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Artificial Intelligence for
​Sustainable Development Centre
Synergizing expertise from across its global ecosystem, the Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development Centre (AI4SDC) is a flagship initiative of the University for Sustainability. Its vision is a future in which data science is harnessed safely and responsibly. Its mission is to accelerate discovery, development, diffusion, and adoption of artificial intelligence innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action. The Centre's work will underpin interdisciplinary collaborations across the University’s ecosystem, foster the next generation of data researchers and engineers and reshape the nature of the innovation process and the organization of R&D&I.

​The AI4SDC was established based on a recognition that responsible data science and artificial intelligence specifically offer a game-changing opportunity to understand real time changes in human well being, assess policy responses and for the deployment of advanced analytics to support development goals and humanitarian action. The AI4SDC shall do so while adhering to the following principles:
  • AI should benefit people and the planet by driving inclusive growth, sustainable development and well-being.
  • AI systems should be designed in a way that respects the rule of law, human rights, democratic values and diversity, and they should include appropriate safeguards – for example, enabling human intervention where necessary – to ensure a fair and just society.
  • There should be transparency and responsible disclosure around AI systems to ensure that people understand AI-based outcomes and can challenge them.
  • AI systems must function in a robust, secure and safe way throughout their life cycles and potential risks should be continually assessed and managed.
Guided by its principles in support development goals and humanitarian action, the AI4SDC is working to generate high-impact analytical tools and accelerate scalable solutions. It partners with experts from non-governmental agencies, governments, academia, and the private sector to research, develop, and mainstream approaches for applying real-time data science to 21st century challenges.
Objectives:
  1. Strengthen the data science and artificial intelligence innovation ecosystem, turning ideas into reality
  2. Synergize talent across the University for Sustainability's ecosystem and beyond working across disciplines on challenge-driven and applied research
  3. Train new generations of data science and AI leaders with the necessary breadth and depth of technical and ethical skills to match societal needs
  4. Achieve a critical mass of implemented innovations
​These objectives are achieved through:
  1. Partnering with various organisations to access petabyte scale data sets.
  2. The implementation innovation programmes and a network of “Data Innovation Hubs” to provide member institutes and partners with access to the tools and expertise required to discover new uses of data science for development.
  3. The development of toolkits, applications and platforms to improve data-driven decision-making and support evaluation of promising solutions.
  4. Collaborative responses to scientific calls.
  5. The provision of client organisations with policy guidance and technical assistance to strengthen their capacity for integrating real-time insights into operations.
  6. The mitigation of innovation and investment risks to take better and faster decisions, and expand perspectives with trusted and actionable data-driven actionable insights for extraordinary results.
  7. Defining and leading new and innovative research paradigms.
  8. The provision of open enrollment and bespoke Master Classes and the support of post-graduate offerings to develop the next generation of data scientists and analysts
  9. Delivering innovative SDG solutions to current national and international challenges, and
  10. The development of public-private accelerator funds and entrepreneurial talent within an Digital Innovation and Investor Platform to accelerate the diffusion and absorption of solutions.
The role of science, technology and innovation (STI) in achieving sustainable development and humanitarian action cannot be overemphasized. Delivering benefits that no single institute could offer, the AI4SDC is an innovation hub, bringing together STI expertise from across the University for Sustainability's global ecosystem to advance data science and technology to yield new insights for decision-makers, improve resilience to the effects of climate change and accelerate solutions. The University for Sustainability's global ecosystem and its ability to work with partners across sectors and academic disciplines offers the ideal platform for the Centre to accelerate new applications from data science research. With strong links to a network of industry, public sector, and third sector partners, we are a convening power, bringing together academia, industry policy makers and the public with the best talent in the data science to address sustainable development goals.

The role of the Centre is to facilitate the development and accelerate the implementation of data science solutions, while harnessing real-time data and new technologies for sustainable development and humanitarian action. Embracing open science and open innovation, we will address real-world problems, with recognition of the important legal, ethical and societal implications of these technologies. In this time of great transformation, data science-based solutions are crucial to the design of effective programmes and policy responses.
Source: Innovation for the Earth, World Economic Forum, Davos, January 2017
More than
associate data scientists
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Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development Centre
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Centro de Inteligencia Artificial para el Desarrollo Sostenible
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Intelligenza artificiale per il centro di sviluppo sostenibile
With our Digital Innovation and Investor Platform, we will channel research toward a number of sustainable development challenges which represent areas in which data science can have a game-changing impact for science, society, and the economy. These challenges are representative of the Centre's areas of applied science.

Strengthening its data science innovation ecosystem, the University's implementation strategy includes working with member institutes to establish a network of “Data Innovation Hubs” to train new generations of leaders, advance artificial intelligence innovation and scale up solutions.
Challenges:
  • Climate Change
  • Biodiversity and Conservation
  • Healthy Oceans
  • Water Security
  • Clean Air
  • Weather and Disaster Resilience
  • Healthcare
  • Financing for Sustainable Development
  • The Joint Research Service (JRC) of the European Union has 490 petabyte-scale datasets. Topics covered by the Data Catalogue include climate, freshwater resources, alien species, soil and forests, etc.  University for Sustainability researchers  can explore the data by country and theme. To the extent possible the datasets are accessible in a platform-independent machine-readable format. University for Sustainability researchers are free to download datasets for their research providing the JRC source is acknowledged.
  • The European Space Agency, which operates the Sentinel earth-observation satellites, has made its datasets and images available to University for Sustainability researchers from the Copernicus Open Access Hub.​
To learn more about the terms and conditions of access to and utilisation of big data contact the Office of Sponsored Research and Programs.
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* Approved by the Board of Directors on 10 November 2019.
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