UNA4CAREER
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement Nยบ 847635.
921354. Group of Agent based Social and Interdisciplinary Applications (GRASIA)
Departament of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence
Institute of Knowledge Technology
UCM-GRASIA is an interdisciplinary research team, with focus on co-designing tools to promote social inclusion, democratic collaborative economy and innovative educational methods. The group is highly diverse, and combines expertise from Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Social and Communication Sciences, and Health Sciences. Since its inception in 1999, GRASIA has participated in European projects (Eurescom, FP5, FP6, FP7, H2020) coordinating 1 H2020 and 1 ERC SG, as well as national projects. At present, around 30 researchers are part of GRASIA.
The research group has been widely successful in achieving social impact with its research. Originally, it was a pioneer in methods and tools for the development of multi-agent systems, with the INGENIAS methodology and contributing to the FIPA standards, with broad applications in aeronautics, smart grids, social simulation, intelligent assistants, smart environments, collaboration tools, computational creativity, and web engineering. More recently, the software for online collaboration SwellRT was adopted by the open source leader Apache Foundation, and a spin-off of our ERC project P2Pmodels acquired funding to develop a platform for decentralized open science.
We have collaborated both with for-profits (e.g. Mindfields, Telefónica, e-La Caixa, Boeing Boeing R&T Europe, Alma Tech, Stonework Solutions) and nonprofits (e.g. Amara.org, Medialab-Prado, la Rueca), as well as with academics from all the continents.
The UCM-GRASIA team has a large experience in hosting visitors from different institutions from Europe, America and Australia. Thus, it will welcome and care for the social integration of the Fellow within an interdisciplinary and diversity-friendly team, as well as providing the infrastructure and resources for both professional and social activities. The Fellow will benefit from: a fully equipped office, access to the University services (email, library, sport facilities and cultural events), and participation in the group and faculty seminars. Besides, the UCM European Research Office, which is an EURAXESS network contact point in Madrid, offers services to facilitate accommodation, national healthcare system, taxation, learning Spanish language and culture, mobility, etc. Technically, the group has state of the art servers, access to cloud computing facilities, and a rich infrastructure for IoT.
UCM-GRASIA includes several research lines on which we can accommodate your research interests, so please contact us to work together on your proposal if you find any of the following topics compelling. In general, all our projects require an interdisciplinary approach, where different backgrounds are combined.
We are specially targeting the following profiles:
– Computer scientists, interested in artificial intelligence, blockchain and P2P technologies, smart cities, or co-design.
– Social scientists, interested in gender, refugees, community governance or economic issues.
– Data scientists, interested in analyzing large datasets of collaborative communities.
Current research topics to frame proposals:
– Assistive technologies for improving the quality of life of people with disabilities, specially addressing aging society http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es/hackwithpeople or gender issues http://www.risewiseproject.eu.
– Methods and tools to create inclusive smart cities that take into account population with special needs (e.g. disability and vulnerable groups: http://grasiagroup.fdi.ucm.es/inclusivecities).
– Innovative models of Collaborative Economy, in which communities can have democratic governance and fair value distribution. This involves experimentation of governance and economic models supported by decentralized technologies, mostly blockchain, to support digital commons: https://p2pmodels.eu.
– Visualization and analysis of the evolution of communities around wikis: http://wikichron.science.
– Collaborative online platforms to co-design attention and inclusion strategies for vulnerable groups, integrating tools for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the social context and the interactions in the platform: https://raisd-h2020.eu.
