Sergi Nadal, coordinator of a project awarded by the Barcelona City Council

The Barcelona City Council awards fifteen scientific research prizes, allocating 1.2 million euros to promoting projects that tackle the pandemic in the city of Barcelona.

With 65 projects presented in the call, 15 winning proposals have come out, among which is the Data Ecosystem Management one, which has received a boost of € 72,113.03, and it is a project coordinated by Sergi Nadal, collaborating professor at the inLab FIB and postdoctoral researcher in the Database and Information Management group (DTIM) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Professors Oscar Romero, responsible for Data Science and Big Data at the inLab FIB, and Cristina Gómez, from the Department of Services Engineering and Information Systems at the FIB, also participate in the project.

This project aims to improve the management of Barcelona from the point of view of public services, as well as facilitating access to the city's enormous data ecosystem, since it is currently a European hub for data science and artificial intelligence. The Barcelona Open Data Portal is an example of this rich data ecosystem. Despite this, finding, contextualizing and cross-referencing the right data, a process known as Data Discovery, is still a major challenge for data scientists. The objective of this project is to democratize access to this information through a public platform that will support data scientists in the process of developing intelligent applications. To meet this challenge, a new line of research will be explored in advanced artificial intelligence techniques, such as neural networks, to support the data discovery process.

You can see more details about the fifteen awards granted by the Barcelona City Council here.