Title: Using Smart Chatbots and Adaptive Ontologies for Improving Public Information Transparency for a Participative European Citizenship

Acronym: SCALE

Objectives:

The objectives of SCALE are:

1. To develop an intelligent Chabot using Artificial Intelligence trained for interaction between citizens and Public Administration entities, a tool which will increase the accessibility of public services and accelerate the digitalisation of public services offered;
2. Standardization of the ontology of the Chatbot so that it can be easily implemented by any of Romanian (and European) public authorities: City Halls, Police Stations, Emergency Units, Hospitals etc.
3. Make the Chabot and ontology interoperable with AI4EU platform, so that it can be used Europe-wide;
4. To promote the chatbot to public authorities in Romania to adopt the tool as one of their channels to interact with the citizens.

Expected results:

At the end of the experiment, to ensure the dissemination of the results achieved: Functional chatbot for Public Administration, Dataset created and interoperable AI Ontology Transilvania DIH will organise a webinar to which representatives of public administrations across Romania will be invited to participate. It will show-case the AI4EU platform, the results achieved during the experimentation phase and how those can be acquired for their usage

Description:

The concept behind the SCALE proposal is to encourage the transition of Romanian and other EU countries' public authorities to offer more and better digital public services. According to the Digital Economy and Society Index 2021 report by the European Commission, Romania is lagging behind compared to all of the EU countries, having 21% of public services digitized whilst Estonia offers digitally 91% of its public services.

We want to address this gap by developing an intelligent chatbot which will offer a new digital channel of instant communication between public authorities and citizens. This chatbot will not only ensure fast and transparent communication, but will also push the public authorities towards transforming most of their services to be offered digitally. The chatbot will be able to collect information by itself from third party sources and assert it into the ontology. The answers to the citizens will be delivered in an explanatory manner, so that the user has high trust in it. The SCALE platform will not only be able to provide answers based on the ontology, but will also guide the user in filling in forms, initiating requests, and scheduling appointments.

The SCALE Chabot will be able to provide to the citizens using public administration’s services the following:

• Public information, such as news, daily work program, and other information about the institution, regulations and law;
• Adaptive information: correlated with the user needs, such as preferred language and place of residence;
• Personal information: based on a unique social security number, the user receives customized information, such as taxes to be paid and requests to be submitted

Statistics regarding satisfactory/ unsatisfactory interactions, automatically generated or operator given replies, topics of interest, suggestions and other relevant aspects will be made public on AI4EU platform, which will contribute to a better understanding of the needs and relationships of the citizens, respectively public authorities. Moreover researchers in AI, sociology and public administration will have datasets for their research related to this topic.

Funding programme: DIH4AI OPEN CALL 1

Project duration:

8 months (01/10/2022 – 30/04/2023)

Budget:

• Total budget: 137k€
• Holisun budget: 85k€

Steps and reports:

1. M4
2. M8

Partners: