Artificial Intelligence is a tool for better understanding of the human intelligence.

Vassil Vassilev is a Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems. He graduated with an MSc in Automatic Control from the Technical University of Sofia and completed a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In his early academic career, Prof. Vassilev actively participated in the reform of higher education in his home country, founding and directing the Department of Computer Science of the first private university in Bulgaria, the New Bulgarian University. At the end of the last century, he also spent several years in the offshore software industry, working on projects in the USA, UK and Ireland.

In 2000, Prof. Vassilev relocated to the UK, where he worked at GE Capital Services, University of Northumbria at Newcastle and London Metropolitan University. Between 2019 and 2024, he served as Director of the Cyber Security Research Centre at London Metropolitan University, leading a series of research and innovation projects funded by Lloyds Banking Group and Innovate UK. Over the last 5 years, he has also actively collaborated on several large EU projects with the Institute GATE of Sofia University, where he currently leads the research group in Data Engineering.

Prof. Vassilev currently lectures on Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Technologies, and Big Data Engineering. His research interests are in hybrid intelligence, where he combines knowledge-based, data-centric, and decision-making approaches to logical analysis of vulnerability, security, and safety in workflows, dataflows and transaction processing systems. Over the past few years, Prof. Vassilev has been working actively on environmental and healthcare projects in Sofia and London, focused on the impact of environmental pollution on biodiversity dynamics and human health.

Dean Palejev, PhD, who leads the Digital Health application domain at the GATE Institute and is also an Associate Professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, presented GATE’s flagship project on Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Ivan Koychev –  a neuropsychiatrist at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a Senior Clinical Researcher at the University of Oxford introduced the Dementias Platform UK.

Dr Dimitar Jetchev, the CTO and a co-founder of Inpher Inc., (a US-Swiss based start-up developing a platform for privacy-preserving data analytics) and a Professor of Mathematics at EPFL, Switzerland presented privacy-preserving AI-based diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s disease.

Vassil Vassilev, PhD, Head of the Cyber Security Research Centre of London Metropolitan University, UK and a leading researcher at GATE Institute spoke about the GATE Data platform.

The moderator was Prof. Graham Kemp, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

The Director of the GATE Institute, Prof. Sylvia Ilieva, participated also in the main programme of the Biotech Atelier earlier on 1^st October 2021, and in particular in the session “Digital Health: Supporting Health Through Technologies”. In her presentation, she focused on AI and data technologies as key enablers of the healthcare digital transformation and underlined the huge potential for health data sharing and utilization. Prof. Ilieva outlined three main principles for the successful adoption of AI in healthcare – data and security, analytics and insights, and shared experience. “We need to convince people that data sharing in healthcare is for the benefit of the society.”, concluded prof. Ilieva.

 “The scientific community is our key partner in our work for the development of Sofia. I am convinced that with joint efforts and work on the basis of science we can improve the urban environment. Being part of this project, Sofia Municipality will have the opportunity to obtain an analysis of various data, which will help us make informed decisions, “said Mrs Fandakova.

“I am particularly pleased that this agreement is based on cooperation in high-tech areas – big data and artificial intelligence, which are the research priority of the GATE Institute at Sofia University. I am confident that the cooperation between Sofia Municipality and GATE will contribute to the transformation of our city into a better place for living.“, pointed out Prof. Anastas Gerdjikov, Rector of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski ”.

“City digital twin” is one of the pilot projects of the GATE Institute. It connects the real and virtual world by constantly collecting data from our environment and using it to model urban processes and phenomena. The project is implemented as a platform that, in addition to data management, includes simulation, analysis and visualization of various scenarios to support timely and informed decisions. The pilot scenarios the team is working on are related to urban planning, air quality and the analysis of the solar potential of the buildings. The main goal of the platform is to provide a tool for interaction, design, experimentation and optimization of the city. The GATE project is implemented on the territory of Lozenets district in Sofia.

The “digital twin” of the city aims to help municipalities make informed decisions by forecasting their results. It provides modelling of complex socio-economic processes and testing of strategies before their implementation in a real environment, which will increase the success of planned activities and projects and will achieve sustainability of results.

“Such initiatives have already been implemented in large cities such as Singapore, Helsinki, Amsterdam and Berlin, which provides a solid foundation of good practices to follow. Our ambition is to help position Sofia among these cities, starting with the creation of a 3D model of Lozenets district, presenting the geometry of the objects in it such as buildings, road infrastructure, green areas, relief and more. In the field of urban planning, for example, the 3D model will be used to study the effect of constructing a new building on its surrounding environment. In combination with the computational dynamics of the fluids, it will be applied to simulate the wind and movement of air, which will provide a better understanding of how air pollutants spread in the city,” said Assoc. Prof. Desislava Petrova-Antonova, Lead of the “Future cities” application area at the GATE Institute.

GATE relies on business to share the data it has on our environment and infrastructure so that the city’s “digital twin” can continue to grow and enrich, and thus offer more accurate models to contribute to improving the lives of citizens.

It is very important for us as an institute to be able to rely on business and public organizations for cooperation – both in terms of data and in terms of experience and technology– based on which we can continue to create innovative solutions for citizens, “said Prof. Silvia Ilieva, Director of the GATE Institute.

Apart from representatives of GATE and Sofia Municipality, Bernd Ketzler from Chalmers Industriteknik, Gothenburg, Sweden also took part in the project presentation. He is the coordinator of a project to build a Digital Twin Cities Center, in which the GATE Institute is a partner. He demonstrated how the completed city digital twin looks like and what its benefits are, and talked about the partnership with GATE and the exchange of experience and information between the two organizations.

The other participants in the forum were Lyubomir Georgiev, Director of Sofiaplan, who spoke about smart urban planning, and Kaloyan Vassilev, Partner Manager at Bosch.IO, who presented the views of the business on innovative technological solutions in support of cities and shared interesting facts about the usage of data from our environment to make it more enjoyable for living.

More than 100 people registered for the online event.

The full record could be seen at the following links:

https://www.facebook.com/120636011966553/videos/455050902143629