Research |

XAI-FinCrime

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: Innosuisse · September 2025 – August 2028

The project aims to transform financial crime prevention by leveraging machine learning, generative AI, and explainable AI (XAI) to enhance fraud detection and compliance management. It uses ML models for transactional behavior analysis and multimodal LLMs for unstructured data processing, with counterfactual explainers to improve AI decision transparency.

Objectives

Significantly reduce the typical False Positive rate of 95% found in current rule-based industry standards
Improve F1-scores, accuracy, and True Positive rates compared to existing solutions
Enhance user understanding of AI systems to reduce investigation effort per alert
Validate innovations through pilot studies with financial institutions

EXperiMental: Wearable Technology and EXplainable AI for Mental Health and Inclusivity in Schools

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF, grant 230189 · July 2025 – December 2028

Mental health is a vital part of our overall well-being, especially during early adolescence, a time of rapid growth and emotional development. The initiative explores how AI, smartphones, and smartwatches can promote mental well-being in schools through collaboration among psychology, sports science, computer science, and ethics experts across Romania, Croatia, and Switzerland.

The research involves two major studies: (1) observing daily routines using digital tools and mental health check-ins, and (2) applying AI methods to identify patterns signaling mood or mental health changes. The aim is creating personalized, understandable suggestions for young people, teachers, and school psychologists.

Objectives

Understand how physical activity, sleep, and phone use relate to adolescent mental health
Design youth-friendly, privacy-protective monitoring methods via mobile devices
Develop personalised suggestions, such as encouraging a walk or improving sleep habits
Create ethically sound guidelines for technology use supporting adolescent mental well-being in schools

XAI-PAC: Towards Explainable and Private Affective Computing

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF · January 2024 – January 2028

Wearable devices combined with AI methods can improve lives through affective computing, which tracks factors related to emotional states and stress for remote mental-health management. However, current AI methods are “black-boxed” and require vast sensitive data. The project addresses the need for explainable and privacy-aware affective computing.

Objectives

Develop novel eXplainable AI (XAI) tools for affective-computing methods based on wearable sensor data with multimodal, interactive capabilities
Develop privacy-aware ML methods for wearable sensor data, including privacy-aware personalization and domain-adaptation
Fuse privacy awareness and explainability into a single integrated approach

TRUST-ME: TRUstworthy enhancement of job SaTisfaction and productivity using Micro-sensing in work Environments

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF · October 2023 – October 2026

The TRUST-ME initiative addresses employee well-being in modern workplaces by examining the complex relationship between employee productivity, job satisfaction, and well-being. The endeavor combines sensing technology and AI to create personalized monitoring tools, emphasizing multimodal monitoring and modeling of job satisfaction and productivity, as well as secure and private AI for productivity assessment. The approach relies on workplace sensors and privacy-preserving techniques, such as federated learning, to deliver insights while protecting employee autonomy.

SmartCHANGE

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: Horizon Europe · May 2023 – May 2027

The SmartCHANGE project addresses the shift from communicable to non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) in developed countries. According to WHO, more than 70% of deaths worldwide are attributed to NCDs, with projected costs rising from 5.5 trillion € (2010) to over 12 trillion € by 2030. Most NCDs share risk factors including obesity, low physical fitness, poor nutrition, and sedentary behavior. The project aims to create trustworthy, AI-based decision-support tools for assessing NCD risk in children and youth.

Objectives

Build accurate machine learning models for predicting lifetime NCD risk (cardiovascular and metabolic disease) in children and youth
Ensure risk-prediction models and AI tools are trustworthy
Develop tools for health professionals and citizens to improve health outcomes
Engage users in requirements elicitation and participatory design
Conduct proof-of-concept studies across four real-world healthcare scenarios in different countries
Develop implementation recommendations and dissemination strategies
Create an exploitation and sustainability plan

PROSELF: Semi-automated Self-Tracking Systems to Improve Personal Productivity

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF, grant 197242 · October 2022 – September 2025

PROSELF aims at investigating how emerging mobile and wearable technology can help provide an understanding of what makes people feel (and be) productive, and subsequently, to assist users with managing their productivity on a daily basis.

The project addresses concerns about workplace monitoring by focusing on knowledge workers’ empowerment rather than employer control. While existing “productivity apps” help monitor work activities, PROSELF advocates for systems that consider environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors in one’s feeling of (and indeed, observed) performance at work.

Objectives

Provide novel methods to enable self-monitoring at work in a semi-automated manner
Develop a sound modeling framework to identify proxies of specific performance indicators in users’ context data
Devise an adequate architecture to support the definition and execution of anticipatory decisions
Critically evaluate these approaches in-situ in a range of field studies

BASE: Behavioral Analytics for Smart Environments

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF · December 2020 – November 2023

Behavioral analytics is widely recognized as being key to providing new services and solutions in many application domains. The key to behavioral analytics is to be able to identify and track individual user interactions across time and space (e.g., Web server logs). However, currently there are no viable mechanisms for service providers to track user interactions in the real world without raising significant privacy concerns. BASE develops a new privacy-aware method for understanding human behavior through activity traces (e.g., GPS, smartphone app launches). The work is based on state-of-the-art federated machine-learning approaches.

