Urban buildings awaken: Slovak AI gives a second chance to underused spaces

Challenge: Millions of Microlocations in the Digital World

Planning a city according to people’s needs means understanding space. The concept of the “15-minute city” suggests that everything essential should be accessible within walking distance. However, for artificial intelligence (AI) to provide meaningful guidance to cities, it must first process vast amounts of data about every street, sidewalk, and existing service.

The Slovak team worked with data on the scale of hundreds of gigabytes, including map data from OpenStreetMap, digital elevation maps, and databases containing thousands of public amenities. The challenge was to transform these datasets into complex mathematical matrices of walking distances. 

In the initial phase of the project, we needed to identify weaknesses in our process through rapid iterations and quickly reach results, understand them, and then adjust the input parameters again. Even at this stage, we had to process substantial volumes of data in which the neural network could detect significant patterns. On a regular computer, this would have taken weeks. Without extreme computing power, it would not have been possible to achieve the first meaningful results in such a short time,” says Róbert Pollák, head of the NextUseAI research team. 

Solution: The Power of the MeluXina Supercomputer

The breakthrough came thanks to access to the European supercomputer MeluXina in Luxembourg, specifically to the part dedicated to artificial intelligence (the AI Factory). Here, Slovak experts were given access to powerful graphics accelerators capable of processing thousands of operations simultaneously.

In this environment, the team built and tested advanced neural networks. These networks were trained to recognize relationships between buildings, services, and their surroundings across different cities. Supercomputing enabled us to experiment with different configurations and quickly fix errors, which would not have been possible under normal conditions. Thanks to this, we were able to rapidly generate a method for producing spatial recommendations for the two largest Slovak cities—Bratislava and Košice. The models can learn from the spatial structure of one or multiple cities and provide recommendations for another city,” adds Timotej Kendereš, a data analyst at CIKE responsible for working with the MeluXina supercomputer.

Results: Data in the Service of People

The result is not just a dry table of numbers. The AI model aims to propose concrete functions for underused urban spaces to city planners and strategists in order to improve public amenities and walkable accessibility within neighborhoods. NextUseAI will then evaluate spatial recommendations in the context of residents’ needs and the city’s strategic priorities, accompanied by a clear explanatory rationale. 

Although the results are currently still in the experimental phase and serve to calibrate the entire system, they have already demonstrated an important insight: artificial intelligence can detect patterns and connections that may escape human observation. For example, the system can identify “blind spots” in a city—areas where a particular service is missing—and suggest placing it in a nearby underused building.

Impact and Future Potential

NextUseAI does not end in the laboratory. Its ambition is to become a practical tool that helps city leaders make decisions based on data rather than intuition.

For residents, this could mean in the future:

• More efficient local governance: Public funds will be invested in buildings with a clear purpose and tangible benefits.
• Less time spent in cars: Services will be located where people actually live.
• A more attractive environment: Abandoned buildings will get a new chance instead of falling into decay.

The use of European supercomputers is thus bringing a technological leap to Slovak urban planning. It shows that AI does not have to remain an abstract concept, but can become a useful ally that helps us build cities where people can live better and healthier lives.