SPOTTED has been proposed as a group-based hands-on project to eight teams of students attending the Master in Artificial Intelligence for Public Services (AI4Gov) organized by four leading European universities: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) in Spain, Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) in Italy, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany, and Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) in Estonia. The aim of this world-class master’s program is to prepare the future digital transformation leaders for AI in the public sector. Specifically, students learn how to plan, design and use Artificial Intelligence in the delivery of public services, so as to improve the provision, effectiveness and value of these public services as well as the public sector’s capacity by means of an adequate management, knowledge and development of AI-related projects and services.

The SPOTTED challenged has been proposed by the project coordinator, Francesco Mureddu, who has thought a module on Human-Centric AI-based Public Services in the master.

The aim of the challenge is to design a visualization platform that can help a public authority (e.g. the Municipality of Milan) to analyze and predict urban, social, and economic impacts of green transformation initiatives. 

Specifically, students were required to:

• Understand and manage the potential of data and knowledge
• Evaluate and govern real benefits and potentialities of visualization dashboards in the public sector
• Be able to commission/buy visualization platforms
• Design and manage practical data projects
• Acquire project groupwork and communication skills (interdisciplinary work)

From a technical (and scientific) point of view, project work will be focused around the following research questions:

• What other data can (earth observation open data) be combined with the open data from cities?
• How can data be made interoperable/linkable?
• How can data quality be ensured?
• What is the structure of the dashboard?
• What kinds of functionalities does the system need to have? Mere data visualization and/or visual analytics? How interactive will it be?
• What software should be used to implement it?
• What are some interesting KPIs?
• What are the exact outputs provided, and how they can be used for policy making? What kind of decisions can be made?

The challenge had also to consider the following constraints for the policy maker:

• Low interoperability of data
• Low prowess in using/developing dashboards
• Scarce knowledge of datasets
• Unsure how to use the dashboard for policy making

The output of the students’ project work (user journey flow, user journey maps, prototyping sketches, scenarios) will be used by the consortium in the development of the pilot requirements.