The AI and the City conference provides a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and knowledge exchange on the transformative role of AI in urban contexts. This conference is sponsored by the School of Cities India at the University of Toronto and the Center for Information Technology and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore in collaboration with UTIF (University of Toronto India Foundation).
This conference explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and urban dynamics and foster innovative solutions and insights for creating smarter, more inclusive, and sustainable cities of the future. We will address how AI is leveraged and critique its possible uses and impacts. Topics of Interest include:
- AI solutions: AI-driven solutions for urban governance, such as predictive analytics for decision-making, smart infrastructure management, and resource allocation.
- Ethical governance: Ethical considerations and social implications of AI deployment in urban contexts, with a focus on issues around inequality and social justice, including critical evaluations
- Mobility: Applications of AI in urban mobility, including but not limited to autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, ride-sharing platforms, drones, urban logistics and public transportation systems.
- Urban policy and planning: Innovative approaches to state-sponsored AI-based initiatives for cities, including land use planning, property evaluation, public-private partnerships, regulatory frameworks, and actual implementation strategies that may be tenuously connected to AI technology.
- Healthcare: AI applications in urban healthcare delivery, disease surveillance, access to care, and public health management.
- Green AI: AI applications including but not limited to renewable energy solutions, emission reductions, and managing urban heat islands as well as the electricity demands for AI systems.
- Cybersecurity and data privacy: Legal frameworks for regulating AI in urban environments, with a focus on data privacy and surveillance.
- Effects on employment: The role of urban robotics, impact of AI on urban labor markets, employment patterns, and workforce skills development.
- Economic development: Role of AI in fostering economic growth, entrepreneurship, and innovation within cities.
Important dates
- The call for papers and abstract submissions closed on October 1, 2024.
- Notifications of acceptance were sent out on October 17, 2024.
- In order to be considered as part of the special issue of a peer-reviewed journal authors should submit their paper no later than December 31st.
- Conference dates: January 4-5, 2025
Conference details
Details of accommodation options will be posted shortly. If possible we will provide accommodation for students free of charge.
Keynote talk
Speaker: Prof Simon Marvin School of Architecture, Design and Planning University of Sydney and Urban Institute University of Sheffield.
Unpacking urban AI’s genealogy, dynamics, and implications will be a programmatic responsibility for urban studies. This will take time, and the need for cautious, rigorous analysis will help avoid the trap of too quickly embracing utopian imaginaries or dystopian visions of AI’s benefits and dangers. However, we also need to be careful to scrutinise technological trajectories that are less visible yet are already actively operationalising milieus, humans, and more-than-human urban life. This paper offers a critical reflection on the current state of the urban technological landscape and its potential AI-enabled development. Specifically, I look through the lens of the Australian context, which is becoming hotter and more prone to extreme heat, bushfires, droughts, floods, and longer fire seasons. Here, an emerging bricolage of responses that repurposes existing technologies, knowledge, and expertise and uses them, it is claimed, as solutions for living with climate change. These are of wider relevance, emblematic of systemic shifts in urban operational capacities that pose stimulating generative challenges to urban studies. The paper explores three themes: i) Climate crisis has brought into focus our relationships with each other, with non-human life, with materials and the atmosphere, and all increasingly mediated through technology, as we need to find new ways of living with climate change. ii) A bricolage of responses is emerging, and existing technologies are being reworked, tested, and applied to create novel operational capacities to manage almost every aspect of urban life. The paper focuses on five extensions in urban ‘techno-social’ capacities in which AI is frequently entangled: a). the secure reproduction of more than human life in artificial ecosystems, b) the technical governance of the elemental and atmospheric milieu, c). the integration of the human brain within technological systems, d) the remaking of mundane urban surfaces as an infrastructural capacity and e) the emergence of new rounds of investment in drones, kinetic machines and robotically enabled automation in a post-smart city. iii) The paper reflects on the critical challenges of this extended technisation of urban life, the challenges of meaningfully keeping ‘humans in the loop’ and what this means for future research on AI in urban studies.
Organizing and scientific committee
- Yuko Aoyama, Clark University (USA)
- Karen Chapple, School of Cities, University of Toronto (Canada)
- Subhro Guhathakurta, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
- Jaya Nair, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) (India)
- Balaji Parthasarathy, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) (India)
- Sachit Rao, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) (India)
- Karan Singh, University of Toronto (Canada)
- Srinath Srinivasa, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) (India)
- Matthew Zook, University of Kentucky (USA)
Full paper guidelines for accepted submissions
- Maximum 8,000 words
- 1-inch margins, single-spaced
- References should be in APA style
- Include a 200-word abstract, with 3-5 keywords
- In order to be considered as part of the special issue of a peer-reviewed journal authors should submit their paper no later than December 31st.
Paper submission form will be available shortly.
