Research Roadmap Plan A

Purpose of the Roadmap

The Roadmap will be used to develop a dialogue between cognitive systems research and industry applications that promotes the emergence of a shared systems engineering research agenda with industry impact. It therefore will be both a research roadmap and also an application roadmap relevant to industry. The core of the approach will be to drive it from applications and requirements. It therefore has both an outbound and an inbound purpose:

  • Outbound, from the community to broader industry: Foster the engagement of the cognitive systems engineering discipline with a range of industry sectors to define sector application scenarios and roadmaps
  • Inbound, within and for the research community: Develop a requirements-led roadmap for future cognitive systems capabilities that are common across domains and that motivates research.

Approach

  • Application: Harness industry energy and interest in specific problem domains
    • Centre around industry/academic research groups with particular domain connections
    • Place the development of a requirements led description at the centre: “these are the sorts of things we want to build, and this is why we can’t build them now”
    • Highly themed workshops (e.g. Vehicle foresight, environmental robotics, adaptive networks)
    • Link to sector ‘natural agenda’ and help develop it
  • Research: Create cross domain understanding of core research agenda
    • Focus on the scientific coherence of cognitive systems as a cross domain systems engineering discipline
    • Work back from longer term scenarios to short and medium term intermediate goals
    • Create map of goals, requirements and capabilities grounded in application scenarios
  • Foresight: Work in partnership with EU Cognition research planning and industry outreach
    • Help create links to relevant industry groups
    • Maintain alignment with ongoing research planning in Cog Sys and related programmes

Outcomes

  • A set of application scenarios, and sector roadmaps, defined in collaboration with representatives of industry sectors
  • A research roadmap linking all the applications to a common scientific language of requirements and capabilities, built by the research community for the research community
  • New dialogues and collaborations between industry and research

Outline Plan

  • January 2007: Roadmap Kick-off Meeting
    • Invited industry & academic attendees
    • Identify people willing to contribute
    • Identify a small number of sectors to start process
    Based on participant feedback, the top three sectors that we intend to move ahead on are: Humanoid robotics, Intelligent Transport, and Industrial Robotics.
  • Mar – June 2007
    • First scientific workshop to create first cut language for requirements and produce roadmap skeleton
  • July 2007 onwards
    • First round of sector workshops to identify landmark applications
    • Bring together first round application and scientific work and organise next round of work