UCUI'15: the 1st international workshop on understanding the city with urban informatics

Urban Informatics aims to exploit the large quantities of information produced by modern cities in order to gain insights into how they function. These insights lay the foundation for improving the lives of citizens, by improving the efficacy and efficiency of public services, and satisfying complex information needs arising within this context. The goal of the workshop is to provide a multidisciplinary forum which brings together researchers in Big Data (BD), Information Retrieval (IR), Data Mining, and Urban Studies, to explore novel solutions to the numerous theoretical, practical and ethical challenges arising in this context. These include difficulties in collecting city data, creating data management infrastructures, and providing new effective and efficient information access techniques to as many users as possible in the context of a smart city. To foster the development of new BD and IR approaches in Urban Informatics, the workshop makes available a representative dataset of city data, including Internet-based visual (Flickr) and textual (Tweets and News) media collections. The workshop provides enormous opportunities for data scientists who wish to understand the complexities of working with city data, conduct innovative research within Urban Informatics, and build a long-term community in this emerging research area.