Two Hyderabad students built an AI map of a city's hottest streets — and took first prize

A city-wide temperature hides the truth: one neighbourhood bakes while a leafier one, streets away, stays cooler, because roads and buildings soak up heat and hold it. Shiva Kumar Induri and M. Akhil Kumar, final-year geoinformatics students at JNTUH in Hyderabad, built Cool City AI to show that difference — an open-source system combining AI, satellite geography and a web map to track urban heat islands and guide cooling measures. At the 47th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing in New Delhi, their project won first prize in the ISRS-I-CON innovation contest, with Rs 25,000 (about $263) and a certificate. It is a concept, not yet a city deployment — but it is exactly the kind of map a city needs before it can decide where trees, shade and cool roofs will do the most good.

SDG 11 · Sustainable cities and communities — Mechanism: tech innovation