CONTENts and methods

Sustainable cities

15 minute city

The idea of a neighbourhood city is interesting from a green transition perspective. Less commuting means less emissions and a better quality of life. In this context, the JICS initiative aims to provide tools to assess the state of our cities and to design and validate new development scenarios. JICS has already improved and developed the Cities in 15 Minutes platform

(http://whatif.cslparis.com/15mincity/), originally conceived and promoted by the CSL of Paris. The platform, which is available online free of charge, is constantly being updated with new cities and features.

Fitness and urban economy.

  JICS aims to assess the accessibility and mobility of different areas of a city using the Fitness and Complexity framework. This framework, developed to assess the fitness competitiveness and complexity of products exported by countries, is adapted to analyse the fitness landscape of different cities, dividing them into sectors and linking each sector to all the different types of POIs located within it internally. The main objective is to compare the results of the fitness and complexity technique with other urban indicators such as accessibility, mobility flows and housing prices. This will provide a more complete tool for quantifying inequality and segregation in cities. Another activity aims to investigate how the technological content of patents characterises the development of metropolitan areas and how innovation is related to GDP per capita.

A smart city project

CREF and Sony CSL, in collaboration with Sony Semiconductor Solutions SSS, have launched an ongoing project to apply cutting-edge computer vision technologies in an urban context. The POC launched uses the new Sony IMX500 smart sensor. The main activities planned so far, in collaboration with public bodies (the Municipality of Rome, the Municipal Public Transport Company, etc.) and private companies (Envision, Artificially, etc.), are (i) forecasting public transport passenger loads in order to promote more sustainable, efficient and safe travel; (ii) assessing the safety of intersections based on various factors (number of vehicles, their speed, promiscuity between vulnerable subjects (pedestrians, cyclists, etc.) and heavy vehicles), with obvious implications in terms of safety and prevention.

Misinformation and Social Dialogue (Infosphere)

Dynamics of the Information Ecosystem

Recent evidence (see Gravino et al, Nat Hum Behav 6, 10691078 2022 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562022013533) shows that disinformation tends to flourish when the supply of information does not match the demand for information. JICS aims to explore this phenomenology further, first to improve our understanding of information system dynamics, and second to identify antidotes to misinformation propagation and increasing toxicity of social dialogue.

Structural discord and polarisation

Increasing polarisation is a major threat to social cohesion and dialogue. It is often associated with so-called “fake news”, although recent evidence shows that polarisation is generated by all types of news, fake or otherwise. JICS aims to explore the complexity of polarisation phenomena and their collective emergence from individual behaviour. The main objectives are: (i) develop a theory of polarisation that can indicate whether a population is at risk of conflict; (ii) develop new tools to achieve difficult trade-offs: promoting diversity of opinion by reducing online violence, suggesting relevant and personalised content while avoiding the creation of echo chambers, improving the reliability of online content without censoring free speech.

Sistemi di raccomandazione e dinamiche di opinione
Il ruolo dei sistemi di raccomandazione è ancora controverso all’interno della comunità scientifica. JICS si propone di definire e testare in una sola volta i tre ingredienti necessari per valutare e superare l’effetto “echo chamber”: nuove metriche per la diversità, nuovi modelli per i comportamenti degli utenti (comprese le dinamiche di opinione a lungo termine) e nuovi algoritmi di raccomandazione. In figura un’immagine di un recente esperimento sul ruolo dei sistemi di raccomandazione sulla nascita della polarizzazione).

AI and Machine Learning for Innovation (Augmented Creativity)

Non-stationary AI

  Modern machine learning is based on the assumption of stationarity, i.e. that the parameters of the distributions associated with the training data remain unchanged over time. Although it is obvious that stationarity rarely occurs in real life, this is particularly true in creative processes, where novelty is a crucial ingredient that can lead to radical paradigm shifts in the reference system. Even the latest and most successful AI systems, such as ChatGPT, do not provide for the management of innovation dynamics. JICS will further develop a new method called Dreaming Learning, originally developed by Sony-CSL, to effectively incorporate spatio-temporal novelty into AI systems. JICS intends to deepen and extend this technique through a deeper theoretical understanding of non-equilibrium AI systems, and to apply this methodology to real-world problems.

Complessità urbana e arti performative Urban complexity and performing arts
A long literature on ‘invisible’ cities refers to aspects of cities that escape superficial quantitative analysis. However, there is a growing consensus that a more complete picture of cities would be key to addressing current challenges and improving quality of life. In this spirit, we might ask whether the arts, particularly the performing arts, can help us to capture all the different fingerprints and reveal the invisible character of cities. We imagine a fruitful fusion between data-driven representations of the city and the creative flow of artists to transform this data into tangible and meaningful expressions. In this framework, different cities could, for example, ‘sound’ or ‘dance’ differently depending on their specific fingerprints. The differences in the dynamic factors that describe urban areas will provide creative ideas to artists with the aim of stimulating awareness, strengthening individual responsibility and suggesting new healing actions.