Welcome to the IEEE ISCC 2017 5th International Workshop on Smart City and Ubiquitous Computing Applications (SCUCA 2017), to be held in conjunction with the 22nd IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (IEEE ISCC 2017), in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, on 3rd July, 2017.

The Workshop is the fifth in the Smart City and Ubiquitous Computing Applications (SCUCA) workshop series. It follows the success of the previous four SCUCA events: the first (SCUCA 2013) was held in conjunction with the 14th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (IEEE WoWMoM 2013), in Madrid, Spain; the second (SCUCA 2014) in conjunction with the 10th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (IEEE WiMob 2014), in Larnaca, Cyprus; the third (SCUCA 2015) in conjunction with the 20th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (IEEE ISCC 2015), also in Larnaca, Cyprus; and the fourth (SCUCA 2016) in conjunction with the 21st IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (IEEE ISCC 2016), in Messina, Italy.

Cities and urban areas in general are experiencing immense growth in the last few years as they are the centers of economic activities. Regarding future trends, it is estimated that 93% of urban growth will occur in developing nations, with 80% of urban growth occurring in Asia and Africa. Urged by these observations, city halls and political decision makers are calling for urgent solutions to the growing problems caused by this increasing population concentration. Recent advances in information and communication technologies may stimulate new solutions towards the urbanization problems, and the mission of this workshop is to present recent achievements in ubiquitous computing from a smart cities perspective. In particular, within SCUCA 2017 workshop, we will examine how new technologies in the areas of machine-to-machine (M2M) and mobile communications, Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, multimedia services, data management can contribute towards intelligent and sustainable urban environments. Attention is also given to other issues that stem from the exploitation of ubiquitous technologies such as innovative business models, security, safety and privacy. Experiences from deployments and case studies are particularly welcome.