‘‘Background to the collaboration between VU & Deloitte regarding social robot Alice

Since 2017, the Vrije Universiteit (VU) and Deloitte are working together to develop social robot Alice. Alice is meant to partially relief loneliness of elderly people. Besides that, Alice contributes to the improvement of the quality of life and support of self-reliance. By using sensors, connections and other objects and tools and an easily set up voice interface, Alice can anticipate to the needs of her user.

A collaboration between VU & Deloitte

In 2017, VU & Deloitte joined forces to further develop social robot Alice. This enables the direct development and testing of scientific insights in practice. The goal is a robotic solution for the elderly, that is based on Alice-robot and -software which were previously developed in the VU research group SELEMCA, led by Johan Hoorn and Elly Konijn, which can help to partially tackle loneliness of elderly people.

The role and intention of the VU

In this collaboration, the VU is involved from her scientific contribution to social robotics, in which scientific values are secured. Within the VU the activities are mainly focused in the field of fundamental and applied research in social robotics. Researchers from different disciplines work together to achieve this, for example from Media Psychology at Communication Science and AI at Computer Science. Students can follow a cross-disciplinary master track ‘Socially Aware Robotics’. At this moment, several groups of students collaborate with Deloitte to execute their research project, on the one hand focused on so called ‘user tests’, ‘design’ and ‘engineering’, on the other hand on policy and implementation, and marketing.

The role and intention of Deloitte

Deloitte is involved with Alice with her Impact Foundation, a platform for societal initiatives. The Deloitte Impact Foundation enables employees from Deloitte to apply their knowledge, energy, and talents pro bono to make a positive impact on society. In 2017, Alice was included in the project portfolio of the Impact Foundation. Since then, as many as 80 employees of Deloitte became involved with the Alice project. Deloitte invests in the project by making knowledge available (strategy, social and technological innovation, design, data, privacy and change management). Involved employees get back an interesting societal and learning experience. Also when possible changes of the goals of the project occur in the future, Deloitte will not pursue a commercial interest with the project. Finally, Deloitte will not put the robot on the market. In case the partners within the collaboration want this, it will happen through a different party.

A short retrospective of what we have achieved already

2010-2015. (prior to collaboration):

• Development of care robot at the VU. The release of Alice 1.0 in 2015 was the result of the project Services of Electro-mechanical Care Agencies (SELEMCA) that the VU acquired in 2009 from the Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap within the national CRISP program (Creative Industries Scientific Program). During the project Alice was the motivation for developing artificial intelligence and her interaction with users led to designing the Robot Brain Server in 2016.

2017:

• Collaboration VU with the Impact Foundation of Deloitte

• Development new Alice vision and design criteria

• User study and experiments resulting in a first new prototype

2018:

• Co-creation to further develop the prototype: Alice 2.0

• Continuation of user study and experiments resulting in additional knowledge to optimize conversations

• Signing the Letter of Intent between VU & Deloitte

• Alice appears in several media, among which Brandpunt and AI for Good Summit

2019:

• Survival pilots during which Alice is placed with end users for a certain period of time, without human interference

• From September 2019 onwards, students from the VU can follow a multi-disciplinary master track ‘Socially Aware Robotics’ and become involved in the development of Alice through assignments

• Alice once again appears in several media, among which Skipr, NRC, FD, Omroep Max, conferences, AI for Good Summit

• The Letter of Intent is converted to a collaboration agreement

• Exploration of collaboration with additional parties

Robot Brain Server

For the Alice robot the project team strives to make use of the Robot Brain Server. The goal of the Robot Brain Server is to let the user interact safely and unwatched with one or more social robots.[1]

By signing this document Stichting VU and the Deloitte Alice Project Team endorse the importance of the entered into collaboration.

[1] The purpose of the Robot Brain Server is to allow the user to interact with one or more social robots in a safe and unobserved manner. The server is stored in a cabinet at home and only connects to the Internet if the user wants so. The robots are securely connected to the server, which runs all heavy-duty programs, including data management, security, and artificial intelligence. The Brain Server does learn about its user, but does not share that information with anyone unless the user wants to. The information can be shared through graded access. The user determines who may know what about the data stored in a data safe at the user's home. The Brain Server has a modular structure, allowing the user to replace a program with something he or she thinks is better suited. The integrity of the standard software is guaranteed by an independent foundation that checks the code for errors, viruses, malware, marketing and spyware.’’