urbAIn – AI, Cities, and Climate Change

The event for AI, Cities, and Climate Change

The event at the venerable Paris City Hall hosted more than a 100 global experts, entrepreneurs and city leaders to share thoughts and showcase how AI can be applied to fight climate change. Organized by NewCities Foundation – a global non-profit organization dedicated to improving life in cities – the event was a part of a series of unique, one-day events about how AI is changing city life.

Many people have concerns of loosing their jobs to AI, and there are numerous applications of AI that are detrimental for a society, such as hacking, scamming, etc. Other AI applications are – let’s put it that way – absolutely irrelevant, like scrolling through endless entertaining content, e.g. cat videos.

Events like urbAIn show that AI can actually be used for good.

So where is AI innovation against climate change actually happening?

For us one relevant area for AI is definitely urban development and fighting climate change. With more and more data available, many design tasks require 100s if not 1000s of man hours. AI can help professionals from many disciplines around real estate to automate design processes. But what about the environment you might be asking? What about saving the planet? Many people have realised the advantages in optimising urban mobility, constructing buildings, operating and maintaining buildings, generally using resources in a much more smarter and efficient manner.

11.000 new buildings are built every single day, not to mention all the rehabilitation of old buildings taking place. Most of these buildings are constructed using traditional methods, non-recyclable materials, and inefficient building services that results in low comfort, loss of resources and detrimental effect on the environment during the whole life-cycle of the building. We spend 90% of our time indoors, so why don’t we build structures, and ultimately cities that are in harmony with nature, and our bodies? Because a building is one of the most complex creations of mankind it’s hard to optimize it for every single climate, country, city, people using it for different purposes, etc.

Our CEO Tariq Kaddoura made a compelling speech about these issues at UrbAIn Paris. After many years of research and development Metabuild has developed an AI technology that explores billions of design solutions for every building project. It identifies the best solutions that fit the developer’s budget, maximize comfort and environmental performance of the building. And we’re already working on upgrades that consider climate change scenarios for even deeper assessment of life cycle building performance.

We’re committed to drive a more sustainable future by creating better buildings. How do you imagine a more efficient future?