Smart City Energy Technology in the Face of Emergency Situations: Electric Supply, Electric Transportation, and Communication

This article examines critical smart city infrastructure components, like electricity supply, transportation, and telecommunication, in the face of an emergency like COVID-19. The electricity infrastructure is a critical component of any smart city and significantly impacts other systems, like transportation, communication, and water delivery and treatment. © 2022 IEEE.

Evoker: Narrative-based Facial Expression Game for Emotional Development of Adolescents

Evoker is a narrative-based facial expression game. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents should be wearing masks in their daily lives. However, wearing masks disturbs emotional interaction through facial expressions, which is a critical component in emotional development. Therefore, a negative impact on adolescent emotional development is predicted. To solve this problem, we design a narrative-based game Evoker that uses real-time facial expression recognition. In this game, players are asked to identify an emotion from narrative contexts in missions, and make a facial expression appropriate for the context to clear the challenges. Our game provides an opportunity to practice reading emotional contexts and expressing appropriate emotions, which has a high potential for promoting emotional development of adolescents. © 2022 Owner/Author.

A Systems Approach for Solving Inter-Policy Gaps in Dynamic Spectrum Access-Based Wireless Rural Broadband Networks

In this paper, we articulate the challenge of multiple intersecting policies for the realization of rural broadband networks employing dynamic spectrum access (DSA). Broadband connectivity has been identified as a critical component of economic development, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and rural communities have been significantly (and negatively) affected by the lack of this important resource. Although technologies exist that can deliver broadband connectivity, such as 4G LTE and 5G cellular networks, the challenges associated with efficiently deploying this infrastructure within a rural environment are multi-dimensional in terms of the different dependent policy decisions that need to be considered. To resolve this issue, we describe how systems engineering tools can be used for representing these intersecting policies such that system configurations can be optimized for efficient infrastructure deployment and operations. One technology requiring increased attention is DSA, where licensed and emerging wireless services can coexist together via spectrum sharing. However, implementation of this technology is challenging, where highly efficient Radio Access Technology (RAT), available spectrum, and user requirements need to be precisely aligned. All these elements to be configured are typically described by independent policies. While DSA is more complicated than previously used spectrum allocation schemes, inter-policy gaps occur that ultimately decrease the network’s efficiency. Consequently, a systems engineering framework has the potential to obtain the optimal solutions although the systems and wireless communities conceptualize and scope problems differently, which can impede collaboration. We present the use case where 4G LTE RAT technology employing DSA applied to digital terrestrial television (DTT) frequency bands can yield spectral efficiency loss when the different policy dimensions are not sufficiently accounted for within the use case. Computer simulations have shown that in an example rural scenario the availability of rural broadband can increase from 1% to 21% of locations if the inter-policy gaps are removed. Author