PyData Amsterdam 2023

The City of Amsterdam has the mission of promoting the development of artificial intelligence to improve the lives of Amsterdam’s residents. We conduct cutting-edge research into the analysis of text, images, and point cloud data, all with the aim of solving the urban challenges of our generation and the ones to come.

Recently, we’ve been working on making our city more inclusive by mapping accessibility infrastructure in the public space. We’ve been also working on making the city safer by localizing all street lights and automatically extracting some of their characteristics. Finally, our analysis of trees and greenery in the city can help increase the city's biodiversity and also help us reach our climate goals.

Working in the public sector means that technology itself is only a part of our job. On a daily basis, we also need to ensure that all development is done according to our city’s values – for example, that applications benefit everyone, that we are open and transparent, and that we give citizens a say in shaping their (digital) city. This means (at the very least) that open-source development and the publication of methodology, data, and insights for all of our algorithms are an inseparable part of work.

In this talk, we would like to introduce you to the challenges that we face, walk you through the technical details behind one of our projects, and share the related open-source materials that can be reused by the PyData community. Finally, we hope to inspire you to join us in the ethical development of cool AI applications for social good.