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Industry Engagement

What IIIA can offer

IIIA-CSIC can support businesses learn and incorporate the latest results in artificial intelligence. We are keen to support innovation and industrial development through different means, including industrial projects and collaborations, technology consultancy and advice, executive short courses and training, and PhD student projects.

 

Technology transfer & development is led by our UDT unit.

IIIA is committed to supporting businesses in their transformation to the digital economy, powered by the latest advances in artificial intelligence.

Consulting Services

 

  • Consulting on AI with the aim of improving businesses' products and services or automating their internal processes.

  • Our consulting services are specialised on research and innovation with AI and can include software development.

Collaborative Research

 

  • Joining bilateral or multiparty collaborative research for novel applications of existing artificial intelligence technologies, or the development of new models and algorithms that can be applied to business cases.

Education & Training

 

  • Collaborating with a business to improve its internal research and innovation capacity through the formation of new PhDs.

  • Providing executive training in the format of personalised short courses on artificial intelligence applied to a given business or sector.

Start-ups

 

  • Supporting PhD students to create spin-offs.

  • Supporting external innovators and entrepreneurs whose aim is to create new technology-based businesses.

Collaboration with businesses is articulated through different models.

Consulting Projects

 

  • Having a IIIA team working on a research problem or question faced by a company. The company outsources the research part of their project, or the IIIA team or researcher joins the company's team in the development of its products and services. Projects are adapted to the companies' needs and regulated by a contract. Types of projects are viability and feasibility studies, tecnology consulting, and can include software development.

Collaborative Projects

 

  • Collaborating by having two research groups, one from the company and one from IIIA, to join forces on a pre-defined research challenge. The research project is led by the company and is driven by the company's needs. Projects can be contracted directly by the company or supported by a public or private grant.

  • Collaborating through a consortium of research organisations and companies that join forces to solve a big research challenge. Usually, the research is funded by national or European grants, and the projects can be led either by a research organisation or by a company.

Industrial Ph.D.

 

  • Collaborating in defining a PhD thesis, co-directing it, and hosting a company's PhD students. Industrial PhDs can be directly contracted by the company or supported by a public or private grant.

Executive Training

 

  • Providing tailor-made courses and workshops on AI technologies, adapted to a business or sector's needs.

Technology Commercialisation

 

  • On demand licensing of technologies.

  • Supporting start-ups based on IIIA technologies. The IIIA technology transfer team works with internal and external entrepreneurs in the process of transferring technologies to new ventures.

  • Collaborating with incubators to offer new technologies, or advising their incubated companies. 

IIIA researchers' broad expertise in artificial intelligence can be applied to develop a custom-made solution for solving a given business challenge. 

Multiagent Systems

Combinatorial Optimisation

 

Optimisation applications are ubiquitous in modern society and arise in networking, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, reservation systems, and emergency response systems, to name a few. Furthermore, optimisation is a core, transversal technique for artificial intelligence, since many AI problems require to solve some type of optimization problem. Solving an optimisation problem boils down to finding best available values of some objective function given a defined domain. 

IIIA specialises on the field of combinatorial optimisation, a particular sub-field of optimization that is concerned with computing the best solution in a usually very large space of alternatives.

Main applications: 

Simulation  |  Decision Support Systems  |  Mobility  |  Supply Chain Management  |  Smart Cities  |  E-Procurement  |  Robotics

Machine Learning

Recommender Systems

 

Recommenders are data-driven systems that automatically detect users' preferences while interacting with a computer system or application. A typical application of a recommender system is presenting new items or products (clothing, news, songs, films, books) to a user while she/he browses information online.

We have broad experience in the standard recommendation algorithms, such as collaborative filtering or content-based filtering algorithms. However, nowadays, recommender systems typically combine several approaches to create hybrid systems called multi-recommender systems. 

Check out our approach to Hybrid Recommender Systems

Main applications: 

Content Recommendation | User Engagement | E-Commerce | Streaming Services | Social Media Platforms

Multiagent Systems

Negotiation Systems 

 

In a computational environment, such as the internet, smart grids, or smart cities, individual software agents must autonomously interact with each other to satisfy their goals. Negotiation systems enable groups of agents to reach mutual agreements regarding their belief, purpose, or plan. 

Negotiation is one of IIIA's most prolific research lines, having broad experience in automatic negotiation techniques such as auctions, protocols in the style of contract net, and argumentation.  

Check out our approach to Negotiation Systems

Main applications: 

Automation Smart Cities IoT Smart Contracts Robotics

Machine Learning

Case-Based Reasoning

 

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a machine learning technique that uses specific knowledge of previously experienced, concrete problem situations (cases) to solve a similar problem. The new problem is solved by finding similar past cases and reusing them. CBR is an incremental learning approach since a new experience is retained each time a problem has been solved, making it available for future questions.

IIIA has largely developed this knowledge-based paradigm because it can deliver explainable machine learning solutions.

Check out our approach to CBR Systems

Main applications: 

Decision Support Systems  |  Automation  |  Health  |  Robotics

Multiagent Systems

Computational Concept Blending

 

Concept blending theory has inspired novel approaches in computational creativity and Artificial Intelligence. At IIIA, we have developed a uniform model of computational, conceptual blending based on the notion of 'amalgam' from case-based reasoning (CBR), which computes the combination of two cases in the CBR problem-solving process into a new 'blended' case through a process of generalisation and unification.

