A joint team of students from King’s College London and the University of Leeds will participate in July in RoboCup@Home, an international competition with the goal of developing autonomous intelligent robots able to assist people in their daily activities.
ACTION applied a citizen science approach to tackling pollution; one of the greatest threats to human health and wellbeing of our times, killing more people than smoking, hunger, natural disasters, war and infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and coronavirus.
The EU-funded MediaFutures project led by Prof Elena Simperl will address this challenge by reshaping the media value chain. It will set up a virtual European data innovation hub to support entrepreneurial and innovative projects.
ACTION was a three-year programme funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework, led by Prof Elena Simperl, King’s College London, dedicated to transforming the way we do citizen science (CS) today: from a mostly scientist-led process to a more participatory, inclusive, citizen-led one, which acknowledges the diversity of the CS landscape and of the challenges CS teams have to meet as their project evolves.
Robots are rapidly emerging in society and will soon enter our homes to collaborate and help us in daily life. Robots that provide social and physical assistance have huge potential to benefit society, especially for those who are frail and dependent. This was evident during the Covid-19 outbreak, where assistive robots could aid in the care of older adults at risk, in accessing contaminated areas, and providing social assistance to people in isolation.
For robots to build trustable interactions with users two aspects will be crucial during the next decade. First, the ability to produce explainable decisions combining reasons from all the levels of the robotic architecture from low to high level; and second, to be able to effectively communicate such decisions and re-plan according to new user inputs in real-time along with the execution.