Search Results for: smart cities

Innovation

Smart transport: looking to a safer and greener future

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Smart transport is the incorporation of modern technologies into our transport and logistics sector. Advancements in space data and satellite technologies have huge potential to improve transport infrastructure, making it more efficient, cost-effective and sustainable. Public investments in space technology have already resulted in useful improvements in this sector, however there is a lot more to come. In this article, we present some of the leading projects using space enabled technologies to improve road safety, deliver goods efficiently and revolutionise public transport. Through funding and support, our transport system can become safer, more user friendly and kinder on the planet.

Science in society

The Linux approach to human and ecosystem well-being

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Our democracies have bugs, lack user-friendly features and under-perform. Above all, they are in need of major upgrades. Political and economic systems are failing us because they are structured vertically through top-down hierarchies. Instead we need to adopt a new economic system, driven by principles related to “act local, think global” philosophy. In this stimulating opinion piece, Lorenzo Fioramonti, director of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, in South Africa, shares his vision about creating a highly integrated horizontal economic system.

Policy

Time to recognise the influence of gender on research outcomes

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The League of European Research Universities, LERU , launches today, 16th September 2015, a new report showing how Gendered Research and Innovation (GRI) can foster new knowledge and solutions to global challenges. And such challenges are not minor. Indeed, research failing to account for sex and gender specificities can put lives at risk and be costly. Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment is a US/EU initiative whose goal is to explore how gender analysis can open doors to discovery. Meanwhile, international, collaborations supported by the European Commission and the US National Science Foundation developed state-of-the art methods for sex and gender research.

Interviews

Dirk Helbing: the potential and the perils of Big Data

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Big Data is becoming a new paradigm of evidence-based decision making, creating new possibilities to build smarter, more resilient and more efficient cities and societies. In this interview, Dirk Helbing, professor of computational social science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, explains how to best utilise information for ourselves and our society, and what pitfalls may lie ahead.