The mid-term review of the COALA project was successfully held on the 5th of May 2022. The objectives of the review were to present: a) the trustworthy voice-enabled digital assistant for the manufacturing Industry, b) the COALA vision for AI in manufacturing via the development of a human-centered Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA) that provides a more proactive and pragmatic approach to support operative situations characterized by cognitive load, time pressure, and little or zero tolerance for quality issues.
The COALA Team successfully reported the project progress from month M01 to month M18. It presented the work performed for cognitive assistance consisting of a composition of trustworthy AI components with a voice-enabled digital intelligent assistant as an interface integrated and framed with the COALA Solution. The COALA Solution supports workers that need to use analytics tools and new workers that perform on-the-job training. By M18, the COALA system architecture and its interfaces have been specified, as well as the first prototype of the core demonstrator, COALA Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA), and some key components/services. These services include the Prescriptive Quality Analytics, the Cognitive Advisor services, the Product Avatar and Data Collection service, the Data Anonymization service, Dialogue and Interface Localization service.
The UBITECH Team is the Technical Coordinator and the Integrator of the COALA project. During the review, we presented the COALA Conceptual Architecture taking into consideration the functional, non-functional, system and security requirements, defined the different data bridges / interfaces, APIs and data security and privacy-preserving measures. We presented the principles, tools and methods for continuous integration which ease code maintenance, automated pipelines for the COALA Solution deployment, the first integrated COALA prototype with a security matching industry needs, as well as the data anonymization service and the localization services to digital assistant’s responses in the languages used by the workers. The overall evaluation of the activities is positive and recommendations for future activities have been provided by the reviewers.
