CINI Smart City University Challenge: presenting the Ca’ Foscari team

Ca’ Foscari University has chosen the BParty Library app as its representative at the CINI Smart City University Challenge,  which will attract challengers from all over Italy on 24th April 2017 in L'Aquila. The app has been developed by a team of Computer Science students (KAFF-e), which includes Federico Fontolan, Fabio Rosada, Andrea Giacomazzi and Kotono Yoshida. For the moment the App is only available on Android in an 'alpha' version, available via invitation.

The challenge, organized by the University of L'Aquila and the National Inter-University Consortium for Computer Science, will display the best apps from 7 universities all over Italy.

The selection process for Ca’ Foscari’s representatives took place at the Scientific Campus, in front of a panel consisting of Gianluigi Cogo (Veneto Region), Tommaso Piazza (Ca’ Foscari IT Services), professors Agostino Cortesi and Claudio Silvestri and post-doctoral student Alvise Spanò.

The competition consists of creating an Android application that allows the transformation of open data (supplied by the public administration) to create a service made for citizens and companies, by students on the Software Engineering course within the CEVID Laboratory (Venetian Centre for Digital Innovation), in collaboration with the Veneto Region.

Competing applications included those related to environmental alert services (Water levels rising, quality of air), health services (presence of pollen in various areas of the Veneto region) student services (availability of seats in the libraries of the Venetian metropolitan area), and services to internet access (where you could access a free wifi hot-spot).

BParty, the app that was chosen, comes under the ‘social’ type, as it allows the user to see in real time the availability of seats in the libraries in Venice, to access their catalogues, and to know which of your friends are studying in the same library at that moment.

It also offers the opportunity for those who manage the library facilities to see the data of available seats on different days at different times, thus it is an excellent tool to help plan the opening hours of the entire metropolitan library system.