Rockit

Roadmap for Conversational Interaction Technologies

ROCKIT is an EU DG CONNECT FP7 GA, which aims at developing a research and innovation roadmap in natural conversational interaction. ROCKIT is concerned with the development of proactive, multimodal, social, and  autonomous agents which enable rich, conversational interactions between people as well as between people and machines. ROCKIT’s community-building efforts aimed to streamline future research directions and bring together researchers from related fields.

ROCKIT is a strategic roadmapping proposal 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. ROCKIT has five key objectives:

1. Construction of a unifying roadmap for natural spoken and multimodal interaction;
2. Formation of a broad-based, cross-sector community mobilised around the ROCKIT roadmap, the Conversational Interaction Technology Innovation Alliance;
3. Recommendations for a common European platform based on an open architecture for Conversational Interaction Technologies;
4. Identification of a number of target scenarios to drive future research, innovation, and economic/social development;
5. Establishment of a research and innovation agenda for Conversational Interaction Technologies.

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.

The project consulted over 200 leading European and international LT experts who provided input over 1,200 inputs for the science/technology areas alone. Figure below provides an overview of relevant items for the scenario organized into Drivers and Constraints, Products and Services, Science and Technology Challenges and Resources.