Our interdisciplinary urban climate workshop has been nominated for a 2025 Science Communication Award! Andrei Covaci, Firass Kooli, Lesley De Cruz, and Sara Top (affiliated with RMI, VUB, UGent, and FWO) were honoured for their accessible and interactive workshop “Instant AI Urban Climate Model”. The workshop was developed at VUB with funding from Innoviris for the I Love Science Festival, with important contributions from VUB and Karel de Grote University of Applied Sciences (KdG) students supervised by Geert De Paepe.
Cities are often warmer than the countryside due to asphalt, buildings, and little vegetation: the urban heat island. Since most of the world’s population lives in cities, it’s important to design cities that stay liveable, even during heatwaves.
During the workshop, participants build their own city out of LEGO bricks and discover how land use affects temperature: swap parking spaces for a green park, and the average temperature of the LEGO city immediately drops. A photo of the LEGO city is converted with AI into a land-use map, after which an urban climate model — trained with machine learning on data from the VLINDER measurement network (UGent-RMI) — instantly calculates and maps the temperature.
The Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium and the Young Academy honour the researchers for their unique approach to bringing science to a broad audience of all ages and backgrounds across Flanders and Brussels. The award was presented on 19 November 2025 during a ceremony at the Palace of the Academies in Brussels.