Innovation Themes

Our technical knowledge at the highest levels of science and technology and wide-ranging expertise enables us to help tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Here are the research topics we are exploring:

We rely on affordable cyber-physical systems to develop cognitive connected solutions leading the path towards a new digital world. They ubiquitously sense and understand complex contexts to predict needs and perform relevant recommendations to support users. By using cognitive inspired models, we develop solutions that deeply understand people and support them through natural interactions.

Topics:

/ Letting everything sense

/ Prediction and recommendation

/ Natural user experience

By deploying wireless sensor networks or mobile crowdsensing solutions with computer vision, we are able to collect relevant measurements related to plants, soil, water and environmental conditions. Machine and knowledge-based intelligence can then be used to process collected data, to support data-driven decisions. Including farmers and stakeholders throughout the development process to understand farmer tacit knowledge, design translations of vernacular to digital or to assess usability and technology acceptance contributes to narrowing the gap between technology and end-users. These approaches allow for building farm planning and management systems, to increase crop production, while minimising waste and preserving natural resources at ever larger scales.

Topics:

/ Decision support

/ Mobile crowdsensing

/ Efficient and self-managed networks

AI holds the promise of positively impacting society, but it can lead to injustice and discrimination, if AI systems are not appropriately designed. For this reason, AICOS is committed to studying the technical, ethical, and social implications of AI systems. We design algorithms that generate transparent and explicable AI-based decisions, and minimise bias and unfairness. We can also evaluate AI systems in operation to assess their different impacts and support the acceptance of these innovative technologies.

Topics:

/ Explicability, transparency, and bias

/ Accountability and ethics

/ Fairness and inclusion through technology

We envision healthcare as a continuum process, where predictive, preventive, personalised, and participatory medicine play a key role. By harnessing technology, we contribute to seamlessly effective, efficient and thoughtful points of care from hospital to home and at every point in between. Healthcare is approached as an ecosystem where technology can facilitate human intervention, connection, and collaboration. Our major goals are to improve patient access to early treatment, support clinicians’ decisions, enable the participation of patients and informal caregivers in their care, empower non-experts to acquire medical data, and decrease the burden of screening actions on healthcare systems.

Topics:

/ Prevention

/ Support to early diagnosis and intervention

/ Affordable cutting-edge technology

Societies are learning to coexist with digital technology. Relying on thick data, we seek to understand and anticipate how people’s existence with tangible or intangible technology unfolds across the lifespan and across contexts. With the democratisation and humanisation of technology, we see that humanities and the social sciences are called upon to help shape how people, regardless of technology proficiency level, relate to data and technology and appropriate it as part of their everyday lives.

Topics:

/ Personalised technology

/ Socio-technical systems

/ Technology design by non-technologists