Urbanization is anticipated to be an inevitable trend in the future and creates a big challenge regarding how to provide the most effective and efficient infrastructures and services to support a better quality of life for people. Smart City, a new development concept that integrates information and communication technologies to connect various physical devices, aims to enhance the performance of city operations and to reduce the energy consumption and overall costs of city living. This integration will be able to monitor what is happening in the city and keep track of how the city is evolving. Universities in Taiwan have been devoting to researches related to smart city in several fields such as industrial design, urban planning, information and communications technology, and law for science and technology, gradually enabling Taiwan to become a smart nation.

In this month’s newsletter, the highlighted subjects include various dimensions of research on the issue of the Smart City. It addresses the research in the fields of strategic regional planning, tagging IoT data in drone view, intelligent transportation systems, sharing of wireless power charging, blockchain, virtually shared spectrum access (ViSSA), IoT and networked society, and disaster prevention monitoring technology in international corporations. It is our hope that this series of “Smart City” studies will provide alternative solutions to ensure and pursue enhanced living quality for people all around the world.