Report on the 1st International Workshop on Information Access in Smart Cities (i-ASC 2014)

Modern cities are increasingly becoming smart where a digital knowledge infrastructure is deployed by local authorities (e.g. City councils and municipalities) to better serve the information needs of their citizens, and to ensure the sustainability and efficient use of power and resources. This knowledge infrastructure consists of a wide range of systems from lowlevel physical sensors to advanced sensing devices through social sensors. The i-ASC 2014 workshop was the first international event, within the Information Retrieval (IR) community, that is dedicated to research on smart/future cities. In particular, the workshop was a venue for research on digesting the city's data streams and knowledge databases in order to serve the information needs of citizens and support decision making for local authorities. Possible use cases include helping tourists to find interesting places to go or activities to do while visiting a city, or assisting journalists in reporting local incidents. Indeed, the workshop was intended to foster the development of new information access and retrieval models that can harness effectively and efficiently the large number of heterogeneous big data streams in a city to provide a new generation of information services. The workshop was well attended, where more than 45 participants were officially registered. It featured two keynote talks from industry (IBM andWaag Society) and two invited talks from academia (Pisa and Edinburgh). In addition, seven refereed papers were presented before breakout groups considered questions and issues identified from a panel discussion.