Artificial intelligence takes center stage at Barcelona's Smart City Expo, debating the future of cities and housing

Barcelona.— Artificial intelligence burst onto the design of the cities of the future at the Smart City Expo, the expo that brings together a thousand cities from November 3 to 5 at the Gran Via venue of Fira de Barcelona to discuss their challenges, and which this year expects to welcome more than 27,000 visitors, according to the EFE news agency.

Amid the widespread frenzy over artificial intelligence, companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia and Google presented their products for the cities of the future, which face challenges such as the housing crisis, an increasingly variable climate and heavier traffic congestion.

Microsoft, for example, presented a software package so city councils can analyze city maps and make real-time use of the data the city generates. In Google's case, attendees could interact with a project called ‘Weather Next 2’, still experimental, which seeks to predict the weather in real time using artificial intelligence, or with ‘Google Earth AI’, with geospatial models managed by Gemini.

The big tech names shared space with smaller projects, such as a real-time drone detector, a humanoid robot already used in the Chinese city of Wuhu to control traffic, and traffic lights that use AI to operate.

The congress director, Ugo Valenti, told EFE that cybersecurity is an “inherent” part of increasingly connected cities, which is why the expo runs alongside the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress and the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit.

Under the slogan ‘Urban Solutions, Real Impact’, the expo's fifteenth edition sought for the first time to address the housing crisis. It thus launched the ‘HOWS Barcelona-Housing World Summit’, an international summit promoted by Barcelona City Council and organized by Fira that brought together mayors, governments, developers, social organizations and experts to debate policies that work.

Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni will chair the housing mayors' roundtable, devoted to the right to stay and to the policies applied around the world against the housing crisis, with the mayors of Milan, Budapest, Athens and Atlanta. The UN will feature on Wednesday the executive director of UN-Habitat, Anacláudia Rossbach, who will give a talk on how data, AI and digital innovation can help cities face the housing crisis.

Photo: El Periódico Digital

Source: EFE