KU Leuven – Breaking Boundaries with Situated Surveys

Cross-Border Pilot with Prague

Challenge: How to engage the citizens in participatory planning?

KU Leuven – Breaking Boundaries with Situated Surveys

As cities become denser and more diverse, it is simultaneously more important and more challenging to ensure inclusive and participatory decision-making. While the advantages of citizen participation are generally accepted, such as improving the quality and sustainability of decisions by building bottom-up support, how to effectively facilitate this remains unclear. What is certain is that existing methods to facilitate citizen engagement pose many barriers, particularly to vulnerable communities. 

This pilot proposes to enhance engagement by bringing it directly to people and into the urban space where change is already happening, including a broader and more diverse people in the urban planning process. As the project aims to engage hard-to-reach citizens and tackle contextual urban planning challenges, right from the ground, it will further validate this and co-create the deployment of Citizen Dialog Kit survey devices in three different European cities. 

CoTown Kasmoni Community Exchange

Challenge: How to involve residents in a community savings supporting social initiatives?

CoTown BV – CoTown Kasmoni Community Exchange: Empowering Amsterdam’s Shared Prosperity

The CoTown Kasmoni Community Exchange App, is an initiative aimed at empowering Amsterdam’s neighbourhoods through shared prosperity and community investment. In collaboration with CoTown, this innovative platform revolutionizes local economies by integrating CoTown’s digital currency system, enabling users to create a local fund. Residents and entrepreneurs will be able to exchange euros for Kasmoni or earn Kasmoni by engaging in neighbourhood work. Kasmoni, earned or exchanged, fuels local payments and investments between entrepreneurs, driving economic growth and shared ownership. By fostering shared ownership, supporting community initiatives, and promoting economic growth, the app seeks to reduce inequalities and shape a more inclusive, prosperous future for Amsterdam.

Project Phonetic

Challenge: Amsterdam: How to include the deaf and hearing impaired in broadcasting info on public transport?

Project Phonetic

Project Phonetic is an app that runs on mobile devices using AI to translate spoken messages into chat messages. Public service announcements are sometimes difficult to understand in public transportation, especially for individuals who are deaf or have impaired hearing. The Phonetic app allows users to read urgent messages at station and in transport instead of hearing them. Users will also receive the messages in their language in their favourite chat app.

One2One.Run

Challenge: How to encourage girls to take part in sports and exercise?

One2One.Run – One2One.Run or WIRL

One2One.Run places all sports activities in one place. This platform facilitates outdoor and indoor activity events, allowing users, local facilities, communities, and businesses to easily create and promote events. An AI tool assists in event creation, and features like event promotion, customization, tracking, and education to encourage participation. The platform’s goals include increasing girls’ participation, fostering community connections, and promoting healthier lifestyles, with a strong focus on local engagement and collaboration

T-APPS B.V. – Skendy: an assistant for your documents

Challenge: How to adapt an existing technological solution for a specific group?

T-APPS B.V. – Skendy: an assistant for your documents

Skendy is an AI-driven solution designed to overcome administrative challenges commonly faced by expats. The application simplifies bureaucratic processes in the Netherlands by translating, organising, and setting reminders for important documents ranging from governmental letters to service bills. Expansion plans include contextual prompts for scanned documents, a feedback/support feature for cultural context, and embedded currency conversion. User satisfaction will be tested by a pilot program run in conjunction with Wijnen Consultancy. Skendy also supports the Green Deal Initiative by encouraging document digitisation and recycling, contributing towards a sustainable and circular economy. Furthermore, our plan extends globally, with intentions to replicate our efforts in expat-dense cities worldwide, starting with Berlin.

Video avatar translation widget (XS2 Content)

Challenge: AI-generated video making healthcare information more accessible
Video avatar translation widget

The Municipality of Amsterdam seeks solutions to help enhance citizens’ understanding of the Dutch National Immunisation Programme and improve overall health outcomes, particularly among those with low literacy skills and those from diverse backgrounds. XS2Content (XS2AUDIO BV) will address this need through the application Video avatar translation widget.

