The idea of smart cities (SCs) has gained substantial attention in recent years. The SC paradigm aims to improve citizens' quality of life and protect the city's environment. As we enter the age of next-generation SCs, it is important to explore all relevant aspects of the SC paradigm. In recent years, the advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has produced a trend of supporting daily objects with smartness, targeting to make human life easier and more comfortable. The paradigm of SCs appears as a response to the purpose of building the city of the future with advanced features. SCs still face many challenges in their implementation, but increasingly more studies regarding SCs are implemented. Nowadays, different cities are employing SC features to enhance services or the residents quality of life. This work provides readers with useful and important information about Amman Smart City.

With world's population continuing to increase and climate change drastically affecting our environment, many metropolises are struggling to grow, develop and even support citizens within current and traditional urban designs. Governments, entrepreneurs and technology companies are employing some of the world's leading architects and designers to rethink the idea of cities, how people can interact and how to live within them. From reclaimed land, groundbreaking skyscrapers in the desert and cities rising in the metaverse, here are 12 incredible futuristic cities redefining the urban spaces we live in. The $500 billion Neom project in Saudi Arabia is set to be home to a record-setting 170-kilometre-long skyscraper called the Mirror Line. It will be the world's largest structure, comprising of two buildings up to 490 metres tall, running parallel to each other.

DUBAI: Six years after the Dubai Roads and Transportation Authority laid the roadmap for driverless vehicles by 2030, smart mobility has swept the landscape with intelligent concepts that are changing the region's social infrastructure. The move has already spurred sustainable cities into high gear with smart transportation such as autonomous shuttles, e-bikes and e-buggies set to own the roads. An excellent example of a fully-integrated residential project is Sharjah Sustainable City. This eco-friendly concept is powering a net-zero energy community with energy-efficient villas that promise to offer sustainable living at no extra cost. Developed by Sharjah Investment and Development Authority in partnership with Diamond Developers, the sustainable city will host the best green technology, including solar-powered smart homes, bio-domes for vertical farming, electric vehicle chargers, driverless shuttles and a biogas plant. "The UAE is the first country in the Gulf Cooperation Council to commit to net-zero by 2050; all growth and development must align with that commitment, which means we have to do our bit," Karim El-Jisr, chief sustainability officer, SSC, told Arab News.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents opportunities to develop tools and techniques for addressing some of the major global challenges and deliver solutions with significant social and economic impacts. The application of AI has far-reaching implications for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general and sustainable urban development in particular. However, existing attempts to understand and use the opportunities offered by AI for SDG 11 have been explored sparsely, and the shortage of empirical evidence about the practical application of AI remains. In this chapter, we analyze the contribution of AI to support the progress of SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). We address the knowledge gap by empirically analyzing the AI systems (N 29) from the AI SDG database and the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) database. Our analysis revealed that AI systems have indeed contributed to advancing sustainable cities in several ways (e.g., waste management, air quality monitoring, disaster response management, transportation management), but many projects are still working for citizens and not with them. This snapshot of AI's impact on SDG11 is inherently partial yet useful to advance our understanding as we move towards more mature systems and research on the impact of AI systems for the social good. Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to mitigate several issues facing cities, such as road safety, waste management, air pollution, and disaster risk reduction (Gupta et al., 2021). Examples of recent AI systems for improved well-being in cities include a tool for semi-automatic digitization of sketch maps to support the inclusion of indigenous communities through the documentation of their land rights (Degbelo et al., 2021; Chipofya et al., 2020), a system for traffic monitoring based on Wireless Signals (Gupta et al., 2018), approaches for efficient waste management (Barns, 2019), air quality modelling (Gupta et al., 2018) and urban health monitoring systems (Allam and Jones, 2020).

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are increasingly embraced around the world to advance smart mobility and more broadly, smart, and sustainable cities. Algorithms form the basis of decision-making in AVs, allowing them to perform driving tasks autonomously, efficiently, and more safely than human drivers and offering various economic, social, and environmental benefits. However, algorithmic decision-making in AVs can also introduce new issues that create new safety risks and perpetuate discrimination. We identify bias, ethics, and perverse incentives as key ethical issues in the AV algorithms' decision-making that can create new safety risks and discriminatory outcomes. Technical issues in the AVs' perception, decision-making and control algorithms, limitations of existing AV testing and verification methods, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities can also undermine the performance of the AV system. This article investigates the ethical and technical concerns surrounding algorithmic decision-making in AVs by exploring how driving decisions can perpetuate discrimination and create new safety risks for the public. We discuss steps taken to address these issues, highlight the existing research gaps and the need to mitigate these issues through the design of AV's algorithms and of policies and regulations to fully realise AVs' benefits for smart and sustainable cities.

As I'm passionate about shaping a better future in the Smart Technology and specifically to help transform Africa through Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain technologies, it was a privilege to participate as invited AI expert at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland on 15-17 May 2018 as well as the AI: Current Policy Reflections and Future Strategies on 18 May 2018 at the United Nations. As mentioned here as well as this post, this was also an opportunity to represent the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA), Cortex Logic (as one of the sponsors) and the African perspective on the use of these technologies with respect to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. In this post I would like to share some links, feedback, perspectives and outcomes of the AI for Good Global Summit. I also share my presentation on Health, Water, Smart Education & Smart Technology Services for African Smart Cities. In a separate post, I'll do the same for the AI: Current Policy Reflections and Future Strategies conference.