The ROCKIT project

ROCKIT is a strategic roadmapping project for research and innovation in the area of natural conversational interaction. The primary scientific focus concerns interactive agents which are proactive, multimodal, social, and autonomous. A second focus concerns systems which can extract and exploit rich context and knowledge from heterogenous data sources.

The main goal of ROCKIT is the development of a Research and Innovation Roadmap which integrates the vision and innovation agendas of those organisations (concerned with R&D and exploitation) in the field across Europe, with a broad coverage across sectors. A key goal is to bring together public sector research organisations with commercial organisations at all scales, with a particular focus on SMEs that represent the majority of fragmented commercial activity in Europe.

A key aspect of ROCKIT will be to organise a European research and innovation community in the area of conversational interaction technologies, integrating a wide-range of commercial organisations with application and use links to the area. ROCKIT will be structured around a set of sector-based clusters including mobile applications, healthcare, education, games, broadcast media, robotics, law enforcement, and security.

ROCKIT is concerned with the development of proactive, multimodal, social, and autonomous agents which enable rich, conversational interactions between people and between people and machines. Such agents should feature:

•  Natural communication and interaction
• Proactive and autonomous behaviour
• Social norms corresponding to the current environment
• Awareness of the current context
• A capability for social and affective behaviour

As part of the strategic roadmapping action in the area of multimodal conversational interaction technologies, ROCKIT has ran in 2014 three consultation workshops at LREC, ICASSP and the LT-Innovate Summit. Interactions will also take place online, with a focus on generating a Research and Innovation Roadmap.

ROCKIT has arrived at a set of five target research and innovation scenarios, presented HERE. These scenarios represent a number of common themes arising from the workshops organized uring the process: accessibility, multilinguality, the importance of design, privacy by design, systems for all of human–human, human–machine, and human–environment interactions, robustness, security, potentially ephemeral interactions, and using the technology to enable fun.


For more information about ROCKIT, please visit : http://www.groupspaces.com/ROCKIT