Collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge

This past year, the Urban Tech Hub secured a prestigious King’s-Cornell Global Strategic Collaboration Award to launch a groundbreaking partnership with King’s College London focused on creating public-facing tools for understanding the risks of urban AI. Led by the Hub’s Anthony Townsend in collaboration with Professor Daniele Quercia—who is based at Nokia Bell Labs Research in Cambridge, UK—this initiative represents a strategic expansion of the Hub’s work on urban AI governance and climate adaptation.

This project builds on Quercia’s previous work at King’s, the “Atlas of AI Risks in Urban Computing,” which used interactive tools to convey AI’s risks and benefits to the public, as well as “The Future of Urban AI,” the Urban Tech Hub’s 2024 horizon scanning effort to map emerging trends in urban climate adaptation AI. This combined expertise and knowledge will inform the way this effort addresses critical challenges at the intersection of artificial intelligence, urban climate adaptation, and social inequity. The research focuses on three key areas: 1) AI governance in sustainable transportation, 2) accountability in AI-driven climate adaptation strategies, and 3) ethical conflicts between privacy rights and environmental monitoring needs.

The centerpiece of this collaboration is an expert workshop that will take place in November 2025, bringing together leading researchers, policymakers, and industry experts to examine real-world AI incidents and develop frameworks for public engagement. This workshop will build on a collaborative analysis by Matt Franchi, a computer science doctoral student at Cornell Tech, and Edyta Bogucka at Nokia Bell Labs. Drawing on millions of news articles in dozens of languages collected by Bogucka, and analyzed by AI software developed by Franchi, this effort applies current international AI governance standards to extract evidence of harmful urban AI incidents, the use cases involved, and the broader risks they point to. Results will be showcased at the 2025 Urban Tech Summit, demonstrating the Hub’s leadership in responsible urban AI development and strengthening our reputation as a convener of critical conversations about technology’s role in sustainable cities.