Inaugural Harvard Urban AI Conference: Aretian’s Ramon Gras will contribute to the Advanced Geospatial AI for Policy Advising panel

Ramon Gras Alomà, the Aretian Urban Analytics and Design founder and CEO and co-author of the book “City Science: Performance Follows Form”, was recently invited to contribute to the panel “Advanced Geospatial AI for Policy Advising” at the Harvard Urban AI conference, taking place on April the 19th, 2025, at the Harvard Science Center (Hall C). He will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on urban policies, as well as the role of Aretian in shaping new policies in urban environments to cater to the challenges of tomorrow. This conference seeks to tackle spatial, social, and economic inequities by facilitating dialogue and collaboration among government agencies, urban planners, technology developers, and academia. These conversations will unveil insights on innovative frameworks for responsibly using AI to build smart, inclusive, and equitable cities.

On stage, Ramon will converse with Fabio Duarte (Senseable Lab @ MIT), Gia Jung (Google Geo Sustainability), Valerie Lechene (Urban Systems Lab @ The New School), and Ben Lewis (Center for Geographic Analysis @ Harvard). Urban development policies rely on extensive data sources from the urban fabric, yet methods and frameworks to obtain detailed, fine-grained insights from these data are often limited. Geospatial AI offers powerful opportunities to bridge this gap, enabling better data gathering and analysis methods of existing urban conditions as well as forecasting future growth. This panel will explore cutting-edge applications of geospatial AI, examine current urban planning needs, and discuss how these geospatial AI innovations will inform better urban policies on issues like sustainability, mobility and equity. The conference will present two other panel conversations titled “AI-Informed Urban Production” and “Urban AI: Concepts, Challenges, and Collaborative Futures”.

You can buy the tickets to the conference here: https://secure.touchnet.net/C20832_ustores/web/store_main.jsp?STOREID=184&SINGLESTORE=true 

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