Notes from the first CITY.AI Bucharest Chapter Gathering
After a very rapid and passionate organizing rush, putting one foot in front of the other (which is actually true to most of the businesses too) we met for the first time, happy AI enthusiasts from Bucharest. We are proceeding adaptively and plan to figure out what does our community need, where do we need more support, how to work out through the challenges, all together. Ping us if you want to offer a helping hand, we most look for help with social media and community engagement management, but all help is most appreciated. If you want to be a speaker or want to share part of your findings, challenges, results, in the field of Applied AI, pings us. It all begins with you. Let’s create shared purpose and local impact. Together we grow!
CITY.AI is a community of 20+ cities that share discoveries in applied AI and connect you to international peers. City.AI powers Chapters throughout the globe. The local communities bring unique contributions, perspectives and are bound by the purpose of collaborative knowledge in the field of Applied AI. By increasing transparency and collaboration, we aim to enable more people to better apply artificial intelligence.
What are the Artificial Intelligence technologies that have an impact?
Swarm intelligence
Natural Language generation
Semantic technology
Text analytics and NLP
Speech recognition
Image and video analysis
Deep Learning platforms
Machine Learning platforms
Biometrics
Robotic Process Automation
Virtual Agents
AI-optimized hardware
Decision management
Our first BucharestAI gathering speakers — “Smart Cities” Track
Remco Veenenberg — CITY.AI Budapest Chapter & Head of Content @City.ai and CES Country Partner.
Remco walked us through the essence of the CITY.AI concept and network. He found very amusing our question on ‘If you were to build a chat-bot, how would you name it?’ because guess what, he’s currently building one for fun. If he were to name a bot, he said he’ll probably name it Sigmund.ai. I’m sure we’ll actually hear from Remco more in the coming editions.
Eduard presented us his progress in defining a Smart City in Romania, spreading out the concept and enabling communication between small startups (via the Smart Start Up Romania Programme) focused on building smart cities and possible investors or local authorities and communities. His efforts count grand public events, a Smart City Magazine and a Smart City Institute, all bound by the same vision: creating a smart community network.
Eduard enjoyed a great peer-to-peer session where he guided small startups owners and IoT enthusiasts to where they can get more help towards bringing to life any projects oriented to smarter cities.
University Politehnica of Bucharest is the largest University to have an AI oriented module where students learn and incorporate AI technologies in their projects. Dr. Adina Florea walked us through the current projects they are developing, from helping elderly people to their AI robots. As a token of further supporting our community, Dr. Adina Florea promised we’ll have the chance to play with Neo, their AI robot, in our next meetup. Thank you, Dr Adina Florea!
Cristian is using IoT to improve life in cities in all its dimensions via smart street lighting systems (already in trial phase), smart metering of water consumption and monitoring of air pollution. Currently successful with e-Alba-Iulia smart city tech and Civic Alert app reporting issues with public equipment. Always looking for startups through Orange’s Innovation Labs and looking to having an open ecosystem to as many players as possible because a proper connected city isn’t just networks and sensors: it’s a real local e-democracy! Just like Dr. Anca Dragan, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and Lead for AI4ALL’s UC Berkeley program, BAIR Camp puts it and we, as a Bucharest AI community, also stand by: „the future of AI needs to have more people in it”.
Cristian put energy and walked us through the data that Orange enables everyone access to and supports startups to use it and build upon it towards a smart city and a better e-democracy. We learnt about the footprints with real-time data, the real-time threats and last but not least about the uRADMonitor where we were able to see data from sensors of: temperature, pressure, humidity, carbon dioxide, radiation and more. Of course, the community couldn’t stop asking questions on use cases, architecture and concepts of further projects that can be done using those real time data.
The Bucharest.AI community starts with you!
We had the pleasure of meeting 55 of you AI enthusiasts at a venue offered by Tech Hub Bucharest, the leading hub for tech events and meetups. We thank our partners, speakers and community, for the feedback offered thus far and encourage to help us shape and build the community further.
Here are some insights into how does our community, that attended the first gathering, looks like. AI for all.
Where to find us?
Make sure you join our Facebook Group and our Meetup.com Meetup Group. Stay connected with our global network of applied AI communities, CITY.AI, to discover, connect and share with the right people from cities around the globe. Fancy talking to us? Drop Alexandra, Raoul or Tudor a line and they’d be most excited to hear from you. Want to demo an AI project you’re working at? We’d love to book you a slot and encourage you to get feedback from the community. We’d also love to hear your recommendations, thoughts, opinions. Please don’t hold it, ping us and let’s start sharing learnings.
