In 2013 I had the pleasure of attending the 13th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM), held at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Although the conference tends to fly under the radar, the event was a true pleasure. The attendees included many scholars whose work I knew from the literature, and featured a truly international mix of participants. My experience has led to new connections and research collaborations. Therefore I’m thrilled to be assisting in planning the 2015 conference, which will be held in Boston from July 7-10, 2015, and will be hosted by my former MIT advisor, Prof. Joseph Ferreira at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. This will be only the third time the conference has met in the U.S., after visiting Honolulu in 2001 and Atlanta in 1993.

If you are interested in participating, abstracts for conference papers are due on December 19th, and abstracts for posters are not due until March 6, 2015. An excerpt from the full call for submissions is below, and additional information is on our conference website.

For more than twenty years, CUPUM has been one of the premier international conferences for the exchange of ideas and applications of computing technologies to address a diverse range of social, managerial, and environmental problems impacting urban planning and development. Recent innovations in information and communication technologies have thrust this topic into the public spotlight:

• Big Data collected from transit systems, telephone networks, social media, and other sources have created new information sources about cities, but have also raised important  technical, ethical, and analysis questions;
• Visualization technologies have helped uncover new patterns and insights about urban phenomena;
• Planning Support Systems continue to evolve as researchers test new interfaces and hardware, develop novel indicators and applications, and explore sociotechnical aspects of their adoption and use;
• Urban Modeling leverages new data and theory to build a richer understanding of urban systems and to develop improved tools for planning and policymaking;
• Smart City efforts have become a major area of research and implementation as more and more cities experiment with new uses of urban sensing and communication technologies.