Christos Emmanouilidis receives grant for major new EU project on human-centric AI

Associate professor Christos Emmanouilidis has received funding by the EU for a new Horizon Europe project titled ‘Hybrid Human-AI Decision Support for Enhanced Human Empowerment in Dynamic Situations’ (HumAIne). The project is among a handful selected from more than a hundred proposals that were submitted to address the human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies in Europe.

Following the already successful current project STAR, which delivers human-centric AI solutions in manufacturing, the new project aims to achieve impact towards a human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies. This will be achieved through a two-way engagement in the development of technologies, empowering end-users and workers, and supporting social innovation. The project involves use cases for human-centric AI from five key sectors: manufacturing (human – robot collaboration in manufacturing), smart cities (incident management with citizens’ engagement), healthcare (cancer patients’ quality of life management for personalised care), finance (investment portfolio risk management in real time) and energy (hybrid decision-making and planning in power grids). The project will start on the 1^st of October 2023.

The project consortium

The project consortium is led by GFT (Italy), a key provider of industrial digitalization solutions (enterprise information systems) in Europe. In total, the consortium includes 18 partners from 12 countries, including IBM, the German Centre for AI (DFKI) and the Jozef Stefan AI Institute in Slovenia.

The overall funding is 8 million euros and the funding for the University of Groningen (UG) is € 535.000. In this project, Christos (associate professor at the Department of Operations of FEB) and other colleagues from the UG will mainly focus on the vision and specifications for human AI collaboration, work towards advanced AI learning and paradigms for human-AI collaboration, and use cases validation and evaluation regarding operations in the five key sectors.

Impact of the HumAIne project

With the upcoming new EU AI Act, the first law on AI by any major regulator anywhere, the HumAIne project will aim to make a significant impact with the development of human-centred AI technologies for important sectors, providing novel solutions for collective intelligence-based decision making and human empowerment. HumAIne will also aim to feed its outcomes into national (NL AI Coalition) and Regional (AI Hub Noord Nederland) initiatives on AI.

For more information, please contact Christos Emmanouilidis.