(Deadline Extended!)
September 16-18, Kyoto, Japan

Digital city projects--building platforms to support community networking--are currently going on world-wide. European and American cities, as well as Asian cities, are creating digital meeting places and information resources for local residents and remote visitors. For example, here in Kyoto, programmers, designers, and social scientists are all working together to build a digital Kyoto (http://digitalcity.gr.jp). This online city will include live sensory links to Kyoto itself, explorable 3-d versions of some locations in Kyoto, and other helpful features.

The aim of the Kyoto workshop on Digital Cities is to encourage activity in this domain, by bringing together people from computer science and social science whose work concerns digital cities, to discuss their work-in-progress. We hope this gathering will be a fruitful and enjoyable meeting of minds, full of discussion and ideas about how to create and evaluate the next generation of digital cities. Some topics we hope will be discussed include: successes and design challenges of currently implemented digital cities; issues of locally-oriented versus globally-oriented resources in digital cities and related cross-cultural challenges; interface design strategies for digital cities, such as 3-d spatial representations; integration of real-world live data into digital cities; and how to encourage and support robust and diverse user populations in digital cities.

The meeting consists of a one-day symposium and a two-day workshop. The workshop will be a two-day combination of presentations and group discussion of key issues in digital city research, with some time for exploration of the city of Kyoto itself. The workshop will follow a one-day symposium on September 16 (http://www.digitalcity.gr.jp/presentations/project_poster.html). Workshop attendees are requested to participate the symposium.

This symposium is open to the public, and includes invited speakers and panels related to the digital city theme. Currently the symposium speaker list includes representatives of Virtual Helsinki and De Digitale Stad of Amsterdam, Community Network of Urbana-Champaign as well as a Digital City Kyoto project member.

To help ensure a discussion-oriented atmosphere, the number of invited workshop attendees will be limited to around 30. For workshop presenters who come from overseas, hotel costs (4 nights from September 15) including food will be covered. Furthermore, fairly large support for airfare is available. Send your request to workshop co-chairs when submitting your paper.

Submission guidelines and recommendations

Professionals who have made significant contributions to the meeting topic are invited to submit a paper for consideration for the workshop. We invite you to submit a paper of up to 5000 words in length. All papers and discussion results will be published as a Springer-Verlag Computer Science Lecture Note.

Some possible topics are listed below, though we welcome other topics that are related to the meeting theme:

Submit three (3) hard copies of your full paper written in English by July 1, 1999 to the following address. Surface mail and email addresses, and phone and fax numbers should be included for all contributing authors.

Katherine Isbister
NTT Open Lab
2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun,
Kyoto 619-0237
JAPAN

Please also send the title and abstract of your paper via e-mail by June 1, 1999 to help speed-up the review process, to: katherine@digitalcity.gr.jp

Submitted papers will be reviewed by program co-chairs, and all authors will be notified of the status of their submission by July 15, 1999.

All those who are accepted for the workshop should plan to attend both the workshop (September 17-18) and the one-day symposium, on September 16, which will kick off the Kyoto Digital Cities Meeting.

Deadline for receipt of title and abstract by email: June 1, 1999
Deadline for receipt of 3 hard copies of the full paper: July 1, 1999
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 1999
Deadline for camera-ready paper: August 15, 1999
Meeting: September 16-18, 1999
Deadline for post-proceedings version of paper: November 1, 1999

The official language will be English. The tentative structure of the meeting is as follows:

9:00 - 17:30 Invited talk
18:00 - 20:00 Reception

9:00 - 12:00 Presentations
afternoon Excursion to Kyoto Historical Places
20:00 - 22:00 Free discussion

9:00 - 11:00 Presentations
11:30 - 14:30 Group discussion
15:00 - 16:00 Presentations
16:00 - 17:00 Summary

Katherine Isbister (NTT, Japan) katherine@digitalcity.gr.jp
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan) ishida@digitalcity.gr.jp

Workshop participants: (Including people under consideration)

 

Architecture and Urban Planning	Bill Mitchell, (MIT, USA)
Digital City Amsterdam (http://www.dds.nl/)	Peter Van den Besselaar (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Vrtual Helsinki (http://www.hel.fi/infocities/)	Risto Linturi (Helsinki Arena 2000, Finland)
Digital City Kyoto (http://www.digitalcity.gr.jp/)	Jun-ichi Akahani (NTT, Japan)
Digital City Antwerp (http://www.dma.be/)	Bruno Peeters (City of Antwerp, Belgium)
Digital City Urbana-Champaign - PrairieNet/IKNOW community networking	Noshir Contractor (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Digital City Shanghai	Sheng Huanye (Shanghai JiaoTong University, China)
Community Networking (http://www.naima.com/)	Amy Jo Kim (Naima, USA)

For further information, please contact one of the organizing committee members.