Urban areas continue to be the centers of human activities and remain the loci of resource and service consumption, economic transactions, and innovation. In fact, the projections in parts of the world point to rapid urban growth. Other areas of the urbanized world are experiencing population decline, reduced revenues, concentrated poverty, and higher demands for services. Whether growing or shrinking, cities and metropolitan areas face challenges of infrastructure, public health, transportation, public safety, and environmental sustainability, to name but a few. To address some of these challenges, the cities of today are increasingly leveraging advanced computing and communication technologies as well as big data analytics under the umbrella of smart cities and urban informatics. Extensive research is taking place in a wide range of relevant research areas to address some of these emerging challenges. Smart City initiative is of global importance undertaken by several countries in both the developed and developing countries in recent times.

We are pleased to announce the second international workshop focused on smart cities and urban data science. This workshop builds on the successes of the first workshop jointly hosted by RIT and IIT, Madras and was held at the RIT campus in 24-25 July, 2017. The workshop aims to gather researchers, practitioners, and subject matter experts from academia, industry, and city leaders to address a number of research themes arising out of building future smart cities. The workshop is naturally expected to be multi-disciplinary, drawing experts in AI/machine learning, social sciences, cloud and distributed computing, urban sustainability, public policy, and software engineering. The workshop participants are expected to share cutting edge ideas that leverage data and computational intelligence to address urban challenges in new and interesting ways, discuss current and future urban challenges, exchange ideas, discuss potential collaborative opportunities, and report new findings that cover a variety of topics including, but not limited to:

Individuals with an interest in these and related themes are invited to submit Extended Abstracts or Position Papers. We hope that the workshop will provide a venue for exciting presentations, having fruitful discussions, and building collaborations. We also plan to develop an international conference on the theme to be held annually as an outcome of the proposed workshop. Please contact either Prof. Box Leangsuksun (chokchai.l@vistec.ac.th), Prof. Naveen Sharma (naveen.sharma@se.rit.edu) or Prof. D. Janakiram (djram@iitm.ac.in) for further information or expression of interest.