From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: COST · March 2017 – March 2021

The terms “Sharing Economy” or “Collaborative Economy” have been commonly used in recent years to refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models and forms of work. The main objective of this action is to develop a European network of actors (including scholars, practitioners, communities and policy makers) focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice-focused approach.

Objectives

To develop deeper understanding of the collaborative economy phenomenon by studying sociotechnical systems and human practices across local, regional, national and international initiatives
To discuss and critique current discourse elements on the collaborative economy, proposing richer definitions and characterization
To formulate a European research agenda for socio-technical aspects, including technological platform design, legal, ethical and financial implications
To articulate a European research perspective aligned with EU values of social innovation and Europe 2020 strategy objectives for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy

Uncovering Privacy Concerns for Public Display Personalisation

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: Google Faculty Grant · July 2016 – June 2017

The focus of this project is to understand personalization and privacy needs of actual public display users. The project will deploy a rich set of personalizable applications on an existing public display network deployed across a university campus, and distribute mobile phone applications (apps) to participants that let them personalize displays with various information feeds (e.g., bus schedules, Google+ feeds) automatically, i.e., as soon as the phone comes close to a display without manual intervention.

PersonAAL: Improving Quality of Life and Remote Care

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: EU AAL Programme · October 2015 – September 2018

The PersonAAL project aims at extending the time older people can live in their home environment by increasing their autonomy and assisting them in carrying out activities of daily living by means of intelligent and intuitive web applications enabling users to receive personalized and context dependent assistance directly in their own homes with the goal to improve quality of life and decrease healthcare delivery cost.

The initiative also seeks to provide older adults with useful and usable means for better managing their lifestyle by increasing awareness and control through tailored information delivered intuitively.

SHARING21: Future Digital Sharing Interfaces

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF · October 2014 – September 2018

The SHARING21 project aims at understanding current practices of sharing personal content, both explicitly (e.g., with friends and family) and implicitly (e.g., with service providers through the use of their services), and to uncover corresponding end-user concerns across a wide variety of content, in order to map the design space for future user interfaces that empower end-users to stay in control of their shared data in a world full of autonomous IoT devices.

CYBERPARKS: ICT and Public Spaces

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: COST Action TU1306 · April 2014 – March 2018

The Action deals with opportunities and risks ICTs offer to the user, via the appreciation, design and usage of public spaces. It exploits the benefits of interweaving a green experience with digital engagement via sharing knowledge, experiences and ideas, and analysing public spaces.

RECALL: Enhanced Human Memory

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: EU FP7, FET Open, grant 612933 · Nov 2013 – Oct 2016

RECALL aims to re-think and re-define the notion of memory augmentation. The project will harness recent developments in capture technology and information retrieval and develop a new paradigm for memory augmentation technologies that are technically feasible, desired by users, and beneficial to society.

The initiative combines technological interventions with basic research questions in memory psychology to advance memory augmentation from niche clinical use to mainstream adoption, developing novel capture systems and feedback mechanisms through displays and mobile devices.

Objectives

Automate the acquisition of personal memories
Investigate how technological feedback can enhance memory retention and attenuation

APD: Attentive Public Displays

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: Hasler Foundation · May 2012 – Apr 2016

The goal of the project is to create a system of attentive displays deployed in a crowded place that are able to grasp the situational context of its viewers and use this information to adapt their behavior.

The system employs 3D sensors for depth imaging and computer vision algorithms to infer crowd behavioral patterns, then adapts display behavior accordingly.

SAPIENT: Supporting Fundamental Rights, Privacy and Ethics in Surveillance Technologies

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: EU FP7, SEC · Mar 2011 – Jun 2014

SAPIENT is a 40-month Collaborative Project which aims to specify how and when smart surveillance should be used (or not) and its characteristics to be effective and scalable to rapidly adapt to changing situations.

The project will provide the Commission, data protection authorities and other stakeholders with a set of criteria for data protection and integrity that could be used to verify that surveillance systems and the sharing of information respect the privacy of citizens.

Objectives

Establish guidelines for smart surveillance deployment
Create criteria for data protection and integrity verification in surveillance systems
Ensure privacy respect in information-sharing practices

PD-NET: Towards Future Pervasive Display Networks

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: EU FP7, FET Open · May 2010 – Jun 2013

The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet.

The initiative seeks to investigate scientific challenges and emerging technologies necessary for establishing extensive networks of pervasive public displays with integrated sensors.

PALS: Privacy-Aware Location Sharing

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: SNF · Apr 2010 – Aug 2013

Many consumers today willingly give up their current location information in exchange for location-based social services. This development poses great privacy risks. PALS aims at designing, implementing, and evaluating novel methods and tools to facilitate the privacy-aware sharing of location data with friends, strangers, and operators. Its goal is to offer a decentralized approach that supports all needed features of location sharing systems without the need to centrally collect location data.

LiSS: Living in Surveillance Societies

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Funding: COST · Apr 2009 – Feb 2013

The primary objective of the Action is to increase and deepen knowledge about living and working in the surveillance age, in order to better understand the consequences and impacts of enhanced surveillance, and subsequently to make recommendations about its future governance and practice.