Hamburg Graduate School for Data-Driven Participatory Smart Cities (sharing.city.college)

Metropolitan areas around the globe are facing huge logistical, societal, and ecological challenges. The rapid urbanization, climate change, and demographic change confronted with resource scarcity in urban areas have led to various stressors such as pollution and congestion, which directly impact the quality of life.

The response of computer science and technology to those challenges is often called "Smart City".

This concept denotes a system of systems, where a large amount of heterogeneous data, partly collected by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, is processed in an intelligent way to efficiently manage scarce resources (such as green areas, mobility services, or energy) and to create services, which increase the citizens’ quality of life. Citizens represent a key enabling component of a smart city, i.e. users, who not only generate and share a large part of the data, but also play a central role in designing, promoting, and feeding smart city systems and services. The participation of users in the design, development, and usage of smart city services is thus crucial for a sustainable, data-centered smart city, which we call "sharing.city".

Hamburg, one of the most dynamic and digitized cities in Europe, represents a perfect candidate of a sharing.city.  For instance, the Hamburg Open Data portal Transparenzportal and the underlying regulation were amongst the first in Germany and is now followed by other cities and states. Hamburg has also already a variety of smart city projects and services as the smart port or autonomous cars in the heart of the city as well as a long tradition of citizen participation. Moreover,  projects like Hamburg Open Science or Urban Data Hub build unique  research collaboration platforms, which facilitate  the development of sharing.city services.

The sharing.city.college is a possible blueprint for a Hamburg-wide graduate school in computer science. The sharing.city.college is expected to pilot and evaluate formats for advancing the development of junior researchers, such as a summer school, international fellowships for leading researchers engaging junior researchers, research courses, development of demonstrators, engaging in citizen science and sharing research findings with practitioners and the public. The sharing.city.college addresses the following research areas:

• Engineering sharing.city
• Citizen Data Science
• Smart, Sharing Infrastructures