Digital Heritage Nexus wins the first edition of the Citiverse Challenge and demonstrates the potential of ICSC Spoke 9 activities

Citiverse Challenge, an international competition promoted by the United Nations and dedicated to the design of public digital infrastructure for the cities of the future, has awarded its debut prize to the “Digital Heritage Nexus” project, a scalable and interoperable platform developed by Team Datalab at the University of Salento and dedicated to promoting cultural heritage, improving tourism management and urban sustainability. This prestigious recognition was also achieved thanks to the contribution of the ICSC – National Research Centre in HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing and its Spoke 9 “Digital Society and Smart Cities”, within which the fundamental development of the Digital Twin solutions available within the platform took place.

Digital Heritage Nexus integrates immersive technologies (VR/AR), artificial intelligence, digital twins and IoT sensors to provide an inclusive and adaptable digital tool that makes closed cultural sites accessible, optimises tourist flows and promotes a more informed and personalised experience. The platform adopts a public-private collaborative model, designed to be implemented by municipalities and cultural institutions, and is designed according to open standards and in line with the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage. The concrete use case from which the app was developed was provided by Lecce, a tourist city faced with growing flows of visitors from all over the world and the resulting problems.

As part of the Citiverse Challenge, organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Digital Heritage Nexus stood out for its high degree of technological innovation, the scalability of its model and its strong alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Global Digital Compact and the UN’s Pact for the Future. The platform builds on many of the results of research carried out in recent years by ICSC Spoke 9. This activity is aimed at developing methodologies and algorithms useful for the creation, thanks to the high-performance computing resources made available by the National Centre, of digital twins capable of providing an accurate representation of the complex dynamics that characterise today’s urban spaces and indicating solutions to improve the organisation of cities and the quality of life of citizens.

Digital Heritage Nexus is the result of three years of research by Datalab on digital twins and the fruit of UniSalento’s intensive work at ICSC, the National Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing. Thanks to this work, we have developed a reference model for a platform in line with the European data strategy, the new frontiers of artificial intelligence, in collaboration with colleagues from the fields of economics, law, philosophy and cultural heritage. I am very pleased with this award, which highlights how the work of an interdisciplinary team of students is the key to success’. Comments Antonella Longo, scientific director of the Datalab at the University of Salento and researcher at Spoke 9 of ICSC.

The award ceremony for Team Datalab, an interdisciplinary research group from the Department of Innovation Engineering at the University of Salento, composed of Chiara Rucco, Francesca Zampino, Paolo Pio Burgarella, Veronica Creti, Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili, Alessandro Stefano and coordinated by Motaz Saad and Antonella Longo, took place during UN Virtual Worlds Day, held in Turin on 11 and 12 June, during which the team had the opportunity to present the project to an international audience.

For more information: https://www.unisalento.it/comunicati/