C. (Christos) Emmanouilidis, Dr

Christos has been involved in Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator for projects in excess of 11.5 m€ funding for the employing organisation. Details below are provided only for projects wherein Christos has had a PI or Co-I role.

Current Projects

SkillAIbility: Co-designing human-centric pathways for future skills in manufacturing through augmented, empowered, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation, and human tasks.

The objective of the project is to create human-centric, empowering pathways to future skills and jobs for all, towards an inclusive, resilient, and equality-based twin transition in the manufacturing industry. This will be achieved by co-designing education, training and relevant AI tools with workers, especially vulnerable groups, using empowering, inclusive, and symbiotic complementarities between AI, automation, and humans.

There are 14 partners from 9 European countries, in a consortium representative of the research, industry, and societal stakeholders needed for success in this area. The overall funding is about 3 million euros. In this project the RuG team will play a leading role in the roadmapping and the creation of future scenarios for augmentation, empowerment, and symbiosis between humans and AI/automation technologies, in the design of human technologies for symbiotic work organisation contexts, and in the use cases through co-design principles for inclusive AI/automation skills, tasks, and jobs in manufacturing. The project duration is three years.

The project aims to produce significant impacts in multiple directions: (i) Through regulator sandboxes and prestandardisation contributions; (ii) in policy making; (iii) via international, national and regional synergies; (iv) use cases testing and demonstrating empowerment, augmentation, inclusivity, symbiosis between humans and AI-enabled technology solutions.

AI4Work: Human-centric Digital Twin Approaches to Trustworthy AI and Robotics for Improved Working Conditions

The AI4Work project aims to provide practical solutions for effective and optimal collaboration between human and non-human (robotics, AI) actors in work environments, demonstrated in several domains with use cases in:

(1) Management of Yard Logistics
(2) Automation in Packaging Systems
(3) Robotics in construction
(4) Healthcare operations management
(5) Agriculture
(6) Education

Consortium and funding:
The project consortium is led by ATB Bremen (Institute for Applied System Technology Bremen) and comprises 18 partners from 8 countries. The overall funding is 7.7 million euros. In this project the RuG team contributes on shaping the AI4Work concept, on the methodological framework for the assessment of Human-centred AI, on human-centred digital twins, and engages in many of the pilots wherein the AI4Work concepts and developed technological solutions will be demonstrated. The project duration is from January 2024 to December 2026.

Envisaged impact:
AI4Work will provide innovative AI/robotics services able to boost the use of mixed human-AI/robotics technologies among the European community and increase their acceptance within the working scenarios, contributing towards the European strategic orientaiton towards Human-Centred and Ethical Development of Digital and Industrial Technologies.

Horizon Europe project:

HumAIne: Hybrid Human-AI Decision Support for Enhanced Human Empowerment in Dynamic Situations

The HumAIne project aims to achieve impact towards a human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies. This will be achieved through a two-way engagement in the development of technologies, empowering end-users and workers, and supporting social innovation. The project involves use cases for human-centric AI from five key sectors:

- manufacturing (human – robot collaboration in manufacturing)
- smart cities (incident management with citizens’ engagement)
- healthcare (cancer patients’ quality of life management for personalised care)
- finance (investment portfolio risk management in real time)
- energy (hybrid decision-making and planning in power grids).

Consortium and funding:
The project consortium is led by GFT, a key global provider of industrial digitalization solutions. In total, the consortium includes 18 partners from 12 countries, including IBM, the German Centre for AI (DFKI) and the Jozef Stefan AI Institute in Slovenia. The overall funding is 8 million euros. In this project the RuG team contributes on the vision and specifications for human AI collaboration, work towards advanced AI learning and paradigms for human -AI collaboration, and use cases validation and evaluation regarding operations in the five key sectors.

