A Proposal for Semantic Map Representation and Evaluation

Semantic mapping is the incremental process of “mapping” relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on learning the semantic of environments based on their spatial location, geometry and appearance. Many methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, but the lack of a uniform representation, as well as standard benchmarking suites, prevents their direct comparison. In this paper, we propose a standardization in the representation of semantic maps, by defining an easily extensible formalism to be used on top of metric maps of the environments. Based on this, we describe the procedure to build a dataset (based on real sensor data) for benchmarking semantic mapping techniques, also hypothesizing some possible evaluation metrics. Nevertheless, by providing a tool for the construction of a semantic map ground truth, we aim at the contribution of the scientific community in acquiring data for populating the dataset

On Robots and Insurance

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Creating Innovative Regions: The role of universities in local growth and productivity

Professor Culkin was a member of the Report's Advisory Board.Our latest report aims to bust a myth – that the main contribution of universities to innovation is through the commercialisation of their research. Universities contribute so much more, particularly in their regions. Institutions like those in the Alliance are rooted in their regional economies. Many grew out of the needs of the industrial revolution and have been a stable presence ever since. They have longstanding networks of graduates in many different occupations and public sector bodies. They align their research activities to regional strengths. They are hubs for innovation activity and are well placed to take on strategic and leadership roles to ensure the economic prosperity and productivity of their regions

Collective intelligence, crowd dynamics, and co-creation: preliminary insights from a case study in Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs)

This article investigates crowd dynamics in co-creation settings. In particular, it aims to provide an understanding of how those dynamics eventually shape collective intelligence in co-creation activities, either enabling or bounding their capacity of scaling. Furthermore, different value perspectives are questioned through the shapes that co-creation practices may assume once moving from local groups and communities to a population assuming the dimension of the crowd. Thus, the article aims to contribute to the research on cooperative strategies involving users as innovators, with a specific focus on high tech industries and co-creation in experimental settings, suitable to lead to innovation related to emergent technologies. To this end, the article considers the early insights from the specific case of a robotics innovation facility based in Italy, where an ethnography has been carried out in 2018-2019 and presents the results from an early analysis of the data