The CITIA Roadmap Conference, with an impressive line-up of speakers and panellists, is around the corner (24-25 Feb in Brussels). We are excited to announce that the first version of the ROCKIT strategic roadmap, which will drive many of the sessions of the upcoming Conference and used to set the priorities of CITIA, is now available to view online.
To main goal of the roadmap is to engage public or private research organisations, including SMEs, into a constructive discussion towards full exploitation of new conversational interaction technologies. The roadmap should enable our community to compare prominent use cases, products and services, science and engineering capabilities, as well as readiness, needs and timeframes for future R&D. Entrepreneurs and researchers can use it to focus their R&D, partnerships and related strategic efforts.
This first version of the roadmap is the result of an on-going (2-year) consultative process which in its first year alone involved over 100 experts who provided their input during five physical workshops organised in conjunction with major sector events. For the science/technology areas alone, some 1,000 inputs were captured during these workshops. All those inputs were clustered, filtered and linked together across several layers, including:
- 10 societal Drivers & Constraints
- 5 generic R&D Scenarios
- 10 Product/Service Types, with the added value, a SWOT analysis and a 10 year timeline for each of them.
- 8 Science/Technology Areas, with cluster and 10 year timelines for each of them.
- 7 Resource Types
The graphical version as well as a presentation of the first version of the roadmap is easily accessible via http://tinyurl.com/ROCKIT-v1
Figure 1 Initial view showing five interrelated layers.
The initial view (depicted in Figure 1) shows the main interacting layers, including: Drivers & Constraints (the “why”); Scenarios; Product/Service Types (the “what”); Science/Technology Areas (the “how”); and Resources. By hovering over any item, one may choose to see either a) a short description of that item or b) the cross-layer relationships with other items.
Clicking on any of the Product/Service Types or Science/Technology Areas allows drilling down to detailed information such as a SWOT analysis of a Product/Service Type (Figure 2), or the foreseen 10 year timeline for a particular Science/Technology Area (Figure 3).
Figure 2 The SWOT analysis of Generic Personal Assistants, under Product/Service Types.
Figure 3 The 10 year timeline of the Natural Language Interpretation & Generation, under Science/Technology Areas.
We now very much encourage discussions around the roadmap’s contents before, during or after the Conference. We are particularly interested in:
- Verifying relationships between items
- Establishing their readiness levels as well as
- Measuring their expected social and economic impact.
If you want to be involved, just create a free account and visit the roadmap to add your comments and cast your votes.
Article contributed by Costis Kompis, Vodera
Costis Kompis is the managing partner of Vodera, a company that supports private and public organisations align their R&D activities, develop innovation strategies for emerging technologies and design new business models to capture market opportunities.
