Lecture: Digital Cities - Promise or Threat for Civil Society

The guest speaker will be Prof. Dr. Matthias Hollick from the TU Darmstadt. He has been a professor of computer science there since 2009 and heads the Secure Mobile Networking Lab. He is currently working with his team on issues of security, quality of service and reliability in wireless networks as well as on privacy and security issues in the future Internet.
Since 01.01.2020 Prof. Hollick coordinates the new LOEWE center emergenCITY - The Resilient Digital City.  The goal of this LOEWE center, in which the ITeG departments of Prof. Dr. Kurt Geihs and Prof. Dr. Gerrit Hornung from the University of Kassel are also actively involved, is to research interdisciplinary principles, methods and solutions that increase the resilience of future digital cities.

Professor Hollick will also address this topic in his guest lecture in the ITEG Ring Lecture:

Wednesday, January 29, 2020, 17:00 - 18:30
ITeG Scientific Center, Pfannkuchstr. 1, 34121 Kassel, Room 0420
Lecture with Prof. Dr. Matthias Hollick/Technische Universität Darmstadt
"Digital cities - promise or threat for civil society".

About the lecture:

In 2050, it is estimated that about two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities - up from about 30 percent in 1950 and 50 percent in 2010. Growth in the number and size of cities will be enabled by adaptable and efficient (critical) infrastructures: energy; transportation, traffic and logistics; health; food; water; finance and insurance; government and administration. Critical to adaptability and efficiency is the ubiquitous use of information and communications technology (ICT). At the same time, non-public sectors such as private households, individual transport and the economy are also being increasingly penetrated by ICT. This results in considerable dependencies on ICT systems, which increase with increasing networking. In such digital cities, the functionality of ICT-supported infrastructures is at risk from natural events, human and technical (ICT) failure, violence and terror. At the same time, users are exposed to potential permanent surveillance and paternalism that can be realized in digital cities. In this talk, we consider promises of digital cities and question them. We highlight potential risks that citizens face and outline possible solutions.

https://www.uni-kassel.de/eecs/iteg/veranstaltungen/vortragmatthiashollick