MUHAI - Meaning and Understanding in Human-centric AI is a 4-year Horizon 2020 Project funded by the European Commission, within the Enhanced European Innovation Council (EIC) Research and Innovation (RIA) action "FET Proactive - Boosting emerging technologies" (FETPROACT-EIC-05-2019).

The MUHAI project explores a radically new approach to push the envelope of Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to come to grips with meaning and understanding. Meanings are distinctions (categories) that are relevant for prediction, classification, communication, problem solving or other mental tasks. The meaning of an experience include the events, actors, entities and what roles they play, the temporal, spatial and causal relations between events, the intentions, goals, interests, and motivations of the actors, and the values and emotions that implicitly underlie their behavior. Understanding is the process of constructing meaning by casting episodic events into coherent narratives that explain experiences and allow them to be integrated into a Personal Dynamic Memory.

The MUHAI project will significantly advance our ability to capture more of the rich and complex understanding that humans are capable of. 

Project partners bring to the table the enormous advances in recent years in technical AI components (such as deep learning networks), semantic resources (such as knowledge graphs) and simulation engines (as developed for VR - virtual reality). 

From this basis they will forge a number of innovative breakthroughs related to the nature and functioning of Personal Dynamic Memory, integrate them within human-centric AI systems, and systematically test them in two challenging human-centric case studies emphasizing AI for the common good: (i) learning common sense every day pragmatic knowledge required in everyday activities, and (ii) collaborative support for historical and social science research when constructing narratives to understand past and current social developments, in particular the origins and persistence of inequality in our society. 

VIU, through its Program on Sustainability - TEN, is a partner of the project and leader of Work Package 4 - Communication, Dissemination and Ethics - under the coordination of prof. Luc Steels, who is also MUHAI Scientific Coordinator. 

MUHAI began on October 1, 2020 and will last 4 years (September 31, 2024). 

The Kick Off meeting took place on October 5-9, 2020 at Venice International University, Italy, with a blended online and in person participation. The week-long event also served as a workshop, where the project partners shared their background knowledge on the core subjects, including the notions of meaning, understanding, and the creation of narratives within the framework of Human-Centric AI.

Project website: www.muhai.org 

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For further information on MUHAI Project please contact Alessandra Fornetti, Executive Director of the TEN Program on Sustainability at alessandra.fornetti@univiu.org

List of participants: 

The University of Bremen (UHB) is MUHAI project Coordinator. 

MUHAI Scientific Board Members: 
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark)
Andrea Baronchelli (City University of London)

MUHAI Stakeholders: 
SAP (Vanessa Micelli)
Telefonica Innovacion Alpha (Tarek Besold)
International Institute of social History Amsterdam (KNAW, the Netherlands)