Audi's effort for a cleaner and sustainable future

The GreenTech Festival, Audi, Marco Voigt, and Nico Rosberg have awarded the Green Future award together for the first time as part of the world premiere of the Audi e-tron GT.

The prize is part of the Green Awards of the GreenTech Festival and distinguishes projects and persons that promote environmentally compatible urbanisation while making an important contribution to improving the quality of life and urban infrastructures at the same time. The award went to Israeli start-up Zencity, which developed an algorithm that collects and analyses social media posts and local news from cities.

The UN already predicted that more than two thirds of people will live in cities by the middle of this century in its 'World Urbanisation Prospects' study in 2018. Already in 2030, the United Nations expects that there will be 43 megacities worldwide.

Making life in cities as environmentally friendly and socially just as possible is therefore one of the major tasks of this decade. By initiating an award precisely for this endeavour, the GreenTech Festival and Audi aim to draw attention to this challenge and promote innovative solutions, support founders in the early stages of their projects, and encourage public dialogue.

Nominees included projects from the fields of energy, water, mobility, construction and living, digitalisation, safety and security, and resources. The jury was comprised of representatives of the World Wildlife Fund, Deutsche Bahn, the German Institute for Economic Research, and the fashion label of rap artist Marteria Green Berlin, who are also members of the Green Awards jury of the sustainability platform.

The jury evaluated the projects in terms of their contribution to environmental protection, scalability, technical innovation, and future viability. The Green Future Award is a special prize that is part of the Green Awards of the festival and highlights the opportunities of sustainable technologies for the cities of the future.

Zencity was developed by Eyal Feder-Levy and Ido Ivri as an intuitive AI tool for local administrations. It uses an algorithm to find social media posts, websites, local news, and other online sources that contain information referring to the cities in which the people making these posts live.

Advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning allow millions of user data points from the defined area, such as within a city's limits, to be processed and to generate informative findings on this basis. Customers of Zencity include municipal authorities that can use this data as a basis for understanding the needs of their inhabitants and making them a reality.

This method conserves resources and replaces expensive and time-consuming face-to-face surveys, citizen hotlines, and committee meetings. This way, the tool helps all inhabitants of a city to gain the attention of political decision-makers and does so in an automated way, without complex reporting processes or bureaucratic obstacles. Zencity is already in use in 160 cities, including Chicago, Ottawa, and Tel Aviv.