Scientists and Dutch Pig Farmers in Dialogue About Tail Biting: Unravelling the Mechanism of Multi-stakeholder Learning.

Pig farmers and scientists appear to have different perspectives and underlying framing on animal welfare issues as tail biting and natural behaviour of pigs. Literature proposes a joint learning process in which a shared vision is developed. Using two different settings, a symposium and one-to-one dialogues, we aimed to investigate what elements affected joint learning between scientists and pig farmers. Although both groups agreed that more interaction was important, the process of joint learning appeared to be rather potentially dangerous for the farmer-scientist relationship. During the symposium, farmers were only moderately open for scientific knowledge and the issue of tail biting had the tendency to run into a deadlock. The setting was an influencing element for the degree of success, because the dialogues did lead to improved mutual trust and understanding of each other's framing and context. Another element was the degree of usability and absoluteness of scientific facts. They were frequently not concrete enough, too uncertain or not relating to the context of the farmers. In addition, some scientific facts were not recognized by the farmers. Both groups appeared to react and argue from their praxis, including their local environment, way of living, handling and understanding their environment. These praxises appeared to function as a filter, influencing the way of observing the environment, inducing 'blind spots' and misunderstandings. Stepping in each other's praxis might provide concrete and fusing insights, required to realize joint learning processes. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Robot Companions For Citizens: Roadmapping The Potential For Future Robots In Empowering Older People

The Future Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship Candi- date "Robot Companions for Citizens" (RCC) proposes a transformative initiative, addressing a cross-domain grand scientific and technological challenge, to develop a new class of machines and embodied information technologies, called Robot Companions for Citizens (RCCs) that can as- sist European society to achieve sustainable welfare. The central premise of RCC is that to solve many important problems in the real world one has to be physically instantiated and capable of action; information alone is not suficient. An important theme is that this new generation of safe and human-friendly robots could assist in extending the active indepen- dent lives of older citizens and help compensate for the demographic shift in the age of EU citizens. In this paper we summarise some of the main conclusions of the Flagship pilot in relation to developing robot technologies that can empower older European citizens