ABOUT
MUSAE is a Horizon Europe project that aims to set up the MUSAE Factory Model and include it in a network of (E)DIHs, establishing a deep connection with the STARTS ecosystem, in order to build a continuous process for artists’ and tech providers’ collaboration. A well-established, verified, and structured approach to collaboration integrated into (E)DIHs can speed up the digital and green transformation of SMEs, mid-caps, and public sector organizations across the EU and a people-planet-centred approach increases trust and acceptance of technology in society.
MUSAE FACTORY MODEL
The main result of the MUSAE project is a new Planet-Centered Factory Model grounded on an innovative and strategic approach called the Design Futures Art-driven (DFA) method that integrates the Design Futures with the Art Thinking method. The DFA method is aimed at supporting companies in facing and leading the ongoing Digital Transformation.
The MUSAE Factory Model aims to facilitate artistic experimentation with cutting-edge technologies and will support SMEs and startups in envisioning future scenarios and developing future-driven products and services in the food domain to improve people’s and the planet’s well-being and address contemporary social and sustainable challenges.
As a final result, the project will release a well-structured Factory model pack to strengthen the services of (E)DIHs by providing:
- The factory core method with the process, tools, and guidelines to apply the DFA
- The open call and residency/fellowship formats promote structured collaboration between artists and SMEs
- Expertise and guidelines for methodological and technological training and mentoring
- Projects and use cases within the topic of Food as Medicine as a showcase to illustrate the potentialities of the method
- An Integrated Stakeholder Network of technology providers, artists, and experts in nutrition, art, and design universities
- A label, possibly enhancing the STARTS original label
MUSAE RESIDENCIES
Two art-tech residencies are the core of the MUSAE project and are designed to lead artists to envision future scenarios related to the food domain and develop future-driven concepts and prototypes. Both residencies are organized to test and implement the Factory Model, including the Design Futures Art-driven method, Training and Mentoring format, and Residency format.
MUSAE project investigates the broad domain of Health focusing in particular on the strong, mutual relationship between health and food. Within the MUSAE project, Health is considered from a holistic perspective considering it as a combination of human and environmental health and their interaction and interconnectedness. The planet’s health is crucial for the physical, mental, and emotional health of individuals. A sustainable food chain can optimize both human health and environmental sustainability. The impact of food consumption and food behaviour on individual well-being is not limited to what people consume but it goes as far as how and where they consume it, as well as social and cultural factors concerning eating.
Therefore, innovating the domain of food to improve human and planetary well-being is a crucial challenge that provides companies with a real opportunity for growth and innovation. ‘Food as Medicine’ synthesizes the ability and the opportunity for a sustainable food chain to enhance both human health and environmental sustainability.
MUSAE ADVISORY BOARD
Baukje de Roos is an internationally recognised nutrition scientist having >25 years of experience in the design and delivery of dietary intervention studies to assess how nutrients, foods and diets affect cardiovascular health outcomes and resilience to disease development. Earlier leading work in the field of proteomics and biomarker discovery led to funding for several European research projects, a BBSRC Case studentship and an invitation to join an International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) task force to establish the usefulness of proteomics for efficacy demonstration of dietary bioactives. Current work focusses on developing and implementing novel and state-of-the-art interdisciplinary precision and personalised nutrition approaches to improve population and individual health, as well as identifying responders and non-responders to interventions, supported by RCUK and industry funding as well as several international research collaborations. Her Scottish Government RESAS-funded work focusses on exploratory modelling of relationships between ‘healthiness’, ‘carbon footprint’, ‘level of processing’ and ‘cost’ of UK diets to identify the most important potential food switches in real-time UK diets, work which is now being developed into a ‘foodswap’ app. Her expertise in the area of diet and health has formed the basis of contracts and consultancies with large food companies (Unilever, By-Health, Stephan Nutrition, Cognis, MacPhie of Glenbervie, Provexis, Kelloggs), food levy boards (Seafish), the food and drink support sector (Food and Drink Innovation Service, Scotland Food & Drink), and national UK television (Channel 4’s Food Hospital and Superfoods series). Baum and Leahy’s proposal
Born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1968. Lives and works in Barcelona, Catalonia. An interactive communication artist and researcher, Pares’ work is characterized by the poetic and critical experimentation with digital technologies, and has been presented and exhibited in festivals, art centers, and museums in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.Parés holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication and a degree in Fine Arts. He is a Professor and Researcher in the Communication Department at the Pompeu Fabra University, and his research projects have been published by the British Computer Society, Academic Press, FECYT, Macba, and MIT Press, amongst others. He has launched pioneer platforms in electronic art, such as Galeria Virtual (1993-2000), dedicated to the development of virtual reality as an art form; Macba En Línea (1995-1997), a pioneer platform for net.art; and M.A.L. (2011-2013), an art lab with smartphones. From 2010 to 2015, he was co-director of the Master’s in Digital Arts at UPF. His commitment to an interdisciplinary culture, which he defends for its anti-dogmatic potential and for its civilizing power, has led him to explore the intersections between art, science, technology, and society.
