Accelerating and promoting the development of innovative digital and computer-based solutions through the creation of an ecosystem capable of encouraging, coordinating, and facilitating collaboration between the expertise of the public research sector and that of the industrial sector is one of the main missions of ICSC – Italian Research Center in High-Performance Computing, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. One of the tools adopted to pursue this goal is innovation funds, dedicated to financing the development of high-value projects born from the meeting of the needs of ICSC’s partner companies and the expertise gathered by the center. This is the context in which the HaMMon project (Hazard mapping and Vulnerability Monitoring) was realized, which aims to use Artificial Intelligence and Data Visualization technologies for the mapping and assessment of the impact of extreme natural disasters that are increasingly affecting Italy. Proposed by Gruppo Unipol and Sogei, HaMMon will benefit from the interdisciplinary activities carried out by the National Center’s Spokes.
Presented on October 24, 2023, in Bologna during the Insurance Skills Jam conference on climate change-related risks, HaMMon aims to develop tools for characterizing the risk associated with extreme climatic events, both for insurance purposes and environmental monitoring. To do this, it will use heterogeneous data sources: from satellite images to drone surveys for vulnerability and impact assessment, from climatological reanalysis to seasonal forecasts to characterize weather and climatic indicators.
“The ambition of HaMMon,” explains Renzo Avesani, CEO of Leithà (Gruppo Unipol), “is to build a flexible and expandable platform where we can map the hydrogeological and atmospheric balance of the country, with the intent of creating an essential infrastructure not only for companies and insurance companies but for the entire country’s system.”
HaMMon involves the participation of many research institutions and private companies that make up the group of founding members of the ICSC National Center, each contributing in various and complementary ways to the project.
“HaMMon represents a first use case, with potentially broad implications, born within the framework of the activities carried out by the National Center to support innovation,” comments Davide Salomoni, Innovation Manager of the ICSC Foundation. “The project also provides an important initial demonstration of the ability of the organizational and operational model of ICSC to promote the development and implementation of new technologies. The National Center, in fact, counts among its founding members both entities belonging to the world of research and universities and entities belonging to the productive world, which participate and contribute their expertise to the entire innovation process.”
