Over the past decade, researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made ground-breaking progress on long-standing problems. Now that AI is becoming increasingly part of our daily lives, we need to avoid being ruled by machines and their decisions. Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. It takes human expertise and intentionality into account when making meaningful decisions and perform appropriate actions, together with ethical, legal and societal values. Our goal is to design Hybrid Intelligent systems, an approach to Artificial Intelligence that puts humans at the center, changing the course of the ongoing AI revolution. By providing intelligent artificial collaborators that interact with people we amplify human capacity for learning, reasoning, decision making and problem solving. The challenge is to build intelligent systems that augment and amplify rather than replace human intelligence, that leverage our strengths and compensate for our weaknesses. Such Hybrid Intelligence requires meaningful interaction between artificial intelligent agents and humans to negotiate and align goals, intentions and implications of actions. Developing HI needs fundamentally new solutions to core research problems in AI: current AI technology surpasses humans in many pattern recognition and machine learning tasks, but it falls short on general world knowledge, common sense, and the human capabilities of (i) collaboration, (ii) adaptivity, (iii) explanation and (iv) awareness of norms and values. These challenges will be addressed in four interconnected research lines: Collaborative HI: How to design and build intelligent agents that work in synergy with humans, with awareness of each others strengths and limitations? Adaptive HI: HI systems will need to operate in situations not anticipated by their designers, and cope with variable team configurations, preferences and roles. Explainable HI: Intelligent agents and humans need to be able to mutually explain to each other what is happening (shared awareness), what they want to achieve (shared goals), and what collaborative ways they see of achieving their goals (shared plans and strategies Responsible HI: Values such as transparency, accountability, trust, privacy and fairness be an integral part of the design and operation of HI systems. Applications in healthcare, education and science will demonstrate the potential of Hybrid Intelligence: virtual agents and robots will help children with concentration problems to study better; virtual agents and robots will support children in paediatric oncology wards by providing them with entertainment and information during prolonged hospital stays; virtual agents will collaborate with scientists on large scale analysis of the literature, formulate new hypotheses and help design experiments to test them. The team brings together top AI researchers from across the Netherlands in machine learning, knowledge representation, natural language understanding & generation, multi-agent systems, human collaboration, cognitive psychology, multimodal interaction, social robotics, AI & law and ethics of technology. We will initiate a Hybrid Intelligence Centre (HI Centre) to host joint research facilities, multidisciplinary PhD programs, and training and exchange programs. Sustainability of the HI Centre is ensured through tenure track positions with guaranteed long-term funding from the participating universities.

Antibiotic resistance is on the rise. Bacteria-killing viruses (phages) are a promising alternative to combat resistant infections. Unfortunately, whereas antibiotics have a broad spectrum for many species of bacterial pathogens, phages are highly specific. Therefore, every patient requires testing of many phages to find a candidate suitable for therapeutic use. With current methods, this often requires more time than a patient can afford. Here we propose a novel method where we pool many phages together in a single test and find successful candidates via rapid, third-generation sequencing. This quick screen will allow a precision medicine approach to phage therapy.

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Humans have strongly influenced the chemical composition of the global atmosphere primarily by the burning of organic material. The mix of gases and particles that is emitted depends strongly on the burning conditions, in particular the combustion efficiency. Despite its importance, regional variations and trends in combustion efficiency remain poorly quantified, and are a major factor limiting the accuracy of global anthropogenic emissions inventories. Our aim is to develop a new method for mapping the global distribution of burning efficiency using satellite measurements. In this project, we make use of total column densities of NO2 and CO from the new TROPOMI satellite instrument, to be launched in August this year. The ratio of these compounds is not only an excellent proxy of burning conditions, but can also be used to improve the quantification of the NOx lifetime in pollution plumes. TROPOMI is exceptionally well suited for this, as it measures both compounds with excellent spatial resolution, global coverage, and similar vertical sensitivity. Using the meso-scale chemistry and transport model WRF-CHEM, we avoid the long averaging times that are needed in many existing methods for quantifying local emissions of NOx and CO from satellite data. Thus, it becomes feasible to study the seasonal dynamics of emission ratios in biomass burning. Yet, our method is efficient enough for application to large data volumes. Its value for monitoring the burning conditions in urban environments and biomass burning will increase with additional years of data from TROPOMI and follow on missions.

The proposed research studies the conditions that enhance the potential of crowdfunding as a source of income for the cultural heritage sector. This is important because crowdfunding, the raising of external funding from a large audience approached via social networks or social media, is an emerging phenomenon that is hardly studied by scientists. Our research is also highly practical relevant for the cultural heritage sector as it is facing voluminous reductions of subsidies and requires alternative sources of income. The research proposal answers two questions: 1. What characteristics are typical for successful crowdfunding projects? A postdoc project will look into this in a comparative analysis of previous Dutch crowdfunding projects. The challenge for crowdfunding is to move beyond an initial financing by family and friends (first tier crowdfunders) to people at a larger social and geographical distance (second tier crowdfunders). Demonstrating the mechanisms that successfully extend crowdfunding projects from first tier to second tier crowdfunders forms the focus of this analysis. 2. How do characteristics of individual crowdfunders and project characteristics influence donation behavior in crowdfunding projects? After conducting a literature review a PhD researcher will execute multiple field experiments in which we control for project characteristics (e.g. rewards, control and participation). The research will be conducted by researchers from Organization Sciences and Philanthropic Studies at VU University Amsterdam. The research team also includes experts of four crowdfunding firms: Voordekunst, Seeds, Flintwave and Douw&Koren. The field experiments exclusively involve cultural heritage organizations. Key words: 1. Crowdfunding 2. Online volunteers 3. Donation behavior 4. Rewards 5. Motivation 6. Cultural heritage