Project office “Smart St. Petersburg” and partner universities
As underlined by Andrey Chugunov, the director of the eGovernment Center of ITMO University’s Institute of Design & Urban Studies and head of the Master’s program Digital Technologies for Smart Cities, ITMO University’s activities in the field of smart city technologies are conducted in close collaboration with the authorities and have an applied focus. Created under the leadership of the city’s governor, the project office “Smart St. Petersburg” has been operating at ITMO since 2017. One result of its activity is the roadmap for the implementation of smart city technologies in St. Petersburg, which was approved in a session of the Government of St. Petersburg.
In its turn, Sevastopol State University (SevSU) runs a Public and Business Council on the Smart City Priority Project and a specialized unit created under the umbrella of the Department of Economic Development of the City of Sevastopol. Functioning within Sevastopol State University’s Institute of National Technology Initiative, the unit trains software engineering-majoring Master’s students for work in the field of smart technologies.
According to Andrey Chugunov, thanks to similarities between the two cities, the technologies already implemented in St. Petersburg can be effectively used in Sevastopol.
“The collaboration with Sevastopol State University is conducted on a university-to-university basis, we have joint projects and applications, there is an ongoing exchange of experience. Half a year ago, an idea arose to send some of the SevSU staff to ITMO for further training. The main idea of this course is to summarize the methodological potential in the field of smart cities, which has been accumulated by the Institute of Design & Urban Studies over several years of work, and transform it to a further training course. Our center organizes similar programs upon commission – namely, we have a course aimed at government officials,” comments Andrey Chugunov.
According to Dmitry Voronin, an associate professor at SevSU’s Department of Information Technologies and Computer Systems and the coordinator of the group of SevSU staff who visited ITMO to partake in the course, the initiative to conduct such a course came from ITMO University.
“We believe that ITMO is the only university which could offer and deliver on the implementation of such a course. Like ITMO University, SevSU also offers a program in smart city technologies. It was the creation of the Master’s program at SevSU that offered the opportunity for us to meet our colleagues from ITMO’s Institute of Design and Urban Studies. We see big potential in this partnership. Both ITMO and we possess advanced IT competencies, and the opportunity to unite them with the developments by the urban studies specialists will allow the Smart City project to add more colors to the overall palette,” posits Dmitry Voronin.
The program
The development of the study program commissioned by Sevastopol State University drew from the experience and the exclusive learning materials of the Master’s programs Digital Technologies for Smart Cities and Urban Informatics and Applied Urban Studies, which have been in operation at ITMO University’s Institute of Design and Urban Studies since 2018.
Among the most in-demand topics are the methodology of smart city development and the concept of creating a city’s digital model based on the ontology of urban environment’s legal entities.
The further training course was held in the format of a four-day intensive program: the staff of ITMO’s Institute of Design and Urban Studies gave classes on the implementation of IT projects for smart cities, technologies for e-government and state information systems, new methods for the monitoring of public opinion and the collection of data generated by users as part of the urban environment quality evaluation studies, and so on. The course also included lectures by invited experts from the IT companies Intelligent Media Systems and ROSINNO, who spoke about geoinformation systems and their application for smart city purposes, as well as geoanalytics and geomarketing studies.
The attestation committee of the further training course was headed by Sergey Mityagin, the director of the Institute of Design and Urban Studies. Contributing as an expert at the defense of the final projects apart from the coordinators and Institute of Design and Urban Studies lecturers was Vitaly Krukovsky, a representative of ITMO’s and SevSU’s partner company SevStar and a member of the Sevastopol Public and Business Council on the Smart City Priority Project.
He also participated in a roundtable which took place after the awarding of certificates. The event’s participants discussed the matters of further collaboration between ITMO and SevSU and the prospects for the promotion of joint projects in the field of smart city development technologies and methods.
As a result of the course, the participants prepared presentations on the development of specific territories in Sevastopol as smart spaces. They carried out an analysis of the city’s Balaklava District and identified today’s problems in the development of habitats, for example the lack of access to certain activities faced by different population groups. The projects presented the scenarios of territorial development in regard to different spheres: energy, environment, education and others.
Based on the presented works, the course’s participants from Sevastopol State University intend to formulate a comprehensive proposal for improving the territory in accordance with the concept of developing Sevastopol as a smart city.
