UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities

As the world population becomes increasingly urban, incredible innovation is required to sustain such dense populations in a safe and healthy manner. Urban areas are responsible for over 70% of global carbon emissions and energy consumption, driven by infrastructure and transportation systems that often remain inefficient or outdated despite advances in technology. AI and machine learning present immense opportunities to reshape urban environments, optimizing everything from energy use and transportation networks to public health and governance, addressing urgent challenges in areas as diverse as building optimization and sustainability, pollution mitigation, infrastructure maintenance, urban planning, traffic management, and civic life. However, applying AI solutions to these challenges is not easy. Engineers must deal with a wide range of obstacles, including complex and non standardized management systems, diverse and non-integrated data sources, security and privacy risks, and continuous integration and maintenance. This workshop aims to engage the machine learning community in addressing urban optimization challenges, overcoming real world obstacles that prevent adoption of solutions, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among experts in infrastructure, transportation, and public health. By leveraging cutting-edge ML methodologies, participants can develop scalable solutions to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and quality of life in urban areas. Confirmed speakers from fields including power systems, building optimization, transportation, water, energy systems, climate science, and building control, will lead discussions on establishing benchmarks, developing robust methodologies, and creating solutions with measurable real-world impact. This workshop offers the ML community a unique platform to directly contribute to sustainable and intelligent urban development, helping cities globally meet climate goals, improve public services, and enhance overall urban resilience. Unlike existing ML-focused workshops on climate and physical systems, UrbanAI explicitly addresses the multifaceted challenges of urban environments, bringing international experts together for the first time at a major ML conference