Smarter universities: A vision for the fast changing digital era $ Mauro Coccoli a,n , Angela Guercio b , Paolo Maresca c , Lidia Stanganelli d a DIBRIS University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy b Department of Computer Science, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA c DIETI Federico II University, Naples, Italy d Università Telematica eCampus Novedrate (CO), Italy article info Article history: Received 20 September 2014 Accepted 24 September 2014 Available online 2 October 2014 Keywords: Smart cities Smart applications Collaborative systems Technology enhanced learning abstract In this paper we analyze the current situation of education in universities, with particular reference to the European scenario. Specifically, we observe that recent evolutions, such as pervasive networking and other enabling technologies, have been dramatically changing human life, knowledge acquisition, and the way works are performed and people learn. In this societal change, universities must maintain their leading role. Historically, they set trends primarily in education but now they are called to drive the change in other aspects too, such as management, safety, and environment protection. The availability of newer and newer technology reflects on how the relevant processes should be performed in the current fast changing digital era. This leads to the adoption of a variety of smart solutions in university environments to enhance the quality of life and to improve the performances of both teachers and students. Nevertheless, we argue that being smart is not enough for a modern university. In fact, universities should better become smarter. By “smarter university” we mean a place where knowledge is shared between employees, teachers, students, and all stakeholders in a seamless way. In this paper we propose, and discuss a smarter university model, derived from the one designed for the development of smart cities. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction At times, technological innovations have contributed to the creation of neologisms by introducing novel buzz- words such as, e.g., micro, cyber, virtual, which are used to identify the latest cutting-edge solutions. As an example, let us consider the prefix “e-”. The massive adoption of Internet and web-based solutions has suddenly given birth to e-mail, e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, and many other modern terms. In many cases, the “e-” has been replaced by the suffix “2.0” to move the attention to a further evolutionary step of the same product. Now we have entered the smart-something era, in which the prefix “smart” is attached to devices with computing and/or network capabilities. Moreover, such devices offer some form of smartness since they are easy to use and designed to improve users experience in common operations. Hence, we make a daily use of smart-phones, smart- TVs, smart-fridges, and so on. Riding this wave, the prefix smart has also been applied to places (e.g., smart-city, Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvlc Journal of Visual Languages and Computing http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.007 1045-926X/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ☆ This paper has been recommended for acceptance by S.-K. Chang. n Correspondence to: University of Genoa, Department of informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering, Via Opera Pia, 13, 16145 Genova, Italy. Tel.: +39 0103532736. E-mail addresses: mauro.coccoli@unige.it (M. Coccoli), aguercio@kent.edu (A. Guercio), paolo.maresca@unina.it (P. Maresca), lidia.stanganelli@ecampus.it (L. Stanganelli). Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 25 (2014) 1003–1011