Technology company IBM and international organisation Sustainable Energy for All have announced new, publicly available AI-powered solutions to enable decision-makers and policymakers to map urbanisation and identify energy and infrastructure needs for communities in developing regions.

The announcement took place at the twenty-ninth UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, which is being held this week in Azerbaijan.

One of the solutions is Open Building Insights (OBI) – an interactive online platform running on IBM Cloud.

OBI visually consolidates data in a map, providing information related to the buildings in countries addressing urban planning challenges, such as building location, height, footprint area and use type.

This visual consolidation is aimed at making AI models’ output simpler to understand for non-technical users and to enable stakeholders to make informed decisions about sustainable urban development.

OBI’s interactive map consolidates models created by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), which estimates buildings’ heights, by using Open Energy Maps, which provides information about electricity status and consumption, and by IBM.

The new AI model developed by IBM runs on IBM Cloud and was built using the IBM watsonx AI and data platform.

It uses building-specific data – including its footprint, number of floors, roof image, location and other map data – to determine whether a building is residential or non-residential.

This categorisation is highlighted to be pivotal in determining the energy needs of a certain urban area.

OBI is available for free to the public, containing, for instance, information across all of Kenya and already being used in that country for energy planning.

The IBM model and DLR model are also available through OBI for the state of Maharashtra in India.

The Modelling Urban Growth (MUG) solution is an open-source AI model designed to predict where cities will grow.

The model is trained on, and validates, historical data from satellite images; geographic data, such as slope and elevation; demographic data; and structural data, such as road layout, combining the data into a time series.

MUG helps users to map future urbanisation and associated infrastructure needs, aimed at enabling decision-makers to prioritise communities and developing regions that need support for issues like electrification and energy services.

MUG is an AI Alliance project and is publicly available and open source on GitHub.

The model is currently trained on data from Africa, including, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda and Malawi.

However, the model is designed to be retrained by users for any country in the world, using publicly accessible data.

On GitHub, MUG includes an explanatory guidebook on running the code and making predictions using the same or different datasets, to increase access.

IBM has also extended its collaboration with Sustainable Energy for All through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator. 

The organisations will initially focus on continuing to expand the OBI online platform in India and will explore integrating the Modelling Urban Growth AI model into the platform.

“At IBM, we're proud to launch solutions that harness the power of AI to have an impact for communities around the world. Collaborating with organisations such as Sustainable Energy for All through our IBM Sustainability Accelerator programme helps us unlock innovation and work more closely in communities to tackle some of our biggest challenges, especially around energy and sustainable urban development,” said IBM Africa and the Middle East corporate social responsibility leader John Matogo.

“At Sustainable Energy for All, we believe integrating AI in the energy sector planning and evidence – especially for developing countries – will go a long way in designing comprehensive solutions for many of the developmental challenges currently facing the Global South and its people.

“The OBI Tool, which Sustainable Energy for All has developed in collaboration with IBM, will help energy planners overcome critical data gap challenges to inform energy access and energy transition interventions, and better deliver results for those most in need,” posits Sustainable Energy for All CEO Damilola Ogunbiyi.