Shaping Tomorrow’s Communities: AI and Responsible Municipal Innovation

Can artificial intelligence create smarter, more sustainable, and resilient communities? Join us for the next Dialogues interdisciplinaires session, a joint initiative by IVADO and the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI (Obvia), Thursday, January 30, 2025, 2-5 p.m. at Montreal’s Esplanade Tranquille.

The Future of Communities at a Crossroads

As cities worldwide grapple with mounting environmental, economic, and social pressures, innovation has become crucial to ensuring sustainability and enhancing quality of life. While AI emerges as a game-changing tool for urban transformation, we must carefully consider its impact and implementation.

Four Key Challenges

The conference will tackle four critical issues that are reshaping our urban landscape. Leading the agenda is data ethics and governance. In an age of unprecedented data collection by municipalities, we’ll explore how to harness this information for innovation while safeguarding privacy.

The shift toward smart cities brings up crucial questions about capacity building and infrastructure. Beyond upgrading systems, cities need to invest in staff training and redesign services to ensure they benefit everyone in the community.

Environmental sustainability takes center stage in our discussions. While AI shows great promise for optimizing resources, we need to ensure its deployment aligns with energy efficiency goals. How do we drive innovation while maintaining environmental responsibility?

Finally, with climate challenges and local crises on the rise, community resilience has become paramount. We’ll explore how emerging technologies can help communities better predict, prevent, and manage emergencies, focusing on practical solutions for adaptive urban development.

Featured Speakers

• Marie-Christine Therrien (keynote speaker) – professor at ENAP and director of Cité-ID LivingLab Urban Resilience Governance
• Carl Mörch – co-director of the FARI Institute and AI Ethics Expert
• Michel Angers – mayor of Shawinigan and President of Digihub Shawinigan
• Julie Boivin – mayor of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines and chair of the UMQ Training Commission
• Philippe Langlais – professor of computer science at Université de Montréal, Natural Language Processing Expert
• Geneviève Baril – co-director of Strategy and Innovation at ENAP
• Chloé Sondervorst – Radio-Canada journalist, AI specialist

Join the Conversation

As a part of our ongoing Interdisciplinary Dialogues series, this event aims to identify practical solutions for leveraging AI in urban development. The program includes an interactive Q&A session to encourage knowledge sharing among urban digital transformation stakeholders.

Free admission. Register now to secure your spot.