Meetings, Workshops and Seminars

• Smart City Research Institute Roundtable

The Smart Cities Research Institute at American University of Sharjah (AUS) held its First Round Table Discussion (RTD) on May 2018 at the university. Present at the workshop were field experts and professionals from government, industry and academia. The RTD sought to identify state-of-the-art, feasible future implementation strategies for smart cities in the UAE and the GCC region. Also discussed were areas of technology or implementation gaps in these strategies and how AUS might contribute in filling theses gaps.

• Nokia Workshop on 5g Technology

In October 2018, SCRI had its first workshop on the deployment of 5G and IoT in UAE. Guest speakers were Nurettin Cetinkaya and Mahmoud El-Banna of NOKIA Corporation. They highlighted how telecommunications become a major pillar of the industry for achieving the next wave of revolution, which is mainly focusing on machine-to-machine communication, automation and artificial intelligence. The aim of this event was to show how 5G and IoT will support this drastic change in the industry.

Projects Awarded SCRI Research Funds 

• Satellite-Based Coastal Monitoring System for Multidisciplinary Science to Support UAE-Wide Smart City Initiatives (PI: Dr. Tarig Ali)
• Real-Time Green Vehicle Routing Optimization for IOT-Based Temperature Controlled Items (PI: Dr. Mahmoud Awad)
• High-Throughput Low-Latency Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (PI: Dr. Mahmoud Ismail)
• Development of Smart Leak Detection Technologies for Water Distribution Network (PI: Dr. Md Maruf Murtala)
• E-Vehicles on the Road Wireless Charging Infrastructure for Smart Cities (PI: Dr. Mohamad Hassan)
• Using IoT and Big Data to Monitor Large-Scale Distributed Solar Farms in Smart Cities (PI: Dr. Imran Zualkernan)

Sponsored Summer Research

In Summer 2018, SCRI funded summer research trips for AUS faculty to engage with international collaborators on identifying and carrying on research activities related to smart cites research:

• Dr. Lutfi Albasha, Research Visit, Sony Corporation, United Kingdom
• Dr. Oualid Hammi, Research Visit, iRadio Laboratory at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Calgary,Canada
• Dr. Raafat Aburukba, Research Visit, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
• Dr. Xiaobo Xu, Research Visit, Smart City Research Center of Fudan University, China
• Dr. Kichan Nam, Research Visit, Smart Tourism Research Center in the College of Hotel and Tourism, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea

Equipment Funding

To bolster research activity at AUS, SCRI has funded the purchase of the following state-of-the-art equipment:

• Network Vector Analyzer
• Health Monitoring Sensor Network for Infrastructures
• Vehicle Simulator
• Smart Living Lab