Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable PA: ALMA GAIE wins first place

The project ALMA GAIE - Sustainable Development Goals Artificial Intelligence Enhanced, submitted by the University of Bologna, has won first place in the Sustainable PA category of the 2024 “PA a Colori”. Organised as part of the annual PA Forum with the aim of showcasing the best solutions for a Public Administration ready to face the challenges of the future, this year “PA a Colori” saw the submission of over one hundred entries, divided into seven areas.

The development of an Artificial Intelligence system capable of automatically recognising the contribution of the University's activities to the advancement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda in a transparent, measurable manner, easily integrated with the University's IT structures, and at a sustainable cost: this is the goal achieved by the ALMA GAIE project.

Coordinated by the Vice Rector for Digital Transformation, Rebecca Montanari, in collaboration with the Delegate for Financial Statement and Planning, Rebecca Levy Orelli, and the Delegate for Sustainability, Giacomo Bergamini, ALMA GAIE involved in close synergy the scientific group led by Paolo Torroni, professor of Information Processing Systems at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the General Administration group, specifically: Camilla Valentini and Stefano Piazza from the University Planning and Data Analysis Sector - Planning and Communication Division; Anna Fulvia Mestolo, Head of the Legal Design Analyst Professional Function of the Executive Support Services; and Alberto Amurri from the Research and Third Mission Systems Area of the IT Systems and Services Division.

The award ceremony was held on Thursday, 23 May at Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome, during the “Arena di PA Forum - Governare e guidare l'innovazione: il ruolo della PA in un mondo in trasformazione” (PA Forum Arena - Governing and guiding innovation: the role of the PA in a changing world). Held on the final afternoon, this event was dedicated to the role of the Public Administration in managing the evolutionary processes underway, amidst regulations, governance and technologies.

Open to consultation by students, researchers, professional staff, institutions, support organisations, companies, scientific communities, international networks, other PAs and the general public, the system developed by ALMA GAIE also aims to promote an awareness of the various ways in which it is possible to contribute to sustainability and of the results achieved.

Among the most innovative features of the system, which is open-source and fully integrated with the University's information system, are its long-term sustainability, its ability to be reproduced for any PA interested in measuring its performance against the 2030 Agenda, and its ability to uniformly manage heterogeneous data such as publications, research projects and training activities.

This is a further step for the University of Bologna, which in 2017 had already adopted a methodology for measuring its impact on the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals based on 'tagging' courses, research projects and publications. ALMA GAIE perfects this method, automating it and making its classification more scalable and sustainable. In order to analyse the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and measure the contribution of the University's activities to the advancement of the 2030 Agenda, the project adopts Natural Language Processing techniques and Machine Learning models.