## 1 Introduction
The goal of this program is to develop, through various projects, the technological \"backbone\" of this new urban space to improve citizens' quality of life using a multidisciplinary approach and, in particular, developing an \"ecosystem\" able to integrate multiple technologies, concepts and work methodologies, such as IoT, cloud computing, ubiquitous and mobile computing, decision-support systems, _etc._  
The main idea of the program is to create an ecosystem that exploits the variety of data coming from multiple sensors and connected objects installed or that will be installed on the scale of a city, in order to meet specific needs in terms of development of new services in fields such as physical security, mobility, resource management and recreation (tourism, culture, _etc._). The vision of the program is described in Figure 1.  
In summary, the iNUIT ecosystem aims to:  
* Provide citizens with services allowing the interaction with the urban environment and the interaction with their fellow citizens. Such a system could help citizens to receive the right information at the right time (e.g., to avoid traffic congestion), to provide relevant information to other citizens (e.g., in crisis situations), _etc._
* Support the politicians through the development of methods and tools for decision-support to optimize the management of resources and waste, to improve citizen physical security, and take into account requirements of people with specific needs (e.g., older adults, disabilities), _etc._
* Support service suppliers (such as the organizers of sport or cultural events) providing to them new ways to provide and assure their services (e.g., to better manage the flow of crowds, the traffic, and increase safety of the event). In order to achieve these goals, iNUIT uses technologies related to IoT in specific and concrete application cases relevant for urban areas. The applications considered are distributed and involve several components (e.g., processors, sensors, actuators, computers, _etc._) connected in networks. The iNUIT program treats the whole integration chain: acquisition, communication, processing, intelligent data analysis and presentation of results. However, scientific and technological challenges are found in all elements of this chain:  
* In terms of data collection, the system should be able to support the diversity of data and the large number of \"objects\" to integrate: sensors, cameras, mobile phones, actuators, _etc._ The main challenge is to manage a large number of heterogeneous sensors and standardize their use to extract reliably useful data. * The network infrastructure should consist of wireless objects that compose a self-organizing network able to convey data between the sensors and the processing infrastructure. The network infrastructure should be as generic as possible to take into account the heterogeneity of data as described in the previous point. In addition, the security of this infrastructure is critical given the confidentiality of the involved information. Finally, the infrastructure should implement complex features such as autonomous reconfiguration of the network while minimizing energy consumption. * The massive data collection made possible by IoT raises many challenges on how to integrate, synchronize, process and recover this heterogeneous data. To do this, it is important to adopt or  
Figure 1: A graphic representation of the vision within the Internet of Things for Urban Innovation (iNUIT) program with main services based on a network of connected objects (Internet of Things paradigm). develop new methods for modeling these \"Big Data\", new techniques of information retrieval to extract meaningful information as well as new machine learning algorithms to classify data.