The Big Data & AI Paris 2022 Innovation Awards

Every year, the Big Data & AI Paris exhibition rewards the most innovative artificial intelligence and/or Big Data projects. On Monday, September 26, 2022, the eleventh edition of the show was held. A jury composed of six experts in artificial intelligence and Big Data selected four finalists, who competed by defending their projects in front of an audience, at the Palais des Congrès, in Paris. In the end, namR won the Start-up final, while La Javaness won the SME/large company final. The interactive eco-design and LCA platform Holis also received a prize from the jury.

The namR project.

The project with which namR won the jury’s favor is called asknamR. Its objective is to characterize all 34 million buildings in France, under nearly 250 attributes: renewable energy potential, envelope, DPE label, climate risks, potential for energy renovation work, etc.

This platform is mainly intended for companies, and allows them to enrich their data tools in order to make the ecological transition easier, to target the most interesting potential for action and to facilitate compliance with new regulations. After more than four years of research and development based on the most efficient deeptech technologies, namR’s platform is the very first French “data as a service” tool that allows to describe French territories, environment and buildings, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

AsknamR is a versatile tool that facilitates many actions:

• It allows banks to control transition risks for real estate assets.
• It allows insurers to study climate risks and their evolution.
• For local authorities, it enables them to effectively plan the ecological transition and the resilience of their territories.
• For developers, it allows them to better take into account certain ecological factors (e.g. renovation, climate or solar) in sourcing new opportunities in real estate development.
• It allows actors in the solar energy development and energy renovation sectors to optimize their projects.

As an example of the possibilities that asknamR offers, the platform has made it possible, thanks to its premium data, to unveil all the 359781 buildings that are classified E, F and G in France, in municipalities with more than 50000 inhabitants. It also revealed the 3335329 buildings equipped with solar roofing systems, revealing an untapped solar potential of 526 GWp. It also highlighted 5.2 million buildings that may have a high climatic risk, related to “shrinkage swelling clay”, a risk that had already cost more than 9 billion euros from 1990 to 2014. The added value thus put forward has helped convince some of the most important players, such as Société Générale and Addactis, the actuarial software specialist, to collaborate on financing for the energy transition and optimizing the insurance risk.
With its victory at the Innovation Awards, namR has once again been recognized by experts and the public sector for its bold and innovative project.

The Javaness project

La Javaness won the SME/large company category with its Project C-in.City project. This is a three-year project, to be completed in December 2022. Funded by the EU, it brings together Europe’s largest cities in the search for solutions using artificial intelligence to accelerate carbon neutrality.
C-in.City enables near-real-time monitoring of carbon emissions, with the aim of enabling all stakeholders (citizens, city managers, businesses, NGOs) to obtain actionable information on carbon emissions in each sector. The project has already been tested in Copenhagen and in the Greater Paris metropolis.

The current tools for measuring carbon footprints do not always allow for the identification and proper measurement of carbon dioxide emission dynamics from one neighborhood to another and from one season to another. The C-in.City project intends to remedy this by providing the missing additional information at the local level. It will allow to target precisely, at the street and building level, the different opportunities that will have a significant impact on the progress towards carbon neutrality.

Ultimately, the project should enable cities to quickly answer strategic questions they may have about energy performance. Where are the best opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? What impact will the actions taken have on the carbon trajectory?
These are the two questions that C-in.City will help answer by making carbon information available for the entire territory.

The Holis platform

The objective of the Holis platform is to provide a tool to companies that will allow them to quantify, reduce and communicate all the data on environmental and social impacts for all the goods they manufacture.

The platform proposes using AI to analyze the life cycle (LCA) of companies’ products. This method can be used to assess the impact of a product, a process, a material or an activity, over its entire life cycle. It allows measuring four main impacts: human health, natural resources depletion, climate change and biodiversity. This allows a company to create value in four different ways:

• It makes it possible to identify different opportunities to improve the environmental performance of products at each point in their life cycle, allowing for optimal resource use and more efficient supply chains. This will reduce a company’s overall costs.
• It informs a company’s decision makers, allowing them to better plan their strategies and reprioritize eco-design, or redesign of products or processes that will comply with regulations and better environmental standards.
• This allows for the selection of indicators that will be relevant to environmental performance, such as techniques for measuring ESG reporting. This will allow companies to gain an advantage over their competitors by being ahead of them.
• The data can be used for marketing purposes, for example by making an environmental claim, implementing an eco-labeling system, producing an environmental product declaration or comparing products.

This year, the Big Data & AI Paris 2022 Innovation Awards focused on ecology, rewarding projects focused on ecological transition (namR), carbon neutrality (La Javaness) and reducing environmental impacts during product manufacturing (Holis).

The innovation awards of the Big Data & AI Paris 2022 exhibition reward namR, La Javaness) and Holis.
Big Data & AI Paris 2022 Innovation Awards focus on ecology.