Christos Emmanouilidis receives grant for collaborative EU research project on Artificial Intelligence transformation towards inclusive jobs

Associate Professor Christos Emmanouilidis has received funding from the EU for a new Horizon Europe project titled SKILLAIbility: “Co-designing human-centric pathways for future skills in manufacturing through augmented, empowered, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation, and human tasks”.

With the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence across different domains, the objective of the SkillAIbility project is to create human-centric pathways to future Artificial Intelligence skills and jobs for all in the digital transition for the manufacturing industry. The potential for AI to exacerbate social disparities and inequalities, especially for vulnerable groups, is a significant concern and to mitigate such risks, the project will holistically target societal, industrial, academic, and regulatory dimensions, through co-designing education, training and relevant AI tools with workers, especially vulnerable groups, using empowering, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation, and humans.

SKIllAIbility is funded through the large European initiative TRANSFORMATIONS: A sustainable future for Europe. The new project has the specific target of assessing and strengthening the complementarity between new technologies and human skills and complements the growing portfolio of the University of Groningen projects on Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence.  In SKILLAIbility, Human-AI synergies are seen to go beyond human augmentation and to target inclusivity, empowerment, and symbiosis in future manufacturing and its workforce. Digital technologies do not simply create or destroy jobs: they change what people do on the job, and how they do it, reshaping job profiles. The project will involve work and outcomes on policies, learning factories, and methodologies for co-designing and assessment, demonstrated in selected production environment use cases. The new project will start on 1 December 2024 and has a duration of 3 years.

The project consortium

The project is co-ordinated by Politecnico di Milano, Italy. The interdisciplinary consortium consists of 14 partners from 9 European countries, including the University of Groningen, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Norway), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), CECIMO (The European Association of Manufacturing Technologies), the MADE Competence Centre in Industry 4.0 (Italy), the Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems (LMS, Greece), and societal stakeholders representing the interest of people with disabilities and chronic diseases. The overall funding is about € 3 million and the funding for the University of Groningen is approximately €300,000. In SkillAIbility, Associate Professor Christos Emmanouilidis (Department of Operations of the Faculty of Economics and Business) and other colleagues from the UG will mainly focus on roadmapping and creating future scenarios for augmentation, empowerment, and symbiosis between humans and AI/automation technologies, on the design of human technologies for symbiotic work organisation contexts, and on leading use cases through co-design principles for inclusive AI.

For more information, please contact Christos Emmanouilidis.