The city of Genoa is working with Danish data-driven video technology specialist Milestone to enhance city traffic management systems with AI. Milestone’s Project Hafnia is an effort to build high-quality, regulation-compliant video data AI systems, trained with NVIDIA NeMo Curator on the NVIDIA DGX cloud.

Milestone is an early adopters of the newly announced NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI, a reference framework for optimising city operations with digital twins and AI agents. Milestone is also expanding its data platform with NVIDIA Cosmos to generate synthetic video data from real world inputs.

Utilising both real and synthetic data, Milestone aims to build and train vision language models (VLMs) responsibly. European cloud provider Nebius will provide the required GPU compute to train the models.

VLMs learn to map the relationships between text data and visual data such as images or videos, allowing these AI-models to generate summaries and insights from visual inputs.

Milestone Systems is working with NVIDIA to enable European cities like Genoa to build and fine-tune computer vision and AI applications on a foundation of fully compliant and ethically sourced data.

The project is rooted in regulatory compliance, data diversity, and AI relevance. It aligns with the EU’s legal frameworks, including GDPR and the AI Act. This ensures both transparency and fairness in the development of AI technologies.

“I’m proud that with Project Hafnia we are introducing the world’s first platform to meet the EU’s regulatory standards, powered by NVIDIA technology. With Nebius as our European cloud provider, we can now enable compliant, high-quality video data for training vision AI models — fully anchored in Europe. This marks an important step forward in supporting the EU’s commitment to transparency, fairness, and regulatory oversight in AI and technology — the foundation for responsible AI innovation,” said Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone.

Project Hafnia now offers a fully European Visual Language Model for transportation management. First service offering trained on transportation data from Genoa The VLM’s accuracy and performance optimisations are tuned for running on NVIDIA GPUs and in NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarisation (VSS).

“AI is achieving extraordinary results, unthinkable until recently, and the research in the area is in constant development. We enthusiastically joined forces with Project Hafnia to allow developers to access fundamental video data for training new Vision AI models. This data-driven approach is a key principle in the Three-Year Plan for Information Technology, aiming to promote digital transformation in Italy and particularly within the Italian Public Administration,” said Andrea Sinisi, Information Systems Officer, City of Genoa.

While the focus of these collaborations is initially on video data, the framework is designed to scale across multiple domains and modalities, enabling future expansion and adaptation improving the value of the data. Both the compliant dataset and the fine-tuned VLM will be made available to the cities using Project Hafnia through a controlled access license model, facilitating Europe’s AI ambitions without compromising ethical standards.