Academic partners

The academic partners in SOCRATES offer academic courses, courses in complementary skills, and supervision of individual research projects. Each PhD student (denoted ESR or Early Stage Researcher) will do at least one academic secondment for collaboration with another ESR in an already defined joint research project that will be part of both ESRs’ PhD theses. The secondment will provide multidisciplinary training in new academic disciplines, including academic courses as well as courses in transferable and complementary skills, offered as part of the local PhD programme.

Umeå University, Sweden (UMU)
Prof. Thomas Hellström   (thomash@cs.umu.se)

Örebro University, Sweden (ORU)
Assoc. Prof. Amy Loutfi   (amy.loutfi@oru.se)

Universität Hamburg, Germany (HAM)
Prof. Dr. Stefan Wermter   (wermter@informatik.uni-hamburg.de)

Fraunhofer IPA, Stuttgart, Germany (FHG)
Dr. Birgit Graf   (birgit.graf@ipa.fraunhofer.de)

CSIC Barcelona, Spain (CSIC)
Dr. Guillem Alenyà   (galenya@iri.upc.edu)

University of the West of England, England (UWE)
Assoc. Prof. Sanja Dogramadzi   (Sanja.Dogramadzi@uwe.ac.uk)

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel (BGU)
Prof. Yael Edan   (yael@bgu.ac.il)

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Industrial partners

The industrial partners will host non-academic secondments tasks, be part of the Supervisory Board, and organise and contribute to the workshops with lectures on topics of their expertise and industrial needs and skills. During the non-academic secondments, all Industrial Supervisors will have special responsibility to provide intersectoral training; knowledge transfer from academia to industry by integrating and implementing developed research on commercial robots, exposure to all the critical aspects of industrial development throughout the product cycle lifetime, including software, hardware, and human and business considerations.

PAL Robotics, Barcelona, Spain (PAL-R)
Jordi Pages

Adele Robots (ADELE)
Celestino Alvarez

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End-user oriented partners

The end-user oriented partners of the consortium will provide access to testbeds and human test subjects, which are important for the user-centred research approach. Staff at these facilities will play an important role in the user-driven design research methodology by actively participating and providing important feedback for specifications, data acquisition, and end-user testing and evaluation.

Alfred Nobel Science Park, Örebro, Sweden (ANSAP)
Kjell Fagerström

Fundació ACE, Barcelona, Spain (FUN)
Lluís Tárraga Mestre

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Business oriented partners

The business oriented partners in the consortium will play an important role in training the ESRs in skills related to commercialisation of research ideas.  Each ESR will, throughout the project, have access to a local personal business coach with whom to discuss ideas for commercialisation of research. The business oriented partners will participate in the Business Plan Writing Course through seminars at Workshop 3, and by giving inspiration and feedback to the business plans the students write as part of the course. These coaches will provide direct inputs to the students hosted at UMU, UWE and BGU and to all students visiting these institutes along their secondments. Additionally, they will provide hands-on training towards the end of the project in live interviews and CV reviewing.

Center for Digital Innovation, Beer Sheva, Israel (CDI)
Boaz Gur-Lavie

UMINOVA, Umeå, Sweden (UMI)
Karl-Erik Johansson