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Circular Economy
and Artificial Intelligence

This project group consisting of Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI)at Nazarbayev University research staff and KBTU research staff has been working since 2023 on the topic of Circular Economy and main aims of the project are to utilize state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to develop a novel Circular City Indexing (CCI) method for construction job site management and operation. Creating circularity indexes for cities is a new research area (Muscillo et al., 2021); recent research initiatives evidence its emergence and importance, e.g., ICLEI Europe[1] and OECD[2] have recently funded similar research. CCI typically involves Big Data Analysis (BDA) and provides a concise measurement of the factors extracted from the data related to urban performances supporting local, national, and international green policies. This project focuses on a novel contribution to the built environment part of the circular developments in cities. Thus, it will facilitate developing a CCI for the built environment, focusing on construction activities.

This project consists of four stages that will run sequentially to achieve the identified aims and targets. In the first stage, AI-powered search tools (e.g., Deep Learning-DL) will be used to find new construction sites in several cities at different circularity levels using satellite imagery, and we will create an open, big dataset of construction sites images. There will be multiple entries in the dataset (e.g., layout characteristics, material storage and use, construction stage, onsite construction safety, sustainable site management, and waste management practices) (STAGE 1). Then, we will create an AI classifier (CCI) that uses construction site satellite images to decide whether the image belongs to a high or low circular economy city (STAGE 2). Afterward, it will be possible to utilize explanatory visualization techniques highlighting the regions in an image that contributed to the decision (STAGE 3). In the final stage, experts will look at those regions, infer insights into them, and make lists of actions, layout techniques, and job site management principles for different circularity levels (STAGE 4).

The Principal Investigator (Nazarbayev University), Ferhat Karaca (Ph.D.), has a background in the fields of sustainable development, green buildings, sustainable building and city assessment methods, indoor and outdoor air quality, pollution prevention, source-oriented air quality modeling, pollution exposure analysis, spatial analysis, and environmental risk assessment. 

The first Co-PI, Huseyin Atakan Varol (Ph.D.), is the founding director of Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) and full professor of robotics at NU.

The second Co-PI, Zhanna Kapsalyamova (Ph.D.), is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Nazarbayev University.

The national collaborator of this project is the Kazakh-British university. Assel Akzhalova (Ph.D. in Computer Science) is the head project groups and professor of IT faculty at Kazakh-British Technical University.

The Senior researchers (Kazakh-British Technical University) - Assoc.prof.Aleksandr Pak, Assoc.Prof.Iskander Akhmetov. 

The young research assistant (Kazakh-British Technical University) is Shakarim Aubakirov who is a student of International School of Economics.

More about the project can be found in the web-site Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at  Nazarbayev University here.

References

[1] https://cityloops.eu/measuring-city-circularity

[2] https://www.oecd.org/regional/cities/circular-economy-cities.htm

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