CITIC

The popularisation of information technologies and the Internet has resulted in an unprecedented growth in the scale at which individuals and institutions generate, communicate and access information. In this context, the effective leveraging of the vast amounts of available data to discover and address people’s needs is a fundamental problem of modern societies. Since most of this circulating information is in the form of written or spoken human language, natural language processing (NLP) technologies are a key asset for this crucial goal.

This NLP can be used to break language barriers (machine translation), find required information (search engines, question answering), monitor public opinion (opinion mining), or digest large amounts of unstructured text into more convenient forms (information extraction, summarization), among other applications. These and other NLP technologies rely on accurate syntactic parsing to extract or analyse the meaning of sentences.

Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art parsing algorithms have high computational costs, processing fewer than a hundred sentences per second on standard hardware. While this is acceptable when working on small sets of documents, it is clearly prohibitive for large-scale processing, and thus constitutes a major roadblock for the widespread application of NLP.

The goal of this project is to eliminate this bottleneck by developing fast parsers that are suitable for web-scale processing. To do so, FASTPARSE will improve the speed of parsers on several fronts: by avoiding redundant calculations through the reuse of intermediate results from previous sentences; by applying a cognitively-inspired model to compress and recode linguistic information; and by exploiting regularities in human language to find patterns that the parsers can take for granted, avoiding their explicit calculation. The joint application of these techniques will result in much faster parsers that can power all kinds of web-scale NLP applications.

Execution period: 01/02/2017 – 31/07/2022

Referencia: H2020-ERC-2016-StG (GA 714150)

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3-i ICT (International, Interdisciplinary and Intersectoral Information and Communications Technology PhD Programme) is an innovative new international PhD programme, offering eight fellowship grants to Early-Stage Researchers (ESR), to carry out their PhD studies at the Centre for Information and Communications Technology Research (CITIC) of the University of A Coruña. There will be two international calls for candidates and contracts will have a duration of 36 months.

3-i ICT will run over 60 months and will provide ESRs with unique opportunities for basic and applied interdisciplinary research, training and career development. During this period, ESRs will acquire real experience and practice on interdisciplinary projects that bridge the gap between different fields of science.

The programme will include secondments in non-academic partner institutions in Spain and abroad and each thesis will have one supervisor from the field of ICT and one from a different academic discipline.

This is the first programme granted to a Galician institution supported by the European Union through Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie agreement (H2020-MSCA-COFUND), that provides funding for regional, national and international programmes for training and career development, through co-funding mechanisms. 3-i ICT is co-funded by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade of the Xunta de Galicia.

Financing institution: MARIE SKŁODOWSKA CURIE DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

Execution period: 1/01/2023 – 31/12/2023

Referencia: Nº 101034261

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PILLAR-Robots aims at developing a new generation of robots endowed with a higher level of autonomy, that are able to determine their own goals and establish their own strategies, creatively building on the experience acquired during their lifetime to fulfil the desires of their human designers/users in real-life application use-cases brought to TRL5. To this end, the project will operationalize the concept of Purpose, drawn from the cognitive sciences, to increase the autonomy and domain independence of robots during autonomous learning and, at the same time, to lead them to acquire knowledge and skills that are actually relevant for operating in target real applications. In particular, the project will develop algorithms for the acquisition of purpose by the robot, ways to bias the perceptual, motivational and decision systems of the robots’ cognitive architectures towards purposes, and strategies for learning representations, skills and models that allow the execution of purpose-related deliberative and reactive decision processes. Given the aim of reaching TRL5, PILLAR-Robots will implement and validate demonstrators of purposeful lifelong open-ended autonomy using the resulting Purposeful Intrinsically Motivated Cognitive Architecture within three different application fields characterized by different types and levels of variability: Agri-food, Edutainment, and unstructured Industrial/retail. PILLAR-Robots will perform a complete evaluation of the possibilities and impacts of purposeful lifelong open-ended autonomy in these realms from an operational perspective, but also from a market-oriented (with significant productivity gains) and societal (socio-economic, ethical and regulatory) perspective. Engagement of industry and SME players is also expected in order to prepare the ground for further large-scale demonstration.

Execution period: 1/10/2022 – 30/09/2026

Referencia: G.A. 101070381

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A website and app-based solution for data collection to provide general and individual prediction models including anomaly detection, geo-localised visualisation and advanced data processing functions using Artificial Intelligence.

The starting point is a random sample of the Spanish population, followed by a monitoring process using a range of technologies: quick testing and PCR testing to detect the virus and the presence of antibodies; collection of geolocalised data using mobile apps and wearable devices; processing and selection of relevant data using Artificial Intelligence methods; interoperability with health information systems using HL7 or protocols defined by the health systems.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of this project is that it was a joint proposal by CITIC researchers who, in the midst of the pandemic and lockdown, designed and began work on an initiative to show how science, technology and the university were able to join forces for the benefit of society in order to overcome the circumstances surrounding the pandemic in the best possible way.

Execution period: 1/11/2020 – 31/12/2022

Referencia: IN845D 2020/26

TALENTOS INCLUSIVOS (INCLUSIVE TALENTS) is a project developed by CITIC, the University of A Coruña’s Information and Communication Technologies Research Centre and ASPACE (Association for the Care of People with Cerebral Palsy) and promoted by FECYT (the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology).

The objective is to boost young people’s interest in STEM-based careers (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and to highlight the situation of disabled people through collaborative work teams as a means of finding solutions for the technological challenges facing people with cerebral palsy.

Within the framework of this project, pupils at a number of secondary schools in Galicia will seek technology-based solutions for a series of challenges posed by ASPACE users.

The key action is the organisation of participatory workshops. Technology-based challenges are posed in order to drive opportunities and learning associated with sciences (formulation of hypotheses, observation, problem solving and meeting challenges), technological innovation (experimentation with various technologies, creativity, development of technological solutions) and the contribution of science to society (adaptation and solution of challenges based on the capacity and needs of persons with cerebral palsy and production of technology that will impact on this group’s quality of life). Participants in these workshops include secondary school pupils and their teachers, people with cerebral palsy, professionals from ASPACE Coruña and CITIC staff members During the 2020-2021 academic year, and despite the exceptional circumstances caused by COVID-19, work was carried out with more than 8 schools and over 100 pupils. In the 2021/2022 academic year, 10 schools and more than 150 students have participated. Various technologies were used in order to successfully overcome the challenges: augmented reality (Scratch); robotics ; automation; support products (Makey-Makey) and accessible leisure (Micro: bit). The results will be published and disseminated among society. The results are the experience lived in the workshops; the development of accessible technological solutions and dissemination in the media and in society. Open access to the materials is available via the website.

This initiative involves more than 30 CITIC researchers from all areas, who provide tutoring and monitoring for the technological developments.

Execution period: 1/06/2020 – 30/09/2023

Referencia: FCT-19-14646, FCT-20-16226, FCT-21-16637

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