New vision and experimentation for future cities An EU project assisted a Portuguese interdisciplinary future cities competence centre to promote sustainable urban development. The main result was the Porto Living Lab, a wireless sensor and communication network for gathering data, analysing city life, and experimenting smart cities visions. Industrial Technologies © ESB Professional, Shutterstock Portugal's University of Porto hosts the Center of Competence for Future Cities. The Center's goals are to promote urban economic development, social inclusion, safety and quality of life by drawing upon the University's expertise in environmentally sustainable cities. The EU-funded FUTURE-CITIES (Expand the Centre of Competence in Future Cities of the University of Porto to strengthen inter-disciplinary research and knowledge transfer to the industry in the Norte Region of Portugal). The project's main achievement was building the Porto Living Lab. The facility consists in sensors, communications equipment and other advanced technologies for heterogeneous wireless data collection, and information extraction and processing, deployed on urban scale in the city of Porto. The Porto Living Lab pursued three main areas of research, two of which were vehicular ad hoc networking and hybrid sensor networking (environmental, meteorological, acoustic). The third was a crowdsensing tool that uses a smartphone app to collect data from large numbers of participants into a backend, and extract information about the city life. The project expanded the Living Lab network to 800 communication nodes and sensors. Project researchers submitted several proposals for further research projects at national and European level. The team fostered synergies with other relevant EU projects, and academic cooperation with two American and three European universities. FUTURE-CITIES also set up the Expanded Faculty and Researcher Exchange (X-FARE) programme between the University of Porto and its European partners. As such, the consortium arranged several exchange visits for faculty and students. The project kicked off an annual conference series on future cities, organising the first three events, and hosted eight thematic workshops. Researchers attended numerous other meetings and third-party events. The project's improvements to the Center of Competence for Future Cities have boosted applied research and experimentation, as well as increased technology transfer to start-ups in Porto, and improve the quality of life of the residents. Such developments also contributed to expanding human potential, improving sustainability both in academia and industry, and raising international awareness to the University and City of Porto. Keywords Future cities, Porto Living Lab, Center of Competence for Future Cities, quality of life, crowdsensing
