Gravitation Grant for designing Hybrid Intelligence

The NWO has awarded a Gravitation Grant to the project Designing Hybrid Intelligence in which Prof. Rineke Verbrugge of the Bernoulli Institute (UG) is co-applicant. The project team of scientists will use the grant to develop AI techniques aimed at collaboration between people and intelligent computers in hybrid teams that perform better than people or computers separately.

The amount awarded is nearly EUR 20 million. The other five universities participating are the VU Amsterdam (Prof. Frank van Harmelen, main applicant), UvA Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and the universities of Leiden and Utrecht.

Human and artificial intelligence in one

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) combines human and artificial intelligence. Six Dutch universities will develop theories and methods for intelligent systems that cooperate with humans, that adapt to dynamic circumstances and that can explain their actions. Ethical and legal values, such as transparency, accountability and trust, will be taken into account during the design of such HI systems. We will demonstrate applications of HI systems in healthcare, education and science to show the potential of artificial intelligence to amplify human intelligence instead of replacing it.

Applications

Applications in healthcare, education and science will demonstrate the potential of Hybrid Intelligence: virtual agents and robots will help children with concentration problems to study better; virtual agents and robots will support children in paediatric oncology wards by providing them with entertainment and information during prolonged hospital stays; virtual agents will collaborate with scientists on large scale analysis of the literature, formulate new hypotheses and help design experiments to test them.

Gravitation programme

The Dutch government uses Gravitation Grants to stimulate the research of consortia of the best researchers in the Netherlands. These researchers must perform innovative and influential research in their respective fields. The selection procedure for this government-funded programme is conducted by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

More info:

Website HI-project