New sensors embedded within urban infrastructure and new analytical and generative methods have together enabled novel understandings of city life even as they change it. For example, these approaches have also been used to create so-called “smart cities” when used to manage service provision and automate city operations. The Journal of Social Computing (jOsOcO) (hosted in IEEE Xplore) would like to invite papers for a special issue on urban data science that explore a range of issues associated with the modern city life. These include new data generation and curation models, dynamic and static descriptions of city life, individual and “local” phenomena that relate to “global” city characteristics (e.g., size, structure, composition), causal analyses of the impacts of urban policy initiatives, and the complex, multi-faceted relationship between urban society and increasingly responsive urban infrastructure, including intended and unintended consequences of “smart city” services and policies.

  Relevant topics include:

• Novel data generation and curation methods to reflect the nuances of urban life.
• Generative agents to simulate the complex interactions in urban space.
• Measurement and analysis of collective behavior in urban environments.
• Temporal-spatial data analytics in association with social science and complex systems theories.
• Urban video and textual analysis combined with socioeconomic panel data.
• The presence of uncertainty effects (e.g., gray rhino effect, butterfly effect, …) associated with urban phenomena and/or how their occurrence may be measured, predicted, mitigated, or exploited for human benefit.
• The emergence of urban social movements and the role of key players and groups.
• The role of digital governance, data privacy, and ethics in a digitalized world.
• The cyber-physical-social system interactions.
• Urban planning based on human mobility and sustainable socioeconomic development goals.
• Data-driven analysis of stratified society.
• Data-driven decision-making for urban governance and its intended and unintended consequences.
• Counterfactual urban scenario simulation and its applications for policy evaluation.
• The support of infrastructure and management of resources to deal with emergency situations relating to both human and natural environments.
• Citizen engagement and participation in or resistance to “smart city” developments.
• AI-supported governance of urban communities, from the top-down or the bottom-up.
• Identifying the role of business and industry within cities’ evolving economic and technological ecosystem.

Submission Guidelines

Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library as open access. No page charges will be requested for publications. No page limitations are set for paper submissions and publications. Paper submission link: https://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/jsc-tup. The manuscript type should be selected as “Special Issue on Urban Data Science: Complex Interactions between Urban Society and Infrastructure”. Further information on the journal is available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8964404.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: May 1st, 2024

First Review Due: July 1st, 2024

Revision Due: August 15st, 2024

Final Notice: October 1st, 2024

Camera Ready: November 1st, 2024

Targeted publication date: December 2024

It is also further envisioned this special issue may reoccur once another half a year.

Guest Editor

Fengli Xu, Tsinghua University, China. E-mail: fenglixu@tsinghua.edu.cn