The director of the GATE Institute, Prof. Silvia Ilieva, was a guest in the morning programme “Business Start” on Bloomberg TV. Together with Gencho Kerezov, Deputy Mayor for Digitalization of Sofia Municipality, they answered hot questions related to urban planning and living conditions in the capital.
Prof. Ilieva told about the pilot project of GATE to create a city digital twin, which is being implemented in the Lozenets region. She highlighted the expected benefits of developing a digital model of the area, which concern the effective planning of street repairs, as well as infrastructure planning in the newly built parts of Lozenets. “In addition, GATE contributes to the infrastructure of Sofia Municipality by building its City living laboratory, which will collect diverse data, including air pollution,” said Prof. Ilieva. The Institute is also working on one of the “sickest” problems in the city – the placement of children in kindergartens. In this regard, Sofia Municipality has provided the necessary data to GATE and the Institute applies an algorithm for the distribution of children by age and according to the capacity of kindergartens, applying the principle of zoning 10 minutes away from the place of residence.
Gencho Kerezov pointed out that it is especially important for Sofia Municipality to be able to make data-driven decisions. “That is why we are happy to work together with the GATE Institute in the project for the digital twin of the city and we are its active partner,” said the Deputy Mayor for Digitalization of Sofia Municipality.
Prof. Ilieva also spoke about the work of GATE in the field of digital healthcare. In this application area, the Institute is implementing a pilot project on how big data and artificial intelligence support the development of analytical models in the research of Alzheimer’s disease. “Especially important here is our cooperation with leading universities such as Oxford, Stanford and Yale,” said Prof. Ilieva.
The director of GATE announced that the topics of the city digital twin, digital healthcare and the discovery of disinformation would be broadly covered in the upcoming annual Big Data and Artificial Intelligence forum of the Institute) on 8 December 2021, from 1.00 pm (CET) and on 9 December 2021, from 9.00 am (CET), online.