The Team Behind SERMAS

UNIMORE is an Italian University organised on a “site network” model embracing the cities of Modena and Reggio Emilia in close cooperation with more than 300 economic clusters in the areas of mechatronics, logistics and automotive.

UNIMORE is responsible for development the SERMAS XR agent architecture, studying human mechanisms in interaction processes and the project coordinator.

TUDa is the home of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab that carries out cutting-edge research in deep learning for natural language processing with a strong emphasis on conversational artificial intelligence, question answering, cross-document natural language processing, as well as novel datasets and problem definitions.

TUDa/UKP ensures the integration of different modules in the SERMAS XR Agent. It contributes to other tasks, including defining the requirements for dialogue agents according to the specific use case scenarios and elaborating non-verbal information linked with verbal communication.

DW is Germany’s international broadcaster. As of 2022, the media house offers high-quality journalistic content in 30+ languages on all kinds of platforms, reaching some 289 million users per week. DW also runs Deutsche Welle Akademie (DWA – a leading European institution for media development).

DW is responsible for developing relevant requirements for socially-acceptable XR systems and scenarios for the social acceptance of the systems of our case studies.

F6S is a leading global founder and startup network that helps public sector entities around the world to promote, communicate and disseminate technical and research projects. F6S stands for F-ounder-S. Our mission is to help founders and startups grow to solve the world's pressing social, economic, environmental, sustainability and innovation problems. In addition to F6S' work with governmental entities, we also work with corporates, investors, research institutions, programs, universities and others in the global startup ecosystem. F6S tools deliver company growth through grants, partnerships, funding, investment, pilot contracts, partnerships, jobs & talent recruitment and company services.

F6S leads the dissemination and exploitation and is responsible for recruiting innovators (researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, SMEs, etc.) to participate in SERMAS development and funding opportunities and engage in our ecosystem activities.

Poste is Italy’s largest service infrastructure, its services play an important role in society and it operates in three lines of business: post and parcel sector, financial services, and insurance. With a 160-year history, the group occupies a unique position in the country, making a major contribution to Italy’s economic, social and productive fabric.

Within the Innovation Technology Department, POSTE leads the pilots and proof-of-concept to gather the requirement for the three pilots in the project, assisting the SERMAS Toolkit, implementing the proof of concept and providing feedback to improve the XR models. POSTE is responsible for two pilots: A virtual Assistant and a Virtual receptionist.

Spindox Labs develops innovative solutions for its customers, providing support in the implementation phases. The competencies of Spindox Labs align with emerging trends in information and communications technology such as 3D Modelling, natural language processing, AR, and data science.

Spindox Labs is the leading technology partner guiding the requirements to implement and develop the SERMAS solution. Spindox Labs also guides the consortium in defining a strategy to exploit the SERMAS’s results.

KCL is ranked in the top 10 UK universities in the world (QS World Rankings 2020) and was ranked 6th nationally in the research-power ranking in REF2021. The SERMAS team at KCL comprises researchers in the department of Informatics and Engineering.

KCL will develop and apply formal and automated tools for security analysis of socio-technical systems that combine XR systems and their human users. KCL will also develop a set of techniques and tools for human-robot interaction, human behaviour understanding, computer vision and machine learning.

The Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) is a world-class research institute located in Lugano (Switzerland) and affiliated with both the USI and SUPSI universities. The institute is active in several domains of artificial intelligence; its robotics lab has expertise in deep learning for robotics, robot control, and human-robot interaction.

The role of IDSIA USI-SUPSI in SERMAS is to develop non-verbal communication modalities between users and virtual agents. The work will focus on two main aspects: the interpretation of implicit and explicit non-verbal communication; and the use of such communication modalities by agents to better interact with humans.