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Making cities and communities smarter is a very relevant goal, but also an extremely complex process that involves several actors and poses a number of challenges in different fields. In this context the role of ICT is essential and ubiquitous to all challenges and smart city related sectors.

The workshop, at its first edition, is an opportunity for people from academia, industries and public institutions to meet and define new collaborations in the perspective of next national and international project calls. It is not intended to disseminate theoretical scientific activities. Instead, its main goal is to present available innovative solutions and active research projects, as well as novel ideas for new project proposals.

On Wednesday, December 18 2013, Prof. Silvio Micali (CSAIL, MIT), winner of the 2012 ACM Turing Award For Advances In Cryptography, gave a lecture on "Proofs, Secrets, and Computation".

"We show how Theory of Computation has revolutionized our millenary notion of a proof, revealing its unexpected applications to our new digital world. In particular, we shall demonstrate how interaction can make proofs much easier to verify, dramatically limit the amount of knowledge released, and yield the most secure identification schemes to date."

The event was held at the University of Palermo, Aula Magna, Facoltà di Ingegneria.

The workshop allowed academic and industrial researchers to share their experience about the topics of ambient intelligence, energy efficiency, health care, precision agriculture and infrastructures monitoring.

The attenders presented their experiences with reference to the projects SMARTBUILDINGS, SENSORI, CESTA, ON SICILY.COM funded by P.O. FESR 2007/2013 of Sicilian Local Government and by MISE (Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico) of the Italian Government.

The January 2013 issue of the ERCIM, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, focus on "Smart Energy Systems" providing an overview of the most advanced european projects in this topic.

The SMARTBUILDINGS project, funded by POR FESR SICILIA 2007-2013, is described in pages 36-37.

In the last years, the increasing social awareness about the need for containing energy consumption within sustainable rates has caught the interest of both the industrial and academic communities. In this scenario, Internet - and more generally ICT - may play a twofold role, being both a significant energy consumer and a potential actor in steering a more clever usage of energy resources.

Both aspects of the problem raise interesting scientific challenges, and require a comprehensive effort and inter-disciplinary research at all levels of abstraction. The goal of this conference is to bring together people from different research areas, and provide a forum to exchange ideas, discuss solutions, and share experiences among researchers, professionals, and application developers both from industry and academia.

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be the basic building block of pervasive computing environments. Aggregating sensor nodes into sophisticated sensing, computational and communication infrastructures to form wireless sensor networks will have a significant impact on a wide array of applications ranging from military, to scientific, to industrial, to health-care, to domestic, establishing ubiquitous computing that will pervade society redefining the way in which we live and work.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the main researchers working on different aspects of sensor networking for supporting pervasive computing environments. This is a very challenging task, as it involves several technological issues (sensor architectures, efficient networking protocol design, power management, security and dependability, etc.), as well as the socio-economic aspects related to the introduction of such novel paradigms and their benefits for the community. The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum to exchange ideas, discuss solutions, and share experiences among researchers, professionals, and application developers both from the industry and academia.

Current rates of energy sources depletion are no longer sustainable, and recent studies prove that a relevant fraction of worldwide energy consumption is tightly related to indoor environmental control systems, such as heating, air conditioning and lighting for residential, commercial, public and industrial premises. A challenging research topic in ICT is thus the design of systems aimed at the reduction of resource consumption in order to keep high standards of global well-being. This entails taking into account not only specialized technologies used for the construction of efficient buildings and actuators, but also the overall ICT architecture.

The topic of this edition of the School will focus on specific technologies, architectural paradigms and algorithms for the design of smart energy applications.

In recent years the number of wireless sensor network deployments has rapidly grown up so that sensor networks cannot be considered just an academic research topic any longer. This trend is expected to increase even more in the next years, especially in some specific fields such as environmental monitoring, logistics, automation and control.

Real-WiNe represents a high-quality forum for discussing the potential of sensor networks for real-life applications, and for sharing experiences based on real test-beds and prototypes. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and application developers working on different fields (electronics, computer science, computer networking, geology, agronomy, structural engineering, etc.). Real-WiNe also represents a chance for presenting projects supported by the University of Palermo to the local scientific and industrial community, as well as to local government institutions.