GATE Institute - Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski

GATE Institute (Big Data for Smart Society) is Bulgaria's first Centre of Excellence in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, established in 2019 as an autonomous structure of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in partnership with Chalmers University of Technology and Chalmers Industriteknik (Sweden). We conduct applied research, build innovations and train the next generation of data scientists in four application areas: Future Cities, Intelligent Government, Smart Industry and Digital Health, with a research focus on urban digital twins, data spaces and semantic interoperability, explainable AI and federated machine learning.

GATE City Living Lab (ENoLL member) is where this work meets the real city. Based in Sofia's Lozenets district and working closely with Sofia Municipality, residents and businesses, the lab combines a permanent urban sensing infrastructure with participatory methods:

- 12 air-quality monitoring stations, 60 noise stations and 50 pedestrian-counting radars, plus a LiDAR edge system for vehicle counting and traffic analysis at one of Sofia's busiest intersections

- a DJI Matrice 300 RTK drone for close-range photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning

- an open data platform (citylab.gate-ai.eu) publishing the sensor data in real time

- the City Digital Twin of Sofia (citylab.gate-ai.eu): a semantic 3D city model used for walkability and 15-minute-city analysis, air-quality forecasting, urban heat island and heat-risk assessment, CFD simulation of wind and pollution dispersion, building energy analysis, LiDAR-based traffic monitoring and micro-simulation, generative urban design and location-allocation of social amenities.

Mobility and citizen engagement are our current priorities. CityRhythm, GATE's multimodal travel-tracking app, is entering a city-wide pilot in Sofia: journeys are detected passively down to the exact public-transport line, raw location data never leaves the phone, and the city receives only aggregated, legally anonymous modal-share and line-level ridership figures. Residents use the same app to see what is happening nearby and to report problems that are tracked from submission to fix. GATE researchers also contribute to the expert working group drafting Sofia Municipality's Digital Transformation and Innovation Strategy 2026-2030, and GATE serves as a NATO DIANA test centre for the testing, evaluation, validation and verification of sensing and AI solutions.

What we offer:

- a fully instrumented urban testbed in an EU capital for piloting mobility, environment and citizen-engagement solutions under real conditions

- urban digital twin, geospatial AI, CFD and urban-climate expertise, with transferable tools (walkability index, air-quality forecasting, LiDAR traffic data pipeline)

- a privacy-preserving method for collecting travel-behaviour data with citizens' consent

- a research and technical partner, or pilot site, for Horizon Europe and other EU proposals

What we are looking for:

- living labs and cities interested in replicating our tools or hosting a CityRhythm pilot

- partners strong in co-creation and citizen-science methods, to deepen the participatory side of our digital twin work

- consortia preparing proposals on urban mobility, climate-neutral cities, urban digital twins and data spaces

- companies that want to validate sensing, AI or mobility solutions in a real urban environment

Contact at OLLD26: Kalin Kostadinov, City Living Lab Manager.