Information School News

Congratulations to Dr Alex Peng who has been shortlisted for the Ernest Davies Award for Advancing Parking Knowledge.  This is an industrial award provided by the British Parking Association (BPA).   This shortlisting decision was made based on Alex's news article on London's smart parking service. The results reported in this article were in turn derived from Alex's smart city project funded by the University's IIKE Early Career Researcher Scheme. Alex will be attending the BPA Member Dinner on 3 December 2015 where the final winner of this year's award will be announced.  

On 3 November Dr Alex Peng will chair an Action Tank session on Smart Cities at the Business and Innovation Network event in Porto, Portugal. Although the smart city concept is driven by advanced technologies, its success is highly dependent on the engagement of citizens. Historically, such engagement has been problematic, especially considering individual differences in terms of age, education, skills, income levels, and family composition. A lack of citizen engagement is increasingly recognised as a global issue affecting successful deployment and usage of smart technologies worldwide. This session will address the issue of citizen engagement with new smart technologies and will discuss ways to overcome this lack of engagement. This session will focus on the new promising technologies and possible industrial application of flexible electronic.

Research led by Dr Alex Peng of the Information School has found that major cities in the UK are falling behind their international counterparts in terms of their use of smart technologies. UK cities such as London are not as advanced as leading international smart cities, such as San Francisco, Barcelona and Amsterdam, because of a lack of citizen engagement with new smart technologies.  Smart and sustainable cities are essentially built by utilising a set of advanced information and communication technologies, such as broadband networks, wireless sensors, cloud services and mobile apps, to generate radical new ‘smart’ services and facilities within a metropolitan area. A parking space sensor in London used as part of the city's smart parking service A recent report by the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills valued the smart cities industry at more than $400 billion globally by 2020, with the UK expected to receive a 10 per cent share. The research team, ...

The University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Social Science hosts its inaugural inter-disciplinary Faculty research conference on 19 September 2014 with strong representation from the Information School. Six members of the Information School are speaking at the conference, with subjects highlighting the range of leading research which is carried out in the School: ·           Alex Peng – ‘Socio-Technical Challenges in Building Future Smart Cities’ ·          Barbara Sen – ‘The information coping trajectory’ ·          Peter Bath – ‘Sharing information online among people with life-threatening, chronic and terminal conditions’ and ‘Experiences of a Sandpit – life before, during and after the ESRC EMoTICON sandpit’ ·          Sheila Webber – ‘Is this a game?   Blended interplay of information between digital and physical worlds'...

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School is presenting o n 15 July 2014 at the Intelligent Cities Conference 2014 as an international expert on smart cities.  The Intelligent Cities Conference is a highly reputable event in its field and  invites insightful speakers   from the government, industry and academia.   The conference this year will explore not simply the connectivity infrastructure needed for smart cities but will discuss intelligent open data, green technologies, innovation, healthcare, mobile advances, wealth creation, digital inclusion and M2M capabilities.   Dr Peng will be presenting the results of two recent interdisciplinary and industrial-based projects in the conference, namely the GSMA Smart Cities Index project and the Smart City Market Sizing project.  

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School has been invited to speak on his smart cities research at BIT’s 3 rd Annual World Congress of Emerging InfoTech 2014 at the Dalian World Expo Centre in China. He will speak about the ‘Socio-technical Challenges in Building Future Smart Cities’ on Friday 20 June and will also deliver a speech on ‘Benefits and Challenges for Migrating ERP Systems to the Cloud’ .

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School will be attending the 2014 Mobile World Congress  in Barcelona between 24 and 27 February. The Congress is set to be attended by leaders from the IT field including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Ginni Rometty of IBM. At the Congress, Alex will announce the results of the Smart Cities Index Project with the GSMA.   

Dr Alex Peng Information School Lecturer Dr Alex Peng has won the University's  SURE 2012 Academic Supervisor of the Year . He received his award at this year's SURE Showcase yesterday. Alex's student Marcus Walton was also one of only three students nominated for the SURE 2012 Student Researcher of the Year.