Dr. Maya Aghaei is a researcher lecturer at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, at the Computer Vision and Data Science professorship. There she is responsible for supervising and mentoring Minor and Master students. Prior to that, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, focusing on the development of comprehensive AI solutions for various large industries. Maya has Computer Software background and holds a M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from University of Barcelona. She has solid research skills in the field of Applied Computer Vision, Machine Learning and General AI. Her research interest is to tackle novel and classical challenges in applying cutting-edge AI techniques to solve real world problems.
Epaminondas Christophilopoulos holds the UNESCO Chair on Futures Research hosted by the Institute of Technology and Research and is Chief Scientific Advisor to the Special Secretariat for Strategic Foresight, under the Presidency of the Greek Government. He is a scholar of the Onassis Foundation and holds a PhD in strategic prospecting, while his academic profile also includes studies in Physics, Environment, and International Relations. He initially worked in the field of technology transfer and support of international research cooperation, coordinating numerous projects in Europe, Latin America, Asia and, mainly, China, where he spent significant time in the last 10 years, designing initiatives aimed at the enhancement of the technological cooperation between the European Union and China. As of 2010, he has been focusing on future studies and research, with recent projects including the development of scenarios for the future of China’s innovation ecosystem in 2030, as well as the Future of Work and Technology towards 2050. Moreover, his interests include the development of serious games for strategic foresight, the promotion of the concept of literacy for the future, in collaboration with UNESCO, the design of educational experiential workshops for students and organization executives, while he also edited the book “Playing with the Future” addressed to teachers and students aged 8 to 16 years. He is currently president of the Foresight Europe Network and co-chair of the Greek hub Millennium Project, a global think tank based in Washington.
Prof. Alessandro Di Nuovo is Professor of Machine Intelligence at the Department of Computing, Sheffield Hallam University. He is the leader of AI, Robotics and Digital for the Advanced Well-being Research Institute. He is the funder and leader of the Smart Interactive Technologies (SIT) Research Laboratory, which has cutting-edge facilities and equipment for advanced machine learning and human-robot interaction experiments.
Prof. Di Nuovo is leading several collaborative research projects in fundamental and applied topics in AI and Robotics, funded by public (European Union, UKRI), private (IBM, NVIDIA) and charities (Sheffield Children Hospital Trust).
His research specialises in cognitive mechatronics and its application to health and wellbeing.
Elena Giulia Rossi lives and works in Rome where, amongst her activities, she continues to work on a study she began in the late nineties on contemporary art and its encounter with technology and science. The analysis of new forms of experimental and multidisciplinary works often coincided with that of numerous socio-anthropological nuances in contemporary culture. She is currently the editorial director of the online project Arshake.
