Partners

Cefriel is a private not-for-profit research and innovation centre founded in 1988 by Politecnico di Milano. Cefriel’s mission is to spread digital innovation, by creating and rethinking products, services and processes and developing digital skills, in order to support our clients in their digitalization path and expand their business. Cefriel has a multidisciplinary team of around 150 people with a mix of technical, business and design background and skills.

Cefriel coordinates the PERKS project (Project Coordinator: Irene Celino, Project Manager: Ilaria Baroni) and also covers the role of technical leader, contributing with its expertise in knowledge graph management and user engagement in data processing pipelines (thanks to the involvement of the Knowledge Technologies Unit); Cefriel specifically focuses on the collection and management of procedural knowledge through Semantic Web technologies and the assessment of the user acceptance and business impact.

Moreover, most of Cefriel’s customers are from the industrial setting and the challenges of procedural knowledge management come up often in its customer innovation projects. Therefore, Cefriel’s interest in PERKS is oriented to experiment and validate a set of different components and integrated solutions, to then transfer the project solutions and broaden its potential offering to its present and future customers.

DFKI is Germany’s largest public and independent research center for AI, where the Multilinguality and Language Technology (MLT) Lab is focused on Multilingual NLP, Machine Translation, and Information Extraction. In the scope of PERKS, the team at DFKI will look into the computational modeling and elicitation of procedural knowledge. We will leverage newest AI technology, including transfer-learning deep networks for information retrieval and generative language models, to learn computational representations of procedural knowledge from textual sources. We will investigate multimodal extensions of our work, also taking into account graphs and figures from texts, and various text types for pre-training and finetuning our models. Moreover, we will contribute towards automatically generating questions as FAQs from technical documents.

Fagor Automation is a company with great experience in the development and manufacturing of products for machine automation and control, being one of the world leaders on the machine tool sector. Its wide technical and sales network spread out in more than 50 countries through its own branch offices and distributors. It excels by its capability to develop software and the versatility of its productive process to offer solutions tailored to the needs of their customers. Fagor Automation will be part of the PERKS project with a use case related to the machine commissioning process. The main objective is to improve knowledge transfer between technicians and to optimize the process, based on state-of-the-art digital tools.

IDC (International Data Corporation) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, IT events, telecommunications, and consumer technology market research, counting on the expertise of more than 1,100 analysts in 110 countries worldwide. IDC’s foundation research is based on approximately 300,000 interviews per year to ICT business users or suppliers (of which 60,000 in Europe), producing an extensive amount of data covering all the technology domains. IDC, thanks to the combination of knowledge on the supply and demand will lead exploitation, go-to-market, dissemination and sustainability activities in PERKS. It is a major partner in the domain of data spaces, contributing to the related activities in BDVA, partner in data spaces for manufacturing and tourism and coordinator of the data space on Green Deal funded by DEP. Usage of this positioning is envisaged for the benefit of PERKS.

NTTD – part of NTT Group – is a trusted global innovator of IT and business services headquartered in Tokyo. We help clients transform through consulting, industry solutions, business process services, digital & IT modernization and managed services. NTTD enables them, as well as society, to move confidently into the digital future. We are committed to our clients’ long-term success and combine global reach with local client attention to serve them in over 50 countries around the globe.

Onlim is a high-tech Austrian SME providing technology solutions for automating customer communication via Chatbots and Voice Assistants by providing a multichannel voice / text AI platform for content creation, content management and content distribution. Onlim technology is based on state of the art research in semantic technologies, in particular KGs enabling better understanding of natural language dialogues and knowledge access for several industries including: Tourism, Utilities, E-Commerce, Social Insurance, and Education just to mention a few. In PERKS, Onlim will develop chatbot assistants from knowledge graphs providing conversational interfaces to access in natural language the procedural knowledge extracted and managed in the Procedural Knowledge Management System. Furthermore, Onlim will also lead the communication and dissemination activities of the project.

Siemens is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, Siemens creates technology with the purpose of adding real value for and markets, helping them to transform the everyday for billions of people. Siemens participation in the project will be carried out by the horizontal research and development unit Technology (T), which provides expertise regarding strategically important areas to ensure the company’s technological future.

Beko Europe is a leading home appliances business, committed to improving the lives of its customers through a wide range of innovative and sustainable household products and solutions. Beko Europe’s 75% shares are owned by Beko B.V and 25% are owned by Whirlpool Corporation. With more than 20,000 employees, Beko Europe operates 11 production sites across Europe, with an annual production capacity of approximately 24 million white goods products. Production sites are located in Italy in Cassinetta di Biandronno, Melano, Comunanza, and Siena; in Poland, in Wroclaw, Radomsko and Lodz; in Slovakia, in Poprad; in the UK in Yate; and in Romania in Ulmi and Gaesti.

Vienna University of Economic and Business (WU) has a long-standing research experience in symbolic-AI technologies (such as ontology engineering and knowledge graphs) thus being aligned with the core technology stack that underlies PERKS. Furthermore, WU complements the consortium with two main topics: First, WU provides expertise/methods/tools in Human in the loop (HiL) systems which will form the basis for human-centric verification of procedural knowledge graphs in PERKS. WU bring in this expertise, among others, from the prior HOnEst research project. Second, WU brings to the project expertise/tooling in system modelling and auditability, especially from the prior OBARIS project, which will be used to ensure the transparency of the knowledge graph extraction process. WU will also support the consortium with scientific dissemination activities.