 Okay, hello everyone, my name is Heike and I'm going to talk to you about cities and city dashboards in particular, which is my kind of research area. So, first of all, why actually cities and why is it important to make sense of cities? What do I actually mean by making sense? Why is it difficult? And what I have found out. Those are the kind of types of topics that I'm going to be talking about in this presentation. So why cities? First of all, urbanization is increasing. There's more people living in cities and we really need to look at how we live in cities and can it be improved? Then there's a concept of smart cities. You know, smart cities really use different types of methods and sensors to get together data and then that data is used to improve the running of the city. Cities are also complex with many different people, kind of individual communities and so on, and then different areas, you know, economy, culture, environment. Then they have geographical links. They are within a county, within a nation, and they're also obviously related to the world. And then they have temporal relationships, you know, they have a past, a present, and hopefully a future. Now, why is that actually difficult? Because showing all this complexity is difficult and understanding is really depending on what is being shown. Now, you may say, why is that actually important? And just to give you an example, electric cars, you know, the aim there is to reduce CO2 emissions and reduce air pollution in cities. But it will not address congestion. Nor will it address noise pollution or light pollution, which has a detrimental effect on particularly bird populations. It will not address any other effects on human health. You know, kind of the issue of accidents being stressed because you're stuck in traffic. Nor will it address the kind of impacts on biodiversity caused by road building and maintenance. And then lastly, then, there's increasing concerns about how the lithium, which is kind of the main ingredient for the batteries, how that is mined and the environmental impact this might have in the long run. So really, air pollution in cities is not a simple problem. It needs to be seen in the context of other issues. Now, taking a step back again, what do I actually mean by making sense? Because this is not just being able to understand something that you read. Making sense of information really is about being able to engage with the information, to understand the context around that information. You know, I don't know if you ever have tried or have listened to a joke in a different language. Sometimes that joke only makes sense if you can understand the cultural context around that joke. You need to be able to trust the source. You need to be able to know how the data was gathered, why it was gathered, who gathered it and what was the overall aim in terms of gathering it. And then your own confidence and skill. You may be quite happy to understand what a biograph is and does, but the histogram may be much more difficult to understand. And then lastly, your goals and intentions. Why are you looking at the data? What do you want to find out? Do you just have a question? Do you want to explore an issue? So having access and being able to understand data about a city is really essential because we need to understand and address the different complex challenges within a city. So, you know, there's climate change, then there's homelessness, biodiversity, equality, health and jobs. All of these are really complex issues that we cannot address if you just look at them in isolation. So what do we mean, though, by city dashboards? What actually are city dashboards? There are really many different varieties. You know, there's real-time dashboards which just provide a snapshot about a city. As you can see here, there's one example there from Venice. It just gives you access to real-time information about what is currently happening within the city. Then there's data dashboards that will give you access to data. You would have some reservations, a little bit of context, some facts and figures. And then lastly, there's what I call performance dashboards that provide updates about what is happening in the city in terms of policies and strategies that the city is carrying out. So really city dashboards aim to give access to data about a city to its people. So my research really focuses on making city dashboards useful for citizens. What I found really is that people have difficulties around understanding. There's issues around presentation. Some of the dashboards are really difficult to read because the text is not in plain English. There's a lot of jargon on those dashboards. The context really is highly important as I was explaining earlier and equally important it is to make the interpretation very easy, how you interact with the dashboard should be easy. Then engagement is very important. You need to like to look at the dashboard. The dashboard should give you relevant information that may be information you're interested in or it may be information that is of local interest. And then lastly it would also support participation. You should be able to filter the data to your own personal interest, or perhaps even the dashboard may allow you to make submissions or participate in decision making. Then there is the issue of governance. As I was saying again earlier, dashboard should tell you how the data was gathered, how it has been filtered, how it has been presented to you. But accountability and transparency of the data would inspire you to actually trust the information. That means though that cities really need to put in a lot of resources in terms of setting up and maintaining the dashboard. And then lastly there's the issue of purpose. What are the reasons for using the dashboard? People have different needs. People may just want an answer to a question. Other might want to look at information regarding a specific topic. And then there's different reasons for the existence of a dashboard. So current dashboards really do not support users to make sense of the information. Because of this, I've been looking at trying to develop a prototype of what a dashboard could look like. So this is the prototype of the Galway Citizen dashboard. And in there you would have first of all information about the context of the different issues. You would also have a short video explaining the idea of a city as a complex system. You would have the possibility of looking for an answer to a question just by typing in your topic or your keyword. Or you could go and explore the different areas that the city is focusing on. Then you can filter it and set up your own dashboard that would kind of portray just the interest that you have in terms of the data about your city. And then lastly there would be something that I'm calling dashboard basics telling you how the data was set up, who it was set up by and why. So and that brings us to the end of this presentation. Thank you very much. Any questions, please be free to ask them or contact me at the email. Thank you.