The 10-year research programme ROBUST aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide sustainable solutions to societally relevant issues, such as in healthcare, logistics, media, food and energy. By realizing the economic potential of AI, it can contribute to sustainable growth. Increasing the reliability and understanding of AI is an important factor.

AI out of the black box

AI is still often seen by outsiders as a black box: inscrutable and somewhat mysterious. Developing explanatory and evaluation methods are therefore an essential part of the programme. To achieve that, the focus is on better understanding the principles underlying sound AI and machine learning: accuracy, reliability, repeatability, resilience and security.

Talent recruitment

With the funds available from ROBUST, 17 new public-private partnership labs will be launched to become part of the Innovation Centre for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), which now consists of 30 labs. According to NWO, the welcome development of this expansion is the emphasis on talent recruitment, as 170 PhD positions will become available for the next ten years. With this, ROBUST further expands the Dutch AI ecosystem.

Financial injection

NWO places the financial injection through the so-called long-term programmes (LTPs) of the Knowledge and Innovation Covenant (KIC) innovation programme. By doing so, NWO offers strong public-private consortia the opportunity to apply for 10-year funding. ROBUST unites 17 knowledge institutions, 19 co-financing industrial partners and 15 civil society organisations.

With the financial injection from NWO as well as co-financing from public and private partners, the total budget for ROBUST comes to 87.3 million euros. Of this, 7.5 million is from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. The ROBUST programme is complementary to the AiNed programme, and will shape cooperation on dissemination, consolidation and valorisation of results, and retaining talent for the Netherlands. This contributes to the ambition from the government's Digital Economy Strategy to be an international leader in the human-centred development and application of the key digital technology AI.

Programme leader of ROBUST is Prof Maarten de Rijke (UvA). ‘The challenges for developing robust AI are enormous. We are focusing on three focal points: talent development, learning-by-doing and joint knowledge development between knowledge institutions, companies and societal parties. NWO is now making a very important and large contribution to this, which is necessary to take research to the next level,’ said the university professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval.

Clinics and open publications

ROBUST aims to set an ambitious, technology-driven research agenda for trusted AI. The consortium also creates economic impact and contributes to sustainable growth through research in close public-private partnerships. The programme should also exploit a number of important societal opportunities, such as knowledge transfer through open-access publications, knowledge sharing, community events and special AI clinics aimed at SMEs and start-ups.

Start-ups and SMEs

In order to make the growth of AI a shared responsibility, cooperation with regional social partners is deployed. By seeking collaboration with start-ups and SMEs, ROBUST provides a ‘learning by doing’ research approach that looks at relevant practical issues.

KIC seeks technological economic opportunities

The Knowledge and Innovation Covenant (KIC) research programme stands for ground-breaking innovative solutions with social and economic impact. Companies, knowledge institutions and governments invest together in business application of knowledge to tackle major societal challenges with smart technologies. This is how we secure jobs and income in the future. This is laid down in the Knowledge and Innovation Covenant (KIC) 2020-2023, which is in line with the central government’s mission-driven top sectors and innovation policy. NWO brings companies and knowledge institutions together and funds groundbreaking research based on their innovative, impactful research proposals.

Strategy

Within the Knowledge and Innovation Covenant, NWO sets up a limited number of long-term programmes (LTP). An LTP stimulates long-term and vigorous national development of a scientific field in the Netherlands, focused on a societal theme and/or key technology.