Smarter Cities - The Social Nexus
From: Scientific American - 09/2011 - page 42
By: Carlo Ratti and Anthony Townsend

Harnessing Residents' Electronic Devices Will Yield Truly Smart Cities

The best way to harness a city's potential for creativity and innovation is
to jack people into the network and get out of the way. 

More natural computer interfaces will let non-techies, disabled persons, and
the illerate participate more fully in civic life, making it smarter still.
Although gestural interfaces that recognize individual faces are new, the
Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California
has developed a gestural controller for Gmail that, if combined with speech
synthesis and recognition, could allow the illerate poor, the elderly, and
the disabled to use e-mail and explore the Web. As these technologies spread
to cybercafes throughout poor urban communities, such as the national network
of more than 600 Pontos de Cultura (culture hotspots) in Brazil's favelas, we
will see an urban movement emerge for more inclusive smart services. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n3/full/scientificamerican0911-42.html
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n3/pdf/scientificamerican0911-42.pdf

Links:
Institute for Creative Technologies
http://ict.usc.edu/

GMail Motion Response
http://ict.usc.edu/news/item/huffington_post_names_icts_gmail_motion_response_among_best_kinect_hacks_to/

Related:
Games for rehabilitation: the voice of the players
http://ict.usc.edu/files/publications/ICDVRAT2010_Flynn_Lange.pdf