To address the growing need for advanced tools that enable urban policymakers to conduct comprehensive cost-benefit analyses of traffic management changes, the Urbanite H2020 project has developed innovative artificial intelligence methods. Among them is a robust decision support system that assists policymakers in evaluating and selecting optimal urban mobility planning modifications by combining objective and subjective criteria. Utilising open-source microscopic traffic simulation tools, accurate digital models (or “digital twins”) of four pilot cities—Bilbao, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Messina—were created, each addressing unique mobility challenges. These challenges include reducing private vehicle access in Bilbao’s city center, analysing the impact of increased bicycle traffic and population growth in Amsterdam, constructing a mobility-enhancing tunnel in Helsinki, and improving public transport connectivity in Messina. The research introduces five key innovations: the application of a consistent open-source simulation platform across diverse urban environments, addressing integration and consistency challenges; the pioneering use of Dexi for advanced decision support in smart cities; the implementation of advanced visualisations; and the integration of the machine learning tool, Orange, with a user-friendly GUI interface. These innovations collectively make complex data analysis accessible to non-technical users. By applying multi-label machine learning techniques, the decision-making process is accelerated by three orders of magnitude, significantly enhancing urban planning efficiency. The Urbanite project’s findings offer valuable insights into both anticipated and unexpected outcomes of mobility interventions, presenting a scalable, open-source AI-based framework for urban decision-makers worldwide.

As urban populations rise globally, cities face increasing challenges in managing urban mobility. This paper addresses the question of identifying which modifications to introduce regarding city mobility by evaluating potential solutions using city-specific, subjective multi-objective criteria. The innovative AI-based recommendation engine assists city planners and policymakers in prioritizing key urban mobility aspects for effective policy proposals. By leveraging multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and ±1/2 analysis, this engine provides a structured approach to systematically and simultaneously navigate the complexities of urban mobility planning. The proposed approach aims to provide an open-source interoperable prototype for all smart cities to utilize such recommendation systems routinely, fostering efficient, sustainable, and forward-thinking urban mobility strategies. Case studies from four European cities—Helsinki (tunnel traffic), Amsterdam (bicycle traffic for a new city quarter), Messina (adding another bus line), and Bilbao (optimal timing for closing the city center)—highlight the engine’s transformative potential in shaping urban mobility policies. Ultimately, this contributes to more livable and resilient urban environments, based on advanced urban mobility management.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, the integration of AI concepts into educational curricula represents an increasingly important issue. This paper presents a comparative analysis of four AI large language models, ChatGPT (now GPT-4o), Bard (now Gemini), Copilot, and Auto-GPT, in the last year, progressing from the previous into the newer versions, thus also revealing the progress over time. Tasks were selected from the Valence project, which aims to advance machine learning in high school education with material designed by human experts. The four LLMs were assessed across 13 topics, 35 units, and 12 code segments, focusing on their code generation, definition formulation, and textual task capabilities. The results were analyzed using various metrics to conduct a comprehensive evaluation. Each LLM was allowed up to five attempts to produce outputs closely aligned with human-written materials, with experts providing iterative feedback. This study evaluated the effectiveness and accuracy of these LLMs in educational content creation, offering insights into their potential roles in shaping current and future AI-centric education systems.

The URBANITE H2020 project aims to address urban mobility challenges caused by growth and new transportation methods. It develops a decision support system for policymakers, incorporating simulation, evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs), a recommendation/decision support system (DSS), and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The system helps identify and improve KPIs, proposes effective policies, and enhances urban digital transformation for sustainable and efficient mobility

Choosing optimal Deep Learning (DL) architecture and hyperparameters for a particular problem is still not a trivial task among researchers. The most common approach relies on popular architectures proven to work on specific problem domains led on the same experiment environment and setup. However, this limits the opportunity to choose or invent novel DL networks that could lead to better results. This paper proposes a novel approach for providing general recommendations of an appropriate DL architecture and its hyperparameters based on different configurations presented in thousands of published research papers that examine various problem domains. This architecture can further serve as a starting point of investigating DL architecture for a concrete data set. Natural language processing (NLP) methods are used to create structured data from unstructured scientific papers upon which intelligent models are learned to propose optimal DL architecture, layer type, and activation functions. The advantage of the proposed methodology is multifold. The first is the ability to eventually use the knowledge and experience from thousands of DL papers published through the years. The second is the contribution to the forthcoming novel researches by aiding the process of choosing optimal DL setup based on the particular problem to be analyzed. The third advantage is the scalability and flexibility of the model, meaning that it can be easily retrained as new papers are published in the future, and therefore to be constantly improved.