming years and provides guidelines and recommendations to achieve self-aware smart city objectives.

Considerable research has been done on different aspects of sensor networks. However management issues for these devices are still little explored. Nonetheless, with the increasing number of heterogeneous distributed sensors in various application domains, their management gains more and more importance, in particular for domains where requirements in terms of quality service, reliability, security and integrity are high, e.g., industrial, medical and domotics. This paper promotes an integrated management solution that covers domains such as network, system, application and device management. It first gives a brief state of the art of management solutions for traditional computer systems and sensor networks, then from a device management point of view, it presents challenges and possible solutions for generic networked sensing device management.