Europe to invest billions in multinational science initiatives

The Robot Companions for Citizens project aims to build “sentient” machines that help people, particularly the elderly. A companion robot “is like your pet, able to understand your emotions, live in the house without breaking furniture, and have emotional interactions with you,” says Dario. “But it will also do tasks for you.” The robots would be useful to people with disabilities or neurological diseases. Other potential applications, he says, could be in rescue situations such as cleaning oil spills, retrieving a cockpit black box, or aiding recovery in the aftermath of the Fukushima partial nuclear meltdown. His team is aiming for an affordable price for the robots “so that every household can have one.” They will be based on “new materials, new actuators, new mechanisms, new energy sources, new nervous systems,” Dario says. “They will be inspired by the biological world.”

The robot companions project has about 250 collaborators in eight countries. But Dario expects the number of collaborators to grow to more than 1200. If selected as a flagship, he says, the development of sentient machines that perhaps “could be expected in 20 or 30 years could be accelerated and done in 10, providing a solution to a deep social problem.”

With Guardian Angels, the FET pilot with energy-scavenging personal assistants, researchers envision miniature sensors that power themselves with any available source of energy, such as light or movement. “We want to develop smart, autonomous personal assistants. It will be a network of body sensors, monitoring a diversity of things: blood sugar levels, heart rates, activity levels—with accelerometers and gyroscopes,” says project coordinator Adrian Ionescu, a nanoscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. A watch or mobile phone could serve as a central interface. At a more advanced stage, such sensors could alert the wearer to gas, or to pollen or other allergens in the environment. Further in the future, the sensors could interact via emotions, says Ionescu. (Although Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, it participates in EU research funding. In 2010 it was ranked by the EU as Europe’s most innovative country, and three of the six FET pilots have coordinators there.)

But intelligent robots, sensors, and devices “will only be remotely feasible with a deep understanding of the computing principles of the brain,” says EPFL neurology researcher Henry Markram, coordinator of the human brain FET pilot. “And we are very far from understanding the brain or any of its nearly 600 different diseases.” The solution, he says, “is to integrate all the fragments of data and knowledge on the brain.” Such a “21st-century approach,” he adds, “had to wait for supercomputing to become useful in biology.”

Graphene, the strong, lightweight, flexible carbon material whose discovery was recognized with last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, is the focus of another FET pilot project. “One of the defining features of research is that you never quite know what is around the corner,” says coordinator Jari Kinaret of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Still, he adds, “we will create a science and technology roadmap for where graphene is going in the 10-year timeframe.” Examples of graphene applications might be large foldable keyboards and screens for smart phones or lightweight nanocomposites for aircraft. “Graphene will result in products and jobs,” says Kinaret. “You could say that the new investment opportunities will either be in Europe or elsewhere. The new jobs will either be in Europe or elsewhere. And we would like to see them here.”

Over the next year, the six pilot finalists will be making their cases in hopes of being selected as a flagship. This period is not about getting new research results, but rather about showing scientific and technological excellence and social impact, defining project governance, and gaining additional financial commitments. “You have to have something that is visionary, but at the same time credible for funding bodies,” says Ionescu. European Commission (EC) funding would start in 2013.

The EC has traditionally funded small- to medium-sized projects for three-year periods. “If you look in general at the results, there is a lot of fragmentation, because projects are all running independently,” says Ionescu. The main idea of the FET flagships is to “federate this effort and have all the research serving a common goal of bridging science and technology to have the largest impact on society.”

Says Kinaret, “I get the impression that funding will likely be 50-50 from the EC and other sources, but this could be 40-60 or 60-40, and it need not be constant” over the decade. In the case of graphene, and perhaps for other areas as well, Kinaret says, “none of the potential materials producers is willing to take the risk and start producing material before they know that the demand is going to be there. And none of the companies that develop applications are willing to say they are really going to put big money there unless there is a materials supply. It’s a chicken and egg situation.” Kinaret hopes that with the FET flagships, “federated funding may be a catalyst that allows us to get through these barriers.”

Dario, who served on the EC advisory panel that formulated the new funding mechanism, says that with the FET flagships, “We want to bridge science with technology and try to address major social programs, and maybe create new industry, educate thousands of researchers, innovate, create new jobs. That is what we dream.”