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The purpose of this paper is to study the unexpected consequences in the operation of urban environments. Prediction within the urban planning process often presents difficulties and unintended consequences. It is not enough to develop a good project. Unexpected consequences are possible because of the environment. The authors argue that these problems of uncertainty can be minimized with citizen participation and the use of new technologies.

The problem of how urban planning initiatives result in unexpected consequences is described. These effects are determined by studying a series of cities and real urban environments. A case study on urban accessibility is developed for a better understanding of the problem.

Avoiding unexpected consequences in the operation of urban environments is strongly linked to the concept of Smart City 3.0. This concept is based on the co-creation. In this line to address the problem, a citizen-centric methodology using the latest information and communications technologies and internet of things technologies is presented. As a practical application, different categories of unexpected events related to the Faculty of Education building at the University of Alicante have been identified as a consequence of the impact of its environment. An uncomfortable or non-accessible environment causes unforeseen behaviour of individuals.

There are no analytical tools to investigate how aspects of the urban environment cause uncertainty about the acceptance of projects by future citizen users. This work takes a step forward in that direction.

This paper aims to present a framework to address the impact of people’s behaviour in the dissemination of information through mobile social networks.

This approach follows the epidemical compartmental models and uses a grid to model the nodes’ (people) behaviour in the dissemination process. The nodes’ status is determined by binary rules that update and define the flow of information between neighbour nodes. An improved stacked-layer grid model is used to implement modulations in the application of the rules and neighbourhoods to model the impact of people’s attitude, which may improve or jeopardize the efficiency of the process.

This proposal shows how grid architecture is a valuable tool to model different causes of malfunction of data dissemination. Combining different grids with different neighbourhoods and different local rules provides a wide range of possibilities to depict the impact of human awareness and decision on the dissemination of data.

This works develops a new approach for the analysis of dissemination of information which add new features to traditional methods for modelling local interactions and describing the dynamics of the communication patterns in the population.

The purpose of this paper is to present a discrete compartmental susceptible-asymptomatic-infected-dead (SAID) model to address the expansion of plant pests. The authors examined the case of Xylella fastidiosa in almond trees in the province of Alicante (Spain) to define the best eradication/contention protocol depending on the environmental parameters such as climatic factors, distance between trees, isolation of the plots, etc.

This approach considers the expansion of the disease among the almond trees orchards by means of a grid model. The cells of the grid represent a tree (or even a group of trees) that can be susceptible (healthy), asymptomatic (infected by the bacterium but without symptoms), infected or dead. When time passes, the status of the cells is determined by binary rules that update following both a neighborhood and a delay pattern. The model assumes that the environmental parameters have a crucial impact on the expansion of the disease, so a grid is assigned to each parameter to model the single effect caused by this parameter. The expansion is then the weighted sum of all the grids.

This proposal shows how the grid architecture, along with an update rule and a neighborhood pattern, is a valuable tool to model the pest expansion. This model has already been analyzed in previous works and has been compared with the corresponding continuous models solved by ordinary differential equations, coming to find the homologous parameters between both approaches. Thus, it has been possible to prove that the combination neighborhood-update rule is responsible for the rate of expansion and recovering/death of the illness. The delays (between susceptible and asymptomatic, asymptomatic and infected, infected and recovered/dead) may have a crucial impact on both the peak of infected and the recovery/death rate. This theoretical model has been successfully tested in the case of the dissemination of information through mobile social networks and is also currently under study in the case of expansion of COVID-19.

This work develops a new approach for the analysis of expansion of plant pests. This approach provides both behavioral variability at the cell level (by its capability to modify the neighborhood and/or the update rule and/or the delays) and modularity (by easy scaling the number of grids). This provides a wide range of possibilities to deal with realistic scenarios.

Spatial ability is essential for engineers’ professional performance. Several studies describe it as a skill that can be enhanced using new technologies. Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that is proving very useful for training different skills and improving spatial perception. In this chapter, the authors firstly present some previous works that use VR to train students, mainly in the area of engineering studies, and which demonstrate that VR can improve some aspects of the spatial perception. This study took a group of engineering students who used VR technologies to carry out learning activities designed to improve their spatial perception, which was measured with a widely used spatial ability test. The results obtained confirm that the use of VR technologies can improve students’ spatial perception. This proposal is easily transferable to other educational contexts. On the one hand, it could be implemented to improve spatial ability in other engineering studies, and on the other hand, with simple adaptation, it could be used to enhance other skills.

Rural society is increasingly open to a globalized world, and migration from rural areas to cities is becoming increasingly important. Many rural areas face depopulation, an aging population, and limited access to a range of services. To address this challenge, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) involved in the concept of smart villages have much to offer. In order to streamline the debate, this chapter proposes a methodology based on resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a habitat or system to recover to its initial state when the disturbance to which it has been subjected has ceased. In this regard, a retrospective of rural areas is proposed based on the experience of the garden city model, for which the advantages of rural areas were evident over those of urban areas. The objective is to reconsider the intrinsic qualities of rural areas in order to recover and enhance them with the added value of the European Union (EU) Smart Villages approach. These facets will be the driving forces behind sustainable development. In conclusion, a number of recommendations are presented, including the development of a catalog, structured by regions and territories, of rural areas and their different potentials and opportunities, for the development of smart villages projects.

Cryptography has become an essential feature for many current technological applications. Cryptographic methods are usually divided into private‐key (or symmetric) and public‐key (or asymmetric) algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to propose a client/server architecture to efficiently authenticate users by means of their fingerprint biometric feature. To do this, the personal data of each user are acquired at the client and, afterwards, they are conveniently encrypted using a combination of up‐to‐date symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms.

First the main issues related to public‐key and private‐key cryptography, including well‐known algorithms, such as data encryption standard and Rijndael methods are reviewed. After that, a proposal for the implementation of a client/server architecture to authenticate users by means of fingerprint features is proposed.

The results of the experiments show that such architecture is optimal for being applied in real authentication systems, provides high‐security standards and can be applied to any practical biometric system.

Biometrics has become an attractive alternative to password‐based systems: using a password is insecure, as they can easily be forgotten or stolen. Fingerprints are the most widely used biometric feature. This paper uses recent fingerprint identification algorithms together with the most advanced cryptographic methods recommended nowadays. This way, the system utilizes state‐of‐the‐art techniques that are also introduced in many practical systems; that is the reason why it will be flexible enough to integrate, any forthcoming needs of cryptographic systems.

Virtual currency is a digital representation of value that is neither issued by a central bank or a public authority. Its reliability is based on advanced cryptographic methods which provide privacy and confidence to citizens. Virtual currency and its underlying technologies such as blockchain or smart contracts trigger transformation in many areas of the society’s functioning. The way in which social relations occur and economic transactions are managed are changing forever. As a result, cryptocurrencies constitute a good example of how specific technology may lead to substantial transformation of the world. Still, virtual currencies could benefit from the versatility of collaborative communication of social media and Internet to promote and develop new commerce and business initiatives as well as new forms of financial flow managements. The objective of this chapter is to examine the role played by virtual currencies in modern societies in order to describe potential uses and applications and their impact on politics and social behavior. As a result, recommendations are inferred to address the challenges and opportunities of these new technologies.