The Director of the GATE Institute, prof. Sylvia Ilieva represented Bulgaria at the Third International AI Forum held online on 30th June 2021. The forum was organized by nine European AI clusters, including the AI cluster Bulgaria. It was attended by representatives of the European Commission, IT industry and research institutions.
Prof. Ilieva participated in the third panel, which discussed the AI regulatory sandboxes. She introduced the GATE Institute and explained how GATE AI approached the topic of regulatory sandboxes.
This approach was illustrated by the GATE’s City Living Lab designed to collect real-time data on the environment, street traffic, mobility and cadastral data needed for modelling processes and objects in the city. The purpose of the laboratory is to build a digital model that provides a software safe environment (sandbox) for design, experimentation and analysis of urban processes and urban planning. The data collected by the sensors in the laboratory will be shared through application programming interfaces (APIs) and will provide easy access to stakeholders (high-tech companies building solutions for the city, municipal administration and small businesses), which will allow them to develop and offer new applications for citizens, as well as to test, experiment with and demonstrate different solutions. The lab will be also open to stakeholders to test their own IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructure, relying on the connectivity of the lab and data storage.
Prof. Ilieva also pointed out that one of the GATE partners – Sofia Municipality – also has a vision and activities for the implementation of sandboxes until 2023 and they are establishing procedures to facilitate their implementation.
“We see GATE as an initiator and catalyst for sandbox implementation in Bulgaria together with the AI Cluster Bulgaria, which is very active in the ecosystem. In Bulgaria, we realise the importance of the sandboxes and we are now taking the first steps to implement them in different fields”, said prof. Ilieva