Reinventing Technology (www.arshake.com) which she founded in 2013. She occasionally writes for catalogues, magazines and newspapers. Since 2013 she is a guest lecturer teaching Net Art and Theory of Multimedia Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts (Rome). She is the author of Archeonet (Lalli Editore, Siena 2003) and of Mind the Gap. La vita tra bioarte, arte ecologica e post internet (Postmedia.books, Milan 2020)
Guillem Alenyà is Researcher and Director at the Institut de Robotica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), a joint centre of the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) and Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He received a PhD degree (Doctor Europeus) from UPC in 2007 with a work on mobile robot navigation using active contours, which he partly developed at the Robosoft company in France, where he was supported by a EU-FP6 Marie-Curie scholarship. He has been visitor at KIT-Karlsruhe (2007), INRIA-Grenoble (2008) and BRL-Bristol(2016). He has participated in numerous scientific and technological transfer projects involving image understanding, next-best-view, rule learning from human examples and planing execution tasks. His current research is devoted to facilitate the introduction of robots in human environments, principally in the fields of assistive robotics and garment manipulation. He is coordinator of various projects on developing enabling technologies for assistive robotics: ROB-IN about personalization and explainability, CLOE-GRAPH about high-level representation of tasks and explainability (coIP J. Borras), and principal investigator in the SeCuRoPS project, about privacy and safety in HRI, and BURG, about benchmarking and repeteability. He has been coordinator of the SIMBIOTS project on cooperative robots and HuMoUR (on human-to-robot skills transfer, co-IP F. Moreno), and principal investigator of the SOCRATES project (on quality of interaction for social robots).
N. Alberto Borghese (Member, IEEE) received the master’s degree (cum laude) in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1986.,He was tenured as a Researcher with the Institute of Neuroscience and Bioimages of CNR, Milan, in 1987, and moved to the Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, in 2001, where he is currently a Full Professor and the Head of the Applied Intelligent Systems Laboratory. His research activity is based on designing, developing and testing on real-problems, methods and algorithms, based on computational intelligence, with particular attention to limited processing time. In particular, he has developed a novel methodology and technology in the fields of motion capture, unobtrusive tracking, and sensors integration. He has also been working on developing robust, multiscale, adaptive models for predictive regression and clustering to extract data features. More recently, he has been applied this expertise to the design and realization of platforms for e-Health and e-Welfare, combining Exer-games, AI, service robots, virtual communities, and the Internet of Things (IoT). He has coauthored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and more than 100 conference reviewed articles (H-index = 36), and holds 16 international patents. His research has been financed significantly by the industry as well as by national and European grants. In particular, he has been the Partner of the projects Robocare from 2001 to 2004 and SI_Robotics from 2019 to 2022 financed by National Research Ministry; a Coordinator of the European projects: FITREHAB (InterReg IVC), from 2009 to 2011, REWIRE (FP7), from 2011 to 2015, and MOVECARE (H2020), from 2017 to 2019; and the Partner of the project ESSENCE (H2020), from 2020 to 2022.
Lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he teaches Art Theory, Contemporary Art and Image Theory. He teaches on the MECLAP (Master’s Degree in Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Thought, UPF) and on the MURAD (University Master’s Degree in Research in Art and Design, EINA-UAB). He is currently researching the problem of time in contemporary art and visual culture, a subject on which she has published numerous articles, chapters and the book “Espectros del tiempo. Estética e historicidad en el arte contemporáneo” (Editorial Gedisa). He complements his academic career as an art critic in contemporary art magazines and a committed disseminator of philosophy and aesthetics.
Dr. Uwe Haass started Roboconsult® in 2016 as an independent professional after working for 35 years in the fields of management in the domains of robotics, pattern recognition, and AI.
His previous roles include:
- 1980: Fraunhofer Institute IITB – Researcher; Project Manager (1983)
- 1985: European Commission – Project Officer in the ESPRIT programme
- 1990: Bavarian Research Center of Knowledge-based Systems (FORWISS) – General Manager
- 1997: FWU, Germany’s largest producer of pedagogical media – Director
- 2007: General Manager of the Munich-based Cluster of Excellence “CoTeSys – Cognition for Technical (Robotic) Systems”
From 2013 to January 2016, Dr. Haass served as Secretary-General of the newly established, Brussels-based European robotics association euRobotics AISBL, the contractual partner of the European Commission in the European robotics programme SPARC.
Since his retirement from salaried employment on 1 February 2016, he has been working as an independent consultant. He has won contracts from public institutions such as the European Commission, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, universities, as well as from private corporations.