Envisaged impact:
The HumAIne project aims to make a significant impact with the development of human-centred AI technologies for important sectors, providing novel solutions for collective intelligence-based decision making and human empowerment. HumAIne will also aim to feed its outcomes into national, regional, and EU-wide initiatives on AI.

H2020 project STAR: Safe and Trusted Human Centric Artificial Intelligence
in Future Manufacturing Lines (grant ID: 956573).

AI systems in industrial plants must be safe, trusted and secure, even when operating in dynamic, unstructured and unpredictable environments. Ensuring the safety and reliability of these systems is a key prerequisite for deploying them at scale and for fully leveraging the benefits of AI in manufacturing. 

STAR is a joint 6m€ collaborative project involving 18 partners from across Europe, including AI and digital manufacturing experts. STAR project outcomes enable the deployment of standards-based, secure, safe, reliable, and trusted human-centric AI systems in real-life manufacturing environments, which are dynamic and unpredictable in nature. STAR acts as a catalyst for ethical AI deployments in production lines. Specifically, STAR produces technical solutions that boost the safety, robustness and trustworthiness of systems AI in dynamic, real-life settings, while at the same exploring the legal implications of a safe and secure AI in prominent manufacturing scenarios. In this project the RuG team has contributed with:

Find out more about the STAR project @:
- the project portal: star.ai.eu
- the EU projects fact sheet

Past Projects

Industrial Transition in Lagging Regions.

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), Unit J.2 - Knowledge for Growth, EC Joint Research Centre, Seville.
Expertise on Industrial Transition and Digitalisation in Regional Innovation, focusing on selected priority sectors (Agri-food, Healthcare, Smart Cities/Urban Development) targeting Romania’s Regional Innovation Strategies.
Budget 9450€ (with Cranfield University). Ares(2020)1940465.

1. Analysis of strategic priorities for UK Manufacturing
2. Study of Industry 4.0 Competencies (Physical / Digital realm)
3. Plextek Priorities and Competencies
4. Analysis and Recommendations, inclusive of priority value propositions
https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/case-studies/image-plextek

Data-driven service innovation for large production-grade digital printers

The InnoPro project, co-ordinated by the LMS laboratory, University of Patras, was a targeted effort to support the EC strategy and networking in SME-oriented innovation and Smart Specialisation Strategies (RIS3) and successfully co-organised the Industrial Technologies 2014 conference, including high-level representatives in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, advanced materials and production technologies, as well as industrial exhibition and brokerage. ATHENA RC has been a co-organiser of the event and participated with exhibition stand and contribution on the RIS3 strategies theme.

https://www.ilsp.gr/en/projects/innopro-2014-innovation-in-production-a-regional-perspective-on-innovation-drivers-for-smes-and-the-nmp-role/

The myVisitPlanner project developed a cloud-based recommender and itinerary planning system for personalised tourism. The recommender system included the development of online and offline recommendation services, devising an information-based data analytics approach for recommendations, employing the Hadoop HDFS and the Mahout machine learning library for enabling clustering and learning to make recommendations based on past experience and itinerary profiling.

Territorial co-operation Collaborative Research Project. Budget: 694.225€

(with ATHENA Research and Innovation Centre).
The CORECT project developed a digital heritage toolset, comprising subsystems for recording, map and timeline-based navigation, educational applications & games and 3D monuments and artifacts visualisation.

Funded by the South East Europe Programme, Budget: 1.93m€ (with ATHENA Research and Innovation Centre).

The ATRIUM project developed a toolset to support the official ATRIUM Cultural Route (approved by the Council of Europe), comprising subsystems for recording, evaluation, map and timeline-based navigation (atrium.ceti.gr).

The main outcome of the iLearn2Main project is an e-learning system for Maintenance Management training and an e-assessment tool for the self-assessment of competences, available in five languages, namely English, Romanian, Latvian, Swedish and Greek. Several piloting actions targeted user groups from academia and industry. The design and development has taken into account requirements arising from professional bodies’ guidelines and a user survey. The project was invited to participate in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Manufacturing Technology Platform (MTP) Maintenance for Sustainable Manufacturing.

