The Big Data for Smart Society Institute (GATE) is a purpose-built institute established in 2019 as a structure of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. It is a joint initiative between Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria and Chalmers University of Technology and Chalmers Industrial Technology, Sweden.

GATE conducts Big Data and AI applied research, develops innovations and provides education in collaboration with government, industry and entrepreneurs. Based on this, it generates well-educated professionals, new business opportunities and societal impact in Bulgaria and Europe. GATE research and innovation are organized into four strategic application areas – Future Cities, Intelligent Government, Smart Industry and Digital Health. The Institute builds sustainable stakeholder relationships, focusing on technological collaboration between government, industry, academia and non-governmental organizations towards Artificial Intelligence and smart decision-making models.

In the deployEMDS project, GATE is a local technology partner for the use case of Sofia City. It brings expertise in combining methods for knowledge processing and hybrid AI for building a federated platform to support intelligent data management. The platform enables the transparent integration of diverse data into Urban Data Space, as part of GATE activities as an International Data Space Association (IDSA) hub and a member of the BDVA Data Spaces Task Force.