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Social robots are effective tools to make healthcare and education more accessible and affordable through standardization and mass replication.Today however working with robots requires extensive IT knowledge. Our vision is to bring social robots for healthcare and education from research centers to mass market by developing user-friendly robots which are accessible for everybody to script custom robot applications. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder. It costs £32 billion per year in the UK and greater than the cost of cancer, stroke and heart disease combined. The average lifetime saving of early and intensive behavioral intervention ranges from $1.6 to $2.8 million per child. This requires 20 to 40 hours of one-to-one therapy per week, costing $40,000 to 80,000 per year. The issue in USA is that while the healthcare systems pay for such therapies, there is a lack of therapists. In EU, the situation is worse as there is a tremendous lack of therapists, costs are not covered by health care systems and children receive insufficient number of hours or no therapy at all. We propose an open innovation to offer a holistic solution to make autism therapy accessible and affordable by providing a social robot platform to create, exchange, personalize, utilize and rate therapeutic robot applications by autism therapists and care providers with no IT background. An effective robotic platform for autism has to provide a large amount of various types of content and applications to meet the needs of different individuals. We make the creation of such platform and scaling it in Europe with its multi-cultrual and multi-lingual nature practical and economical through enabling user generated robot therapies to be adapted and re-used by others. This is where the economy of scale has to come from to build an app store of social robot therapies built by psychologists.

Over the last four decades since the initial mass resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975, principally in the US and France, the Southeast Asian communities in Europe and the US have registered a demographic shift with the emergence of diaspora-born generations with different experiences, access, mobility, ties to the ancestral homeland, and notions and claims to citizenship and belonging in multiple contexts. Despite the long history of migration to France, dating back to the colonial period, there is little scholarly attention paid to the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities (heretofore referred to as "Southeast Asian") in France. French preoccupation remains largely fixated on Asia and on the antiquities, rather than on the diaspora. This is particularly noteworthy given that Southeast Asians collectively constitute the second largest Asian population in France, a close second only to the Chinese. Despite the resurgent attention to immigration issues in Europe in recent years, we know little of the integration experiences of these earlier but relatively recent refugee communities in Europe. In particular, we have virtually no knowledge of the post-refugee generations that are an integral part of French cultural, political, economic, and social fabric. These knowledge gaps deprive us of critical insights that would be relevant and invaluable in view of the current refugee situations in Europe, and the intensifying debates engendered by demographic and cultural shifts both in the US and in France. Though relatively more prolific, scholarship on Southeast Asians in the US remains uneven, with more studies available on Vietnamese Americans than on other communities, and comparatively little on the post-refugee generations. With their different historical relationships with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and different philosophies about immigrant incorporation and cultural pluralism, the US and France make for a rich comparative study that is at the center of our proposed collaboration. This two-part initiative proposes, firstly, to bring together an interdisciplinary group of European and American researchers working on Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian diasporas to engage in critical, cross disciplinary discourse on the post-refugee generations. Among other concerns, the researchers on the project are particularly interested in their social, cultural, political, and transnational negotiations with regards to identity politics, networks, and public engagement, as guided in part by the following questions: What are the experiences of the Southeast Asian post-refugee generations in Europe? What forces and factors in the receiving contexts shape their experiences, and how, and what are the differences and commonalities among the contexts of reception? How, if in any way, does historical memory inform their identity constructions, socialities, and diasporic consciousness and engagement? What, if any, are their relationships with the ancestral homeland? How are those ties maintained or made manifest? The ultimate aims of this project are as follows: - to map the landscape of research on contemporary Southeast Asian migration to Europe - to share research methodologies, trends, and findings - to broaden and deepen our comparative understanding of refugee resettlement and incorporation experiences in America and in Europe that are the two principal refugee resettlement hubs - to foster cross and trans-disciplinary discourse on migration and diasporas - to advance and widen the transnational fields of critical refugee, migration and diaspora studies - to transnationalize the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, which is a University of California-based network of critical refugee studies scholars. Secondly and as an extension of this larger conversation, Um and Le Bail also propose to begin ethnographic research on post-refugee generations of Southeast Asians in France, with particular attention to the Sino-Vietnamese community that is their shared research interest and that constitutes an underexplored research terrain.

At the core of my proposed research lies the desire to understand turn-of-the-century European fascination with the idea of race and the employment of modern sciences in the construction of racial theories in national and imperial contexts of East-Central Europe. The project will explore the history of racial thinking and related biological, human and social sciences in the mostly uncharted region of East Central Europe, with special focus on the Hungarian Kingdom in the decades around 1900. Rooted in the ethnically and confessionally most mixed region of contemporary Europe, Hungarian sciences faced unique intellectual challenges in constructing racial theories and creating ethnic, national and imperial identities, thus contributing to the process of Hungarian nation-building while legitimating liberalism in general. To understand how race, ethnicity, the nation and the multi-ethnic kingdom were co-produced in the region, systematic research will explore a variety of scientific disciplines, including ethnography, sociology, physical anthropology, criminal and social statistics, biology, public health, eugenics, and crowd psychology. Based on the Applicant’s preliminary studies and research hypotheses, the disciplinary trajectories of Hungarian ‘sciences of race’ seem to diverge considerably from the models offered by the historiography in the British, French and German contexts. Rather exceptionally, in the Hungarian intellectual field, a marked and overall shift towards a biological, hierarchical, and racialist thinking did not seem to have taken place before the end of WWI. Due to the originality of the research and its interdisciplinary nature, the planned outcome, a monograph, will contribute not only to the historiography of European “racial sciences” and science studies, but also to nationalism and imperialism studies, the cultural and social studies of fin-de-siècle modernity in Central Europe, and the wider scholarship on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During 2006 the Canary Islands received more than 30,000 boat people from the West African coasts. The so-called “cayuco crisis” resulted in institutional and or-ganizational improvement in the management of irre-gular migration flows through the Canaries Regional Coordination Centre, established in 2006. The centre coordinates the interception, retention and repatriation provisions and integrates several institutional actors like Frontex, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and NGOs. The paper describes this new institutional structure, its functions, actions and organi-zation. Several years have passed since 2006 and arrivals have dropped to low levels. There are lessons to be drawn from the organizational innovation experience in the Canary Islands. The paper identifies improvements and shortcomings in managing irregular migration flows.