Smart Cities are the future. So when Houston, Texas faced rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, it seized the opportunity to transform itself as a tech-centric, smart city by incorporating emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Machine Learning and data analytics. Houston is being extremely planful in building multiple innovative solutions across departments at the same time that communicate with one another which is significantly increasing the positive impact it's bringing to its citizens. As a result, Houston has come to serve as a model for Smart City initiatives. We will hear from those responsible for Houston's transformation and examine what others - from policymakers to city officials to business leaders - can learn from their experience.

Today it takes about four minutes to download a movie on a 4G LTE network. With 5G, that same film could be on your tablet or phone in as little as six seconds. At those speeds--and with help from connected headsets--theme-park visitors could stream high-definition, virtual-reality experiences while on a speeding roller coaster. For self-driving cars to safely navigate the streets, they need to be able to communicate--with one another, with traffic signals and with passengers. Cars equipped with 5G-powered mapping will be able to see and react to their surroundings instantaneously.

In a Smarter City, available resources are harnessed safely, sustainably and efficiently to achieve positive, measurable economic and societal outcomes. Data and information from people, systems and things is the single most scalable resource available to city stakeholders but difficult to publish, organize, discover and consume, especially in a real-time context. Enabling city information as a utility, through a robust (expressive, dynamic, scalable) and (critically) a sustainable technology and socially synergistic ecosystem, could drive significant benefits and opportunities. In the context of stream data (as real-time, gigantic, noisy and private data), this paper targets research issues we identify as important to harness the fused information resources of cities, Citizens and Stakeholders to reach the concept of Smarter Cities.