The EU Innovation Radar, which compiles cutting-edge EU-funded innovations, just published five innovations created within the COALA consortium. The COALA project designed and developed an AI-Powered Cognitive Assistant for the manufacturing sector. TU Delft was a key contributor for most of the innovations claimed in COALA.
Large language models are transforming how knowledge is harvested, managed and shared in the enterprise, and our Knowledge and Intelligence Design sector is at the forefront.
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Assistant Professor at TU Delft, Evangelos Niforatos, who lead the work packages resulting in these innovations.
About the COALA project
Europe is experiencing a shortage of skilled workers in sectors like textile manufacturing. Moreover, continuous improvement in product quality is necessary for maintaining a competitive advantage on the market. The solution is effective training to upgrade the skills of new workers. However, for many companies, the costs of such training sessions are prohibitive.
The EU-funded COALA project, concluded in November 2023, designed, and developed a cutting-edge Digital Intelligent Assistant for the manufacturing sector. At its core lies a privacy-focused, open-source voice assistant, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). COALA integrated, augmented quality analytics, an experimental mechanism for explainable AI, and features for the assistance of on-the-job training. The COALA solution aimed to significantly decrease the costs of failures in manufacturing and to reduce training time for workers.
The COALA consortium combined multidisciplinary competences and resources from the industry and research community focusing on AI technologies in the manufacturing industry. It consisted of 14 partners representing research institutes, technology providers and industrial partners, from 5 EU member states. TU Delft was one of the research partners that spearheaded most of the innovations claimed in COALA.
