Artificial intelligence on the hunt for green energy funding

An advanced artificial intelligence system capable of analysing different sources of data, with the aim of independently verifying which institutions and countries are financing initiatives for the construction of green energy production and distribution plants, which countries are the recipients, and the progress of the projects. This is the AIGreet/Sibilla industrial research project, carried out by La Sapienza University of Rome and Internationalia, a publishing company that deals with economic information on new markets, particularly Africa. The initiative, after having been presented at the Fiera di Roma during Codeway Expo 2024 (the event that brings together all the protagonists of international cooperation), is now ready to be launched on the market within this month with the birth of a start-up, with the name Sibilla.

'It all started four years ago,' says Massimo Zaurrini, director of Internationalia, 'when an Italian institution commissioned us to carry out a study on the development funding that African countries had received from 2015 to 2020. In carrying out this study, we realised that the data did not exist in an aggregate manner. There is no database of all the actors, able to make an analysis of, for example, the sectors that received the funding'.

This is where La Sapienza University of Rome comes in. Zaurrini continues: 'We discussed this issue with Umberto Ferraro Petrillo, Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Statistical Sciences at La Sapienza, and he helped us with a technical solution. This is where the AIGreet/Sibilla adventure began'.

'We started developing the work,' Ferraro Petrillo says, 'in an era when artificial intelligence was not as widespread as it is today. We worked on automating certain tasks, enabling the software to understand the content we were interested in. We also received co-funding of EUR 101,576 from the Ministry of Universities and Research, for a three-year researcher contract, as part of the ESF REACT-EU European funding'.

"The system," Zaurrini emphasises, "searches for data, either on the entire network or on sources that are indicated to it, such as international databases. AIGreet potentially has infinite sources, scours and collects the information and passes it on to an artificial intelligence system trained to recognise green investments from those that are not. It then collects this information, telling the user, in real time, about green investment projects everywhere'.