The EU is funding world-class AI researchers to tackle key research challenges together in Europe.
What are the Networks of Excellence?
The Commission has invested over EUR 100 million through Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe to establish a network of AI & Robotics Excellence Centres, aiming to address major scientific and technological challenges around Trustworthy AI. These networks form a European AI & Robotics powerhouse, uniting over 1000 researchers and 100 industry organisations to tackle the fragmentation of the research landscape and promote a cohesive community.
Who are the Networks of Excellence?
The EU AI & Robotics NoEs community includes the following nine projects:
- AI4Media, ELISE, HumanE-AI-Net, TAILOR (2020-2024)
- ELSA, euROBIN (since 2022)
- ELIAS, dAIEDGE, ENFIELD (since 2023)
With the support of VISION, the networks have mapped the European AI & Robotics research ecosystem, enabling researchers, industry, and citizens to identify key actors and their research topics, including generative AI.
How do they advance AI research in Europe?
The networks of excellence have created a joint strategic research agenda to advance AI, Data, and Robotics in Europe. The 2024 agenda identifies nine research challenges, from accelerating research and innovation with AI and robotics to building the technical foundations of trustworthy AI. A new research priority is building safe, reliable, and trustworthy foundation models, focusing on their impact on AI research and ensuring regulatory compliance.
The joint AI strategic research agenda by the networks of excellence represents a significant contribution to the EU AI research funding roadmap developed by the AI, Data and Robotics Association (ADRA), where the networks of excellence constitute an important part of the community. The joint strategic research agenda by the networks of excellence can serve not only as a basis for the EU funding programme Horizon Europe but also as a basis for national funding initiatives and collaboration with industry, thereby leading to even greater scale and avoiding fragmentation.
What are their achievements and success stories?
Overall, the first generation of networks of excellence have produced close to 4 000 scientific high-quality publications. Tangible research resulted in more robust machine-learning, greater transparency with hybrid AI, a better understanding of both hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models.
Supporting current and future AI talent is a key focus of the networks of excellence. They have created the International AI Doctoral Academy AIDA offering world-class AI education and research programme such as a standardised AI Ph.D. curriculum, organised junior and senior researcher exchanges and summer schools.
The networks of excellence worked also closely with industry by providing innovation support for SMEs, startups and fellow researchers in the form of cascade funding and innovative microprojects. These collaborations yielded concrete results, such as a more collaborative platform to use open-source intelligence for fact-checking, early-warning systems for cyber risks thanks to automated threat analysis. They are also working towards a better understanding of the cognitive capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models.
Tangible success stories that improve citizens’ lives include deepfake detection service in recent major events like the War in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict, enhancing breast cancer prognosis thanks to an advanced detection algorithm, developing a chatbot for migrants in Europe and providing a handbook of trustworthy AI.
Cooperative Competition Driving Robotics progress
As the work of the Networks of Excellence continues to evolve, the ongoing Network of Excellence (NoE) in Robotics stands as a prime example of how collaboration can drive AI-powered robotics forward. The cooperative competition model within the robotics network encourages teams to share modular solutions through a shared repository (Eurocore), ensuring scalability, reusability, and measurable progress. Coopetitions introduce a new robot competition concept, where participating teams get awarded for the performance of their contributions both for the own team and for other teams that (re)use their modules. This initiative plays a pivotal role in advancing robotics research and Innovation, with further developments on the horizon.
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