The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) will participate this week in the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC25), the leading international event on smart cities, with a program focused on digital twins and the role of supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) in city planning and management.
BSC will present vCity, an Urban Digital Twin platform developed by the Data Analytics and Visualization group. vCity is designed to support public officials and urban planners in simulating, analyzing, and visualizing different scenarios, anticipating the impact of policies on areas such as mobility, sustainability, or air quality, and enabling more informed and equitable decisions to build more sustainable and people-centered cities.
The platform interacts with multiple urban data sources and relies on a scalable architecture that allows analysis of the current situation at various levels, creation of advanced maps and indicators, and simulation of future scenarios using AI predictive models.
Technologies developed at BSC within the ASCENDER and EXTRACT projects will also be presented. These are aimed at managing urban risks such as traffic accidents or emergency situations and are already being tested in cities like Barcelona and Venice.
Technologies, researchers and projects from BSC at SCEWC
Sophie Marandon, Fernando Cucchietti, Patricio Reyes, and Tomás Andrade, researchers from the Data Analytics and Visualization group (BSC Data Viz Group), will present the vCity project, as well as a collaborative initiative with the Diputació de Barcelona aimed at optimizing services of the Municipal Library Network of Barcelona using AI-based solutions. vCity is a citizen-centered platform for the development of urban digital twins, allowing simulation of different scenarios with components such as air quality, mobility, sustainability, or proximity, with the goal of creating fairer and more sustainable cities.
Eduardo Quiñones, researcher in Computer Sciences at BSC, will participate in a session focused on urban decision-making enhanced by AI and Big Data, showcasing how advanced technologies developed at BSC in projects like ASCENDER and EXTRACT are driving real-time solutions for critical urban problems. These initiatives are applied in cities like Barcelona and Venice to manage urban risks, such as identifying situations that may lead to traffic accidents or designing personalized evacuation routes in emergencies.
Alba Jené, scientific coordinator of Life Sciences at BSC, will complement the center’s presence at Smart City Expo by participating in the V Spain-India Forum, focused on innovation in health. She will discuss the application of digital twins to human biology, highlighting how BSC’s supercomputing, data infrastructure, and AI make it possible to develop predictive models that drive precision medicine.
Tech for Impact Awards 2025
As part of the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit, held for the first time within Smart City Expo, BSC is organizing the first edition of the Tech for Impact Awards 2025, an open innovation challenge to promote the development of innovative solutions addressing real needs and problems.
The event is part of the BSC Connects program, in collaboration with X4HPC, and will be a space to connect AI and Deep Tech startups and SMEs with leading corporations in the Connects ecosystem, such as Banc Sabadell, TMB, Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca, AMB, Werfen, and Almirall.
Eurocities Academy
The week will conclude with the Eurocities Academy, held on November 6 and 7 at BSC facilities. This training, co-organized by the Eurocities network and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is aimed at municipal officials from the Eurocities network, with representation from countries such as Italy, Greece, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The goal of this practical training is to support public sector professionals in evaluating if, when, and how Urban Digital Twins can bring real value to urban governance.
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