Target Groups:
•People who speak a different language
• Low-literacy individuals
• People with low family care
• Parents and young people with a Moroccan or Turkish background

Objectives:
• Reach hard-to-reach target groups through the use of video content in addition to text
• Reduce video-creation time by leveraging AI technology
• Convert existing text into spoken videos with real-life, lip synced avatars in multiple languages
• Make healthcare information more accessible by converting written content into video format
• Ensure easy accessibility by sharing videos on social media and web-widgetsany

Audio-to-audio translation for status holders

Challenge: How to let non-Dutch speakers communicate in their own language?
Audio-to-audio translation for status holders, in real-time, powered by AI

Status holders are required to go through a participation and immigration process (PIP) at the municipality of Amsterdam. However, employees at the municipality (klantmanagers) and status holders often don’t speak the same language. Klantmanagers speak mostly Dutch, and status holders often Arabic or Tigrinya. Translators are not always available or viable. They are expensive, take time to organize, are not always available in the short term, and sometimes make errors. Meanwhile, most status holders speak languages that have an oral tradition; hence verbal communication is preferred. There are barriers to communication between klantmanagers and status holders.

Objective: Better communication would improve the experience throughout the process for both. To achieve this, Switch AI develops speech technology that does audio-to-audio translation, in real-time! A solution built using the power of state-of-the-art AI technology.

Solution: Switch will build a software service that leverages speech recognition, translation and personalized speech generation AI models. The service will aid klantmanagers and status holders to communicate in their own languages. This service can be integrated with various applications developed by Gemeente Amsterdam, such as the PIP app.

Empowering low-literate citizens with AI (Tolkie)

Challenge: Wildcard – Propose any technological solution for any marginalised community
Empowering low literate citizens of Amsterdam with the help of A.I.

Amsterdam has 33.3% more low-literate citizens than average for the Netherlands. Tolkie has developed a tool that helps low-literate users to overcome obstacles in a complex text. Organizations embed our tool into their website and by doing so they enhance the accessibility of their online platform. Our current solution is developed together with low-literate people. In an iterative process of acquiring user needs, designing and developing a solution, testing with the target audience, adjusting the design, etc. we developed the tool we have now. Our tool currently operates on a per-word basis, meaning that the target audience gets reading aid when they encounter difficult words. However, complexity of a text lies not only in difficult words, but also in complex sentence structures, the use of jargon and proverbial language, the structure of longer texts, etc. During this challenge we are going to extend our reading aid and we want to achieve that with the use of AI and other modern technologies.

WeSolve, driving change with inclusion

Challenge: How to offer opportunities for youngsters having had contact with the law?
WeSolve, driving change with inclusion

The platform built by WeSolve ApS represents a powerful opportunity for the city to showcase its activities and engage with young people, particularly those born in disadvantaged conditions. By using technology to create an active and accessible platform, the city can make youth engagement smoother and more effective. Target groups: Through the WeSolve platform, young people can participate in a wide range of activities that foster social cohesion, build trust, and create meaningful connections with others. These activities are aimed at developing skills, supporting communities, and building a brighter future for everyone involved with a particular attention to disadvantaged youth. Objectives: WeSolve can be used as a powerful tool by municipalities to enhance the level of disadvantaged youth engagement in order to create a safer, more connected, and more engaged community. By empowering young people through community-based initiatives and promoting social cohesion, WeSolve platform results as the means through which municipalities can reduce the likelihood of criminal activity and create a brighter future for young people born in disadvantaged conditions.

Co-creating & piloting assistive robot FLOo

Challenge: Wildcard – Propose any technological solution for any marginalised community
Co-creating & piloting assistive robot FLOo for parents with disabilities

Together with the open call and co-investment of youthcare organization Levvel, Garage2020 will pilot the co-designed assistive robot FLOo in Amsterdam for parents with intellectual disabilities in vulnerable positions in society. The project aims to improve the self-esteem of parents, enhance family life, promote self-reliance in parenting, and break the cycle of problems by utilizing the services of the FLOo robot, which provides easily accessible and always available care and support without judgement.

The project is focused on marginalized families in Amsterdam, where one or both parents have intellectual disabilities. These families are in vulnerable positions, have poor access to good healthcare and parenting support, and often live at or below the poverty line. In the pilot we will focus on three families in Amsterdam (already in care with Levvel) with in-depth piloting of additional support of FLOo and use co-creation methods to customise FLOo to the needs of every specific family. There are about 23000 – 46000 parents that face challenges in child rearing because of these disabilities in the Netherlands. Between 2000-3000 children are born within vulnerable families every year. Many of them live in cities like Amsterdam (exact numbers are not publicly accessible).