Call for Proposals: AI for Human Empowerment (AI, Data and Robotics Partnership)
Deadline: 16-Nov-22
The European Commission (EC) is offering grants to Build the next level of perception, visualisation, interaction and collaboration between humans and AI systems working together as partners to achieve common goals, sharing mutual understanding and learning of each other’s abilities and respective roles.
Innovative and promising approaches are encouraged, including human-in the loop approaches for truly mixed human-AI initiatives combining the best of human and machine knowledge and capabilities, tacit knowledge extraction (to design the next generation AI-driven co-creation and collaboration tools embodied e.g. in industrial/working spaces environments).
Objectives
Each proposal will exclusively focus on one of the two following research objectives, and must clearly identify its focus in the proposal:
Reach truly mixed human-AI initiatives for human empowerment. The approaches should combine the best of human and machine knowledge and capabilities including shared and sliding autonomy in interaction, addressing reactivity, and fluidity of interaction and making systems transparent, fair and intuitive to use, which will play a key role in acceptance. The systems should adapt to the user rather than the opposite, based on analysis, understanding and anticipation about human behaviour and expectations.
Trustworthy hybrid decision-support, including approaches for mixed and sliding decision-making, for context interpretation, for dealing with uncertainty, transparent anticipation, reliability, human-centric planning and decision-making, interdependencies, and augmented decision-making. Transparency, fairness, technical accuracy and robustness will be the key, together with validation strategies assessing also the quality of the decision of the AI supported socio-technical system.
All proposals should adopt a human-centred development of trustworthy AI and investigate and optimise ways of human-AI interaction, key for acceptance and democratisation of AI, to allow any user to take full advantage of the huge benefits such technology can offer, regardless of their age, race, gender or capabilities. This includes development of methods to improve transparency, in particular for human users, in terms of explainability, expected levels of performance which are guaranteed/verifiable and corresponding confidence levels, accountability and responsibility, as well as perceived trust and fairness. AI could also be used to empower humans in supporting them to improve responsible behaviours, where appropriate, but this should be done in full respect of the requirements ensuring trustworthy AI, including human autonomy.
Innovative scientific approach towards human-centric approaches will require multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches paying particular attention to intersectional factors (gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, disability) including SSH and other disciplines relevant to stimulate novel research avenues, and eventually improve user-acceptance. Collaborative design and evaluation with users involvement should also be considered.
Funding Information
The check will normally be done for the coordinator if the requested grant amount is equal to or greater than EUR 500 000, except for:
public bodies (entities established as a public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) or international organisations; and
cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (lowvalue grant).
Expected Outcomes
Proposal results are expected to contribute to at least one of the following expected outcomes:
Truly mixed human-AI initiatives for human empowerment
Trustworthy hybrid decision-support systems
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions;
the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;
eligible non-EU countries:
countries associated to Horizon Europe
low- and middle-income countries.
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