AI Beyond Chatbots: Meaningful Use Cases that Drive Real Impact
Only 20% of the world’s AI investment in 2035 will go toward GenAI, yet many cities still struggle to look beyond today’s flashy headlines. Municipalities in the UK, Africa and US are combining AI and data science to deliver tangible benefits for their citizens and city administrators alike. From smart water management to EV charging installations, learn which AI innovations are driving the most impact — and which use cases are pure fluff.
Hosting the World: Global Events and Smart Tourism
Strategic urban design and sustainable event planning are vital to preparing cities for hosting global events and tourism. This session will explore innovative building solutions and cutting-edge urban planning, highlighting smart tourism and internationalization in alignment with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Can cities leverage innovative infrastructure and smart technologies to prepare for hosting […]
Sustainable Urban Evolution & World Cup 2026
This dialogue discusses the role of smart city infrastructure in revolutionizing urban environments for the World Cup 2026 and beyond. By harnessing innovation now, cities pave the way for sustainable development that emphasizes community engagement, improved quality of life and inclusivity.
Digital Rights In Our Cities: From Challenges To Solutions
The session will highlight the role of cities in fostering human rights in the digital era and promoting a human-centered digital transformation. A first dialogue will expose how and why cities are relevant to addressing digital rights challenges. It will be followed by a solution dialogue, showcasing different projects from cities to uphold digital rights in urban spaces.
Driving Urban Sustainability: Achieving Net-zero the Just Way
EU cities are key to advancing climate mitigation, adaptation, net-zero goals, and competitiveness, while ensuring social inclusion, as acknowledged – among others – by the Covenant of Mayors initiative. This session explores accelerating cities’ sustainable and just transformation through Local Green Deals, deploying new net-zero technologies, and creating strategies to make climate neutrality appealing, competitive, accessible, and just.
Predicting Tomorrow through Data-Driven Management
How are cities managing data analytics to prepare urban areas and citizens for future challenges? Can cities not only analyze data but also predict future dynamics to guarantee resilience and plan in the long term? This session delves into how cities can focus on data collection, storage, and management and use this information to predict performances and dynamics, guaranteeing better resilience and governance.
Safeguarding Elections in the AI and GenAI Era
With 2.3 billion people worldwide voting in key elections in the United States, United Kingdom, EU, and India, 2024 will be a global litmus test of the impact of generative AI (GenAI) on elections. This talk discusses the benefits and risk of GenAI in the democratic electoral process.
Building Vision AI Pipelines using Nx Tookit
The ubiquitous presence of cameras and affordable edge computing, combined with remarkable advances in vision-based AI, present a wealth of new business opportunities. Any process historically monitored by the trained human eye can now be efficiently automated at scale using vision and AI solutions. In this talk, Maurits will first provide several examples of novel vision and AI systems, showcasing how monitoring tasks can be automated at scale, with cameras and AI models working together as “smart sensors” for various business applications. After presenting these examples, Maurits will detail how to build such vision and AI applications, outlining the construction of edge AI vision pipelines. Finally, he will introduce the tools provided by Network Optix to facilitate the easy scaling of innovative vision and AI solutions.
Effective Public Policies for Healthier Communities
How do cities ensure the protection of human rights for all residents? What measures can decision-makers implement to address the diverse aspects of human security within their governance frameworks? This roundtable will discuss how local administrations are protecting citizens’ rights through public policies that promote equality, social justice, and overall well-being ensuring access to healthcare, education, and political participation.
Neither Bottom Up, Nor Top Down: Time for Hybrid Smart Cities
This keynote addresses the need to move beyond traditional top-down and bottom-up approaches in smart city development, advocating for a hybrid model that integrates both. By balancing technological innovations with community-driven initiatives, hybrid smartness creates more equitable and sustainable urban environments. Drawing from the evolution of smart city discourse, this talk highlights how hybrid smartness can solve urban challenges more effectively by intertwining top-down infrastructure with bottom-up citizen engagement. The keynote will explore how this socio-technical integration can reshape cities to be inclusive and responsive to both human and environmental needs.