Philhumans Outreach

This introductory workshop was planned in Cagliari and aimed at presenting and discussing the rationale behind interdisciplinary research, its purpose, challenges and good practice elements. Because the COVID pandemic the workshop had to change its format and was held remotely. It was organized as an event within the ACM IUI conference and different papers in different topics related to the smart personal health interfaces were submitted. A website of the workshop was set up at https://hri.unica.it/SmartPhil/. The workshop started with a keynote presentation related to the conversational interfaces for personal health, held by Dr. Aki Harma, the coordinator of the PhilHumans project. Then four sessions related to three different topics followed. The first two were focused on NLP and sensor-based AI, the third session was focused on image processing and computer vision and the fourth one was focused on insight mining and exploitation routes. We had five papers discussed for the first topic (the first two sessions), three papers for the second topic (third session) and two papers for the third topic (fourth session).

Each talk was discussed remotely and a wrap-up discussion after each session was organized to stimulate conversation from the participants. The accepted papers were published on CEUR and are publicly accessible at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2596/. Other details  related  to  the  workshop  can  be  seen  at  the  workshop’s  website.

This introductory workshop on Project Management was delivered online to all ESRs to provide horizontal skills relating to the management of R&D projects from a non- technical perspective.

The workshops covered the basic topics such as:

• What is a Project
• What is the main terminology used in Project Management
• What is the Project Lifecycle
• What are the main responsibilities of a Project Manager
• How can a Project be split into phases

The workshop provided information about the “Iron Triangle” of a project composed by resources´, time and scope.

The workshops also provided the basic concepts of the Plan-Do-Check-Act virtuous continuous cycle and went in detail int each phase.

Scheduling and risk management were presented with different techniques for them.

The workshop included a homework session where ESRs will prepare a project management plan for their own PhD projects and deliver to R2M. After these were deliver, here were 1-to-1 meetings with the ESRs to discuss and provide feedback for improvement.

“Robotics Platforms and How to Program Robots” was a training activity for ESRs held in July 2020. The goal was to introduce robotics in general, and to programmable humanoid robotics in particular. The activity included a lecture in which some use cases of robots in different industries were presented (Healthcare, Education, Manufacturing and Construction), to later focus on humanoid robots for healthcare and carebots (e.g: Zora/Nao, Pepper). The training also included a more technical part in which the ESRs were trained on robot programming solutions at different levels (ROS, Naoqi, Choreograph and higher levels UIs).

The ESRs were asked to develop 2 proofs of concepts using some of the programming frameworks mentioned above. The first proof of concept was related to the development of advanced robotic behaviour and using composition on that development. The second one was about developing a game for kids, including sensing, actuation, and speech recognition capabilities. The training concluded with a validation session in which all proof of concepts were evaluated, and some recommendations and pointers were provided to ESRs. The results were satisfactory, all the ESRs presented high quality solutions, with very imaginative approaches. Overall, it was an interesting way to introduce ESRs to robots and robot programming allowing them to have a base for future projects.”

AI Bias and Fairness training was organized in collaboration between Philips Research and Technical University of Eindhoven. The main teacher was Dr. Arlette van Wissen from Philips Research.

Biases related to gender, ethnic background, and health history, to name few, are often present in collection and analysis of personal data. The learning goals of the course are to

• Understand general concepts about AI bias and fairness and how they may influence design of intelligent systems.
• Learn about methods and tools to analyze and manage biases
• Apply bias-aware thinking in your own use cases and environment and define a strategy to mitigate the biases
• Write together with a team a position paper addressing AI bias and fairness questions in your own area of research

PhilHumans Summer School, embedded inside the ICJAI-ECAI’22 in Vienna, was organized in 22-30 July, 2022 in Vienna. IJCAI is one of the largest conferences in the AI area and has a good fit with the PhD projects of all ESRs. The idea of the PhilHumans Summer School was to use the conference, with its hundreds of talks and dozens of Tutorial and Keynote talks as the material of the Summer School.

All ESRs and two of the supervisors from Philips Research participated the workshop physically, and all supervisors and partners were invited to the concluding workshop. The organizers of IJCAI provided PhilHumans a meeting room for the duration of the entire conference. We started every morning by a joint checking meeting where we went through the program of the day and plans of individual ESRs.

The ESRs were given an assignment to prepare a presentation, on the last day of the conference, based on the findings, pictures, and discussions they had over the conference duration including:

• 2-6 most important presentations, learnings, breakthroughs in your own area or research. How does your work fit into the new learnings/ trends observed? How do those learnings impact your work and next steps?
• 1 learning on “I had no clue of this area but this is quite fascinating”
• 1 example from “How it is possible they accepted this work to the final program?!” [optional]

These results were presented on the last day of the conference in a larger conference room provided by IJCAI organizers. This event was also open for external participants and basically all supervisors and other people connected to PhilHumans project joined the session over a call link. All 8 ESRs gave 20–30-minute talk about the findings and conclusions.

In the beginning of 2023, a two-day Interdisciplinary workshop was held at Philips Research Eindhoven. The supervisors and ESRs participated face to face during the workshop.

A full, interactive program was arranged for this, during the first day the ESRs presented their research results in the different stage of their PhD. Also the status and actions need for completion of the PhilHumans deliverables was discussed.

On the second day the ESR organised for a social event, the supervisors discussed options for collaboration towards the future.