Sebastian Valkama knows what it takes to turn a bold idea into something a city actually runs on. As Senior Specialist at the City of Tampere, he leads projects that bring together AI, XR, digital twins and IoT – not as experiments, but as practical tools that serve residents, businesses and urban planners in their daily reality.

He leads the project x-CITE: Expanding the Experience of Citizens through Extended Reality / https://xcitecitiverse.eu/.

x-CITE is a European project creating a human-centric CitiVerse where XR, AI and other digital technologies enable new ways for people to engage with their cities. Across 12 pilot use cases in Tampere, Rotterdam and Flanders, the project explores how immersive digital experiences can strengthen participation, collaboration and informed decision-making for citizens, public authorities, and businesses.

His work sits at the intersection of strategy and execution: building public-private partnerships, developing scalable digital platforms and navigating the complexity of municipal systems with a collaborative mindset. The CitiVerse is not an abstract concept for Sebastian – it is something he is actively building from the inside out, one pilot at a time.

At ITW, he brings a rare perspective: what immersive and data-driven technology looks like when it has to work for an entire city – and every citizen in it.