This talk will focus on recent developments on the use of Big Data for urban planning, policy and business innovations. Examples of recent work in this area will be given. The importance of Open Data initiatives and open source tools and technologies will be discussed, as well as emerging informal networks of urban data infomediaries and civic hackers who are likely to play a transformative role in urban informatics. The value that citizens can bring through Information and Communications Technologies in cities of the future will be discussed with examples.

The Cities Learning Together conference is approaching rapidly. The European Union Centre at RMIT, PASCAL and the Hong Kong Institute of Education are very pleased to invite your participation. All the elements are now in place for an exciting and stimulating experience in Hong Kong in November.

A great deal of work has been done so far by many people and our conference partners: ASPBAE, ICAE , CITYNET, PRIA, EAFAE, APUCEN, and DVV (see details in attached booklet).

To considerable media interest, the OECD published the early findings from the PIAAC survey of adult competences yesterday 8th October.  The report Skilled for Life? Key findings from the Survey of Adult Skills is featured below and there is also a SlideShare presentation from the launch by Andreas Schleicher.

Three years after receiving an $11 million grant from the European Union, the city of Santander in northern Spain has transformed itself into a prototype "smart city" that has attracted delegations from China and the US as well as from Google and Microsoft. Its 36-square-kilometer area is studded with 10,000 sensors that deliver data about everything from parking space availability to dumpster capacity to streetlight luminosity. Residents and officials can access the data through their mobile phones or tablets.