Research services contract / feasibility study for adaptive user interfaces appropriate for use in industrial environments and computerised maintenance management systems.

Research services contract for investigating potential and suitability of wireless sensor network platforms and solutions for use in condition monitoring applications.

Information Society Project, Budget: 93.5k€ (with ATHENA Research and Innovation Centre). Training delivered to all municipalities in the Region of East Macedonia-Thrace, Greece, on various aspects of e-government tools and associated technologies.

Virtual Guide involved the design and development of software prototype for interactive museum collections management and museum navigation targeting multiple devices (mobile and desktop), employing primarily PHP, MySQL and Javascript; experimentation on wireless multimedia transmission performance assessment based on simulation tools and emulation environment to support final prototype development. Final prototype commercialised by Prisma Electronics SA under the brand name Xenagos.

The Dynamite Integrated Project has developed methods and tools to deliver e-Maintenance solutions for modern industry. The project delivered wireless sensing solutions, incorporating MEMS sensors, RFID tags and a range of software modules to support maintenance planning and decision making, as well as e-training support to enable end users to make maximal use of the developed toolset. e-training and wireless sensing platform development PrismaSense, developed by Zenon SA and Prisma SA respectively. Overall project results published in a Springer volume under the title 'e-Maintenance'.

GNOSYS designed a cognitive agent architecture for mobile robots. The architecture was divided in two components: a domain agnostic one (GNOSYS Brain) and a domain-dependent one (robot architecture). The architecture integrated the cycle of perception, knowledge acquisition, abstraction, reasoning and action generation. The robot software architecture completely abstracts the hardware, resulting in a generic embodied cognitive agent architecture. The architecture was embodied in a Pioneer AT3 mobile platform by Zenon SA. At the lowest level, sensors, their interface electronics and actuator amplifiers were integrated with local processors that implement a first level of signal processing and in the case of actuator amplifiers low level control. At the next level more powerful processors were used for more demanding computation, ie XSCALE 400 MHz RISC processor on a gumstix® board and an Intel P4 Centrino processor. The third level included a cluster of off-robot PCs, implementing the GNOSYS "brain".

Check the project fact sheet at the EC portal.

D-SCRIBE developed a software system solution for processing and transcribing ancient manuscript images (Mount Sinai Library Digital Archive), employing document image analysis techniques, and a training-support system for palaeography.

Development of a hardware and software infrastructure for smart buildings. Integration of distributed sensors for air quality, humidity, temperature and light monitoring with controller hardware and software for fuzzy logic basic control of HVAC and adaptive blinds, piloted on the building of Zenon SA Automation Technologies.

Check the TECHNOGENESIS model in the book edited by Christos Bezirtzoglou.

Development of a software suite for the management and processing of CCTV survey images from robotic scanners operating in sewer network utility companies, including image sequences preprocessing, feature extraction and neural network-based detection of cracks in underground pipes. Included extensive analytics leading to final integration in an overall decision support suite for sewer infrastructure networks.

Robot Inspector developed a prototype robot platform for automating the non destructive testing of large steel and aluminum plates, as typically present in oil tanks. The mobile robot was a customised P3AT robot platform, capable of carrying and deploying appropriate NDT equipment to perform scanning of the plate surface for corrosion and of the welded parts for defects. Three different NDT probes are utilised, namely a dry-coupled ultrasonic wheel probe, a phased array (PA) ultrasonic probe and an Alternating Current Field Measurement (ACFM) probe. The multi-threaded software architecture for the robot control is run on a microcontroller that handles interfacing with the robot electronics and low-level control functions, an on-robot PC that processes laser sensor input and handles higher-level robot functions, such as behavioural and fuzzy control, localization, path planning and Non Destructive Testing (NDT) specific functions and an off-robot PC that handles user interfacing and integration with NDT signal processing software.