Cities and transport are major contributors to CO2 emissions. FCAI’s recent webinar brought industry and academia together to discuss the need for new sustainable solutions, enabled by artificial intelligence.

We need new solutions for ecological, social, and economic sustainability. The issue is of critical relevance for the international community, and the UN has defined 17 sustainable development goals that demand immediate action.

Artificial intelligence plays a very important part in each of them, says Laura Ruotsalainen, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, HELSUS, and FCAI.

According to Heikki Ailisto, Research Professor at VTT and Lead of FCAI’s Industry and Society Program, sustainability is a phenomenon whose different aspects are each of them complex in their own right, and even more so in their interplay. It is hard to make mathematical, systemic, or societal models that consider all relevant variables simultaneously.

AI, however, can do that. It has been successfully used to optimize, simulate, and control similar complex settings, for example in the energy sector and medical industry.

Read more here.