With the support of dedicated researchers and piloting cities, FinEst Centre will validate the need for the solutions and potential future customer segments. Finalists will refine their solutions to address complex urban challenges, and full project proposals will be prepared by August 22.  

Top ideas for pilot projects will be chosen by our international evaluation committee, consisting of 10 members: Ralf-Martin Soe, our founding director, alongside 3 academic evaluators, 3 business evaluators, and 3 public sector evaluators.

Three new pilot projects are scheduled to begin on Nov 1, 2024. 

Get to know the exciting lineup of finalists!

Buildings as power plants

Solution lead(s): Dr. Jaanus Kaugerand and Dr. Noman Shabbir from TalTech.  

Pilot cities: Võru, Estonia; Derry City & Strabane and Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. 

Initial challenge: How to provide green electricity

This solution would combine two ideas at different levels: 

• Building level – to utilize buildings as power plants.  
• City level – collaborating with the electricity retail market by providing virtual power plant (VPP) services for grid balancing.  

Those two levels complement each other and in unison offer a comprehensive solution to pave the way for green electricity while ensuring the stability, reliability, and sustainability of the local electrical grid. 

Wellbeing in virtual townscapes 

Solution lead(s): Prof. Ivo Fridolin from TalTech.  

Pilot cities: Narva, Estonia; Kuldiga, Latvia. 

Initial challenge: Well-being in virtual townscapes 

Proposed solution is a new well-being profile estimation tool and a service in virtual and/or hybrid 3D reality. The tool for physiological and psychological well-being estimation consists of the physiological signal sensors and psychological questionnaires that will be combined and optimized for virtual reality data space and environment.   

In addition, the tool will include automated algorithms that can be used for fast processing and analysis of data, that lowers the costs to the service. 

UrbanSplash  

Solution lead(s): Dr. Ciprian Briciu-Burgh from Dublin City University, in close cooperation with Prof. Tanel Tenson from University of Tartu, and Prof. Yuliya Semenova and Prof. Sadok Ben Yahia from TalTech.  

Pilot cities: Tartu, Estonia; Dublin, Ireland. 

Initial challenge: Monitoring of Bathing Water Quality  

UrbanSplash is a decision support tool for urban water recreation that provides open data on water quality in real-time and forecasting capabilities.   

UrbanSplash uses sensors for near-real time detection of E. coli bacteria, microbial source tracking tools, in situ data from low-cost IoT sensors, readily available meteorological data and geospatial data at catchment scale to provide near-real time data and forecasting.  

CitySense 

Solution lead(s): Dr. Uljana Reinsalu, Prof. Raivo Sell, Prof. Sadok Ben Yahia, Dr. Jaanus Kaugerand and Prof. Olev Märtens from TalTech; Dr. Mozhgan Pourmoradnasseri from University of Tartu, and Prof. David O’Connor from Dublin City University.  

Pilot cities: Tallinn, Estonia; Dublin, Ireland; Pula, Croatia. 

Initial challenge: Urban Sensing Mobile Node Network 

This solution targets challenges related to damaged or missing traffic signs, graffiti, and road conditions. Additionally, monitors various urban parameters, such as air quality, noise levels, and parking occupancy, addressing challenges related to sustainable urban planning and citizen well-being.   

Thanks to its adaptability, this solution is flexible and adaptable for a variety of urban problems. The pilot project will focus on implementing a robust sensor network based on smart mobile sensing devices.    

SmartWaste

Solution lead(s): Prof. Wolfgang Gerstlberger from TalTech.  

Pilot cities: Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia; Cesis, Latvia.  

Project also is partnering with a future commercialisation partner ibiot.io. 

Submitted challenge: Waste management in urban area

Connections to transfer information to the waste-collecting service companies to optimize their routes and participate in tenders based on actual and retrospective bin fill data.  

Proposed solution is a big data driven full-stack ICT-based system of Internet of Bins – including data hardware for wastebin level sensing and data collecting, back-end, front-end, and an Application Programming Interface (API) connection.

SafeSchoolWay

Solution lead(s): prof Dago Antov and dr Tiia Rõivas from TalTech; Jun Yang from Aalto University.  

Pilot cities: Tartu and Valga, Estonia; Riga and Cesis, Latvia. 

Initial challenge: Safe Way to School 

Solution allows establishing time-related measurable goals, in conjunction with stakeholder participation and responsibility, covering various target groups, survey methods and areas. The aim is to create a user-friendly toolkit valuable for experts, but also usable by non-specialists, however yet versatile for evaluating diverse solutions.   

This toolkit solution provides an opportunity to assess the dangerousness of the details of different solutions, thus determining which are the most important and effective measures to increase safety.

It will be universal at least in European scale and useful for assessing schools in various locations and ensuring the comparability of aggregated results across different countries and cities.  

FinEst Centre has recently started the fourth round of the Smart City Challenge. The aim is to collect complex modern urban challenges to create smart and science-based solutions for them in cooperation with researchers and developers. Cities globally are invited to send their challenges to receive funding and pilot projects support in creating new smart city solutions. We will launch three pilot projects with a total budget of 3 million euros from September 2025.

Read more how to participate in the Smart City Challenge 2024

The implementation of the pilot projects is financed by the “FinEst Centre for Smart Cities” project funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. 

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