The Alliance is organised in a Steering Committee and a Technical Board. The Steering Committee is composed of representatives of each of the members and is in charge of the management of the entity, while keeping it in line with the objectives of its members. The Technical Board develops and maintains the source code according to the roadmap set up by the Steering Committee and integrates the progress across the many modules of the system.
Members
These are the current members of the Agents United Alliance:
If you are interested in joining the Alliance, check out the Community section.
History
The Agents United Alliance and its open platform started as an initiative for promoting and taking advantage of the results of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action “Council of Coaches” (#769553). The Agents United Alliance’s founding members are initially partners that participated in the Council of Coaches project.
The Alliance started taking shape within Council of Coaches at the end of 2019 and was officially constituted later in 2020. The open platform software however was made public earlier, during May 2020, when the source code was transferred from the private repositories of Council of Coaches to Github. It is available under the LGPL license.
Council of Coaches
The task of the Council of Coaches project (or COUCH for short) was to design, develop and evaluate a virtual coaching system targeted at older adults that are undergoing life-changing events that have a potential negative impact on physical, cognitive, mental, and/or social well-being as well as elderly users suffering from Diabetes or Chronic Pain. The Council of Coaches project was funded under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. It started in 2017 and runs through 2020.
The virtual coach system is manifested as a group of virtual characters: a council where each member represents a different knowledge domain. Coaching sessions consist of an interactive group discussion between the user and several members of the council, in which the user and his behaviors are the main topic of discussion. The project emphasizes deep character design based on sound theories from the video game and film worlds.
The project combines smart multimodal sensing technologies to seamlessly and opportunistically measure and model the user behavior in a comprehensive fashion, including physical, cognitive, mental and social aspects.
While the scope of the Council of Coaches was originally about health-related issues, the coaching framework it developed can be tailored for multiple purposes. This is what forms the core of the Agents United open platform.