Delft AI Lab Lunch with AidroLab & XAIT Lab

About AidroLab

AI research into resilient and sustainable water management

Urban water systems face growing pressure from climate change and demographics. As a result, water managers count increasingly on digitalization to ensure safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, and effective flood control.

Fast and accurate AI-tools are needed to model the physical processes within water networks and during flooding events. AidroLab believes that the most promising techniques to develop such tools are Graph Neural Networks or GNNs – an extension of deep learning to graph data structures. We are also exploring other AI-applications that can complement our GNN models and provide a thorough AI-based digital twin of (urban) water systems. By bringing together fundamental and applied AI, AidroLab is pushing the boundaries of science, enabling resilient and sustainable urban water systems.

About XAIT Lab

eXplainable AI Twins for Resilient Cities

Digital twins (digital replicas of cities) are a key innovation in shaping the future of mobility –  in the face of growing challenges such as major disruptions from climate change, pollution and equity. Such twins, coupled with AI, are crucial in providing support to mobility system decision-makers. The ‘black box’ nature of competitive AI approaches, however, hinders adoption since AI recommendations are not transparent. 
 
The XAIT Lab develops novel approaches that focus on the explainable aspect of AI for mobility. We incorporate explainability into three core modules within mobility decision support systems: state estimation, prediction and optimization. This means integrating multimodal data, contextual information and novel AI techniques into a single holistic digital twin platform. The result is augmented digital twinning methodologies with explainable AI techniques, creating a new class of AI twins for cities. Such approaches provide tangible and concrete decision support that helps resilient cities to tackle urban problems such as evacuation, energy, long-term planning and infrastructure operations.