Luca Aiello

The corporate smart-city rhetoric is about efficiency, predictability, and security. "You’ll get to work on time; no queue when you go shopping, and you are safe because of CCTV cameras around you". Well, all these things make a city acceptable, but they don’t make a city great. We are launching goodcitylife.org - a global group of like-minded people who are passionate about building technologies whose focus is not necessarily to create a smart city but to give a good life to city dwellers. The future of the city is, first and foremost, about people, and those people are increasingly networked. We will see how a creative use of network-generated data can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions. Can we rethink existing mapping tools? Is it possible to capture smellscapes of entire cities and celebrate good odours?

Luca Maria Aiello is a Senior Research Scientist in the Social Dynamics group at Bell Labs in Cambridge, UK and Research Fellow of the ISI Foundation in Torino, Italy. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Torino in 2012 and he has been a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs for almost 5 years. He conducts interdisciplinary research in network science, computational social science, and urban informatics. He co-authored 50+ peer-reviewed papers and his work has been covered by more than 200 news articles published by prestigious news outlets worldwide including Wired, Wall Street Journal, and BBC. He was General Chair of SocInfo in 2014 and covered different organizational roles in ICWSM, ACM Hypertext, ACM Multimedia, UMAP. He is among the founding members of GoodCityLife.org, a global network of scientist with the goal of giving a good life to city dwellers.