Artificial Intelligence for Flood Protection

The Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Serbia hosted the international ARTIFACT Summer School on AI Tools for Modelling Urban Flood Risks (AI4Flood), held from June 30 to July 3, 2025, at the Science and Technology Park in Novi Sad.

This intensive four-day school brought together over 30 local and international researchers, students, and professionals in the fields of artificial intelligence, hydrology, and urban planning. Through lectures and hands-on workshops, the program aimed to deepen knowledge and promote a multidisciplinary approach to managing flood risks in urban environments.

“The high level of interest and active participation clearly showed the importance of applying AI tools to address real-world challenges such as urban flooding. We are especially pleased that the ARTIFACT Summer School successfully connected leading experts with young researchers in AI, civil engineering, and urban planning. It was also encouraging to see young engineers participate in a hackathon focused on developing startup solutions for urban flood problems,” said Dr. Veljko Prodanović, team lead of the “Green AI” research group and one of the coordinators of the ARTIFACT project.

The program covered current and innovative topics, including:

• physical modeling of urban floods;
• fundamentals of deep learning, computer vision, and satellite image analysis;
• application of AI solutions in flood risk prediction and mitigation.

“What motivated me to join the ARTIFACT Summer School was the highly relevant and contemporary topic of urban flooding, addressed from the perspective of hydrology and hydraulic engineering, as well as the application of AI tools. The school offered an opportunity to hear lectures and real-world examples from professors at European universities and researchers from IVI. The teams we worked in were multidisciplinary—composed of civil engineers, software engineers, and others. This made the experience especially valuable, as a basic understanding of the roles and knowledge of other disciplines is essential for the successful implementation of project activities,” said Đorđe Ćajić, a master’s student at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Belgrade.

The organization of this prestigious summer school is the result of successful collaboration between several European institutions: Delft University of Technology, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Hamburg University of Technology, and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Serbia.

“Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly important across nearly all fields, particularly in managing urban flood risks. AI significantly contributes to minimizing flood impacts and increasing the resilience of cities by enhancing real-time flood forecasting through the use of meteorological, hydrological, and satellite data for early risk detection, mapping of vulnerable zones, and optimizing flood mitigation measures. It also enables rapid post-flood damage assessment using drone and satellite imagery, as well as visualization of model results through augmented reality. The ARTIFACT Summer School once again demonstrated how the integration of AI tools with physics-based models is crucial for reliable planning and advancing the field of Hydroinformatics,” explained Prof. Dr. Zoran Vojinović, representative of the IHE Delft Institute and an active partner in the ARTIFACT project.

The Summer School was held as part of the international research project ARTIFACT (Artificial Intelligence for Flood Resilient Infrastructure), funded through the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.

Hosting the ARTIFACT Summer School in Novi Sad marks an important step in connecting the scientific community and institutions across Europe in a joint effort to strengthen urban climate resilience through the use of cutting-edge AI technologies.