A City-Stack Powered by Decentralized AI
Overview
MIT Kumbhathon, hosted at the MIT Media Lab, is pioneering a revolutionary approach to urban development through the creation of an AI-powered "city-stack." The initiative builds on the foundational belief that "Smart Citizens create Smart Cities," emphasizing citizen empowerment in the age of AI agents. The MIT Kumbhathon project aims to support an 'AI-First Kumbh Mela' for the 2027 event to be held in Nasik, India that attracts 30M visitors over 30 days. The project seeks to study, design and demonstrate how decentralized AI can solve complex urban challenges while promoting inclusive innovation and responsible AI. With city-stack, we seek to create a replicable model for citizen-centric self-orchestration that can be adapted and implemented worldwide.
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Vision
In developing nations, citizens are becoming digital and AI-savvy before their cities. The proliferation of AI Agents creates new opportunities and risks. This digital and AI transformation presents a unique stack to reimagine urban development from the ground up. The MIT Kumbhathon leverages this phenomenon by creating an ecosystem where:
- Crisis response, often challenged by data silos, is dynamically addressed by incentivizing unconnected stakeholders to participate in knowledge transfer
- Transportation solutions emerge without centralized fleet ownership
- Digital platforms democratize civic participation in complex events like Kumbha Mela
- Awareness and Learning happens beyond traditional training and communication
- Transactions occur outside conventional banking systems with minimum overheads
- Citizens and patients engage with the disjointed healthcare ecosystem without a need for interoperability and centralization
The City-Stack
The city-stack is inspired by other open network protocols such as digital public infrastructure (DPI ). Previous examples of DPI include identity systems such as Aadhar and financial transaction platforms such as UPI. City-stack is designed to connect previously siloed stakeholders across multiple urban domains:
- Healthcare
- Transportation
- Language services
- Hospitality
- Housing
- Crisis response
- Crowd management
- Payment systems
- Government departments
- Communication and media
- Civic organizations
Decentralized AI Architecture
The project implements a decentralized AI approach built on five key pillars and research areas:
- Computational Privacy & AI across Data Silos
- Maintaining data sovereignty while enabling collaborative intelligence
- Privacy-preserving computation methods using confidential computing and Split Learning
- Secure data sharing protocols between untrusted entities
- Agentic AI Systems and Edge AI
- Autonomous AI agents serving specific urban functions
- Self-learning capabilities adapted to local contexts
- Edge-AI for server-less and cloud-less training and inference across phones, drones and compute nodes
- Incentive Models
- Economic frameworks encouraging stakeholder participation
- Reward systems for data sharing and service provision
- CrowdUX and Large Population Models
- Agent-based Modeling to calibrate and model large population behavior
- User-centric dashboard design with User-centered design principles
- Intuitive interfaces for citizen engagement
- Collaborative interface development involving end-users
- Self-Orchestration
- AI agents coordinating activities autonomously across sensors (IoT), citizens and organizations
- Dynamic resource allocation based on urban needs
- Cross-domain optimization
Historical Context
The projects builds on the success of the 2015 Kumbh Mela collaboration between MIT Media Lab, the government of Nasik, Kumbh Foundation and TCS Foundation. The collaboration led to a digital-first Kumbh Mela where the city government deployed many of the innovations, mentored by experts from MIT Media Lab and our member companies. This led to the creation of Digital Impact Square. You can read Dr. Pravin Gedam, IAS Government officer and the CEO of Kumbh Mela blog post about the innovation platform. Traditionally, the state government, local district administration, non profit groups and corporations start preparing for Kumbha Mela 3 years before the event. Nasik with a population of 2 million hosts more than 30 million pilgrims and visitors during the 30 day festival.
The 2027 initiative aims to revolutionize this model through decentralized AI technologies. We invite you to leverage Kumbhathon Sandbox for Dual-Purpose Solutions. They will serve the purpose of Kumbh Mela but also help validate and scale long term solution for complex urban challenges for any city.
The city-stack will:
- Address large-scale 'pop-up city' challenges
- Foster bottom-up innovation
- Create a fresh ecosystem of researchers and innovators
- Scale solutions globally through decentralized AI
Through this transformation, the project seeks to demonstrate how decentralized AI can solve complex urban challenges while promoting inclusive innovation, ethical exploitation of behavior economics and democratization of emerging technologies.
Call for Participation
- The MIT project operates as an innovation sandbox bringing together many stakeholders. Please contact Prof. Ramesh Raskar or Santanu Bhattacharya, PhD for details. (Google Form)
- MIT, Harvard and academic researchers in US and worldwide: Join our Decentralized AI summits and roundtables for collaborations on various topics https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/decentralized-ai/overview/
- Corporate partners: Join the MIT Media Lab as a member company, or embed your researchers or innovators in the sandbox, or support our open-source city-stack decentralized AI efforts. We expect the efforts to lead to new internal corporate ventures, better understanding of consumer facing AI deployments and scalability in open protocol networks vs corporate networks.
- Innovators (including Entrepreneurs, Startups, and Investors): Follow the call for proposals posted by Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation and Govt of Maharashtra. They are hosting a series of buildathons to select top innovations that are validated and scaled to deploy. The venture supporting activity is not affiliated with MIT but the innovators can potentially make use of the city-stack software. We expect new AI solutions that go beyond 'Screen-AI' (chatbots, report generators and creativity tools) and deliver 'Dimensional-AI' (works in the physical world and addresses population dynamics).
- Foundations, Philanthropists, Government officials, Non-profit organizations: Please share information about your funding opportunities and grant cycles. Join us in building smarter, more resilient cities through citizen empowerment and technological innovation. Whether through grant funding, program-aligned investments, or strategic partnerships, your support can help scale this transformative initiative. You can participate in defining how decentralized AI will create a new generation of social impact innovations.
- Activities at MIT include research, courses and standards working group meeting. Programs in Nasik conducted by Kumbh Innovation Foundation (but not affiliated with MIT) include biannual camps with government leaders, challenge identification workshops, stakeholder consultations, prototype development and venture mentoring.
By engaging these critical stakeholders, MIT Kumbhathon seeks to create a replicable city-stack model for citizen-centric AI-first self-orchestration that can be adapted and implemented worldwide.
Related Research in Decentralized AI at MIT
Overview ‹ Decentralized AI — MIT Media Lab
AgentTorch for Large Population Models and Behavior
A Perspective on Decentralizing AI — MIT Media Lab
Secrets In Your Data: NOVA PBS documentary about Prof. Raskar's work