Our model tackles the process of concept invention in mathematics and music. The objective is to provide human creativity with different computational approaches. 

Check out our approach to Computational Concept Blending

Main applications: 

Concept Invention  |  Creativity 

Multiagent Systems

Trust & Reputation

 

Trust and reputation techniques address the problem of automatically finding, in an open distributed system, the most appropriate entity to collaborate with, usually understanding such entity as a person, a computational agent, or a web-service. Our data-driven approaches provide mechanisms for assessing trust based on learning from past experiences. The mechanisms may be applied to any real-world application where past commitments are recorded and observations are made concerning the outcome of these commitments.   

IIIA researchers have extensive experience in developing trust and reputation algorithms, providing means for its calculation in scenarios such as networked organisations, social networks, or online communities.

Main applications: 

Automation  |  Decision Support   |  People Analytics  |  Recommendations

Our researchers and PhDs students produce novel AI algorithms and software applications that solve advanced computational problems. Collaboration and partnerships between CSIC and companies are welcome to take these technologies to commercial products or services.

Eduteams

Smart Education

 

Cultivation of teamwork, community building, and leadership skills are valuable classroom goals that are being introduced at shcools more and more each day. Our aim is to contribute with software technologies that provide teachers with tools to create diverse teams that perform well at different levels.

Eduteams is a webapp that supports the composition of teams of students in the classroom. Eduteams uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms to cluster students creating a well balanced and competent team for a particular assignment. 

Entrepreneurs are being sought to exploit this software for the development of team formation based solutions. 

Eduteams' website

[Free application]

uHelp

Social Networking

 

uHelp is a mobile app that allows people to find help within their community, for example, find someone to pick up my kid from school, someone to lend me a ladder for my works this weekend, … Finding help is based on an intelligent algorithm that is based on trust and friendship level. The application creates a community of mutual help, building up a large social network that addresses people's everyday need.  

The application is completely free, and both the requests for help and help itself are free and based on altruistic volunteers.

Entrepreneurs are being sought to exploit this App or its core algorithms for their innovations.

uHelp's website

App available at Google Play and Apple Store

[Free application]

Come4RIDE

Sustainable Mobility 

 

Come4RIDE is a IIIA AI-based technology for the implementation of a large-scale sustainable ridesharing platform at a city-wide scale. The technology allows the organization of short-distance trips with users' own private cars, without the participation of professional drivers. It also provides matchings and routes taking into account QoS and environmental benefits. 

A ridesharing platform implemented with this technology can be a complementary solution to current public transportation systems that could result in social, economic and environmental benefits for cities that deploy it.

Industrial partners are being sought to exploit this software for the development of a sustainable shared mobility platform.

Come4RIDE's demonstration page

[Software Licensing]

BANDANA

Open Science

 

BANDANA is a Java framework designed for the development of automated negotiation agents that play the game of Diplomacy. The framework can be used also for benchmarking negotiation algorithms (agents).

BANDANA provides a negotiation server and uses a simplified negotiation language. It comes with a tutorial that explains how you can implement your own Diplomacy-playing, negotiating agents, and how you can let them play a game of Diplomacy, or even an entire Diplomacy tournament. 

If you want to refer to BANDANA in a scientific publication, please use the following citation: BibTeX  

Bandana's website

[Open Source]

Edu2Com

Smart Teams

 

Cultivation of teamwork, community building, and leadership skills are valuable classroom goals that are being introduced at shcools more and more each day. Our aim is to contribute with software technologies that provide teachers with tools to create diverse teams that perform well at different levels.

Eduteams is a webapp that supports the composition of teams of students in the classroom. Eduteams uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms to cluster students creating a well balanced and competent team for a particular assignment. 

Entrepreneurs are being sought to exploit this software for the development of team formation based solutions. 

Eduteams' website

[Free application]

IIIA's PhD spin-offs and start-ups, presented below, showcase our successfull collaboration with the industry.

For more information about our R&D projects with industry, please visit the UDT page (IIIA’s technology transfer and development unit). 

Pepermint

Innovation project 2015

 

Pepermint (an Enzyme Advizing Group´s spin-off) helps organisations execute their strategies on a day-to-day basis and share actions with all their teams. It makes use of its platform to increase KPIs by making use of AI techniques that detect best practices and highest performance members.

CogniCor

CSIC´s Spin-off 2012

 

CogniCor is the leading AI-based digital assistant platform that enables wealth advisors and insurance agents to reduce calls while enhancing service.

Strands

CSIC´s Spin-off 2004

 

Experts in Big Data, AI and Machine Learning since 2004, Strands creates highly-customizable digital money management software for top-tier financial institutions worldwide, and empowers people to be smarter with their money. Strands has carried out more than 700 implementations to date.

iSOCO

CSIC´s spin-off 1999

 

iSOCO provided AI based-solutions focused on automating the purchasing processes of companies, and transforming the purchasing function into a strategic and transversal one.
iSOCO was acquired in 2019 by Clever Global.