I received an information that Chatbots Community needs a solid financial foundation.
What kind of obstacles you have to overcome to get Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) grant from the European Commission?

Time…. Do you happen to be an expert in these kind of grants. I’d be happy to pay your commission on no pay, no cure basis!!

I received an answer today from EC:

“For the moment [...] it is not possible to submit any proposals. We are preparing for a next call to be launched in December this year.

FET gives grants for collaborative projects, so you would need to team up with at least three other groups in Europe (3 countries) to define your project. The biggest obstacle I see for you is to argue the novelty. Bots are not a new idea . I agree with you that their potential is still to come. In order to obtain funding from FET it would be important to convince with a proposal what are the new ideas that you bring in to make it work…”

So volunteers have 3-4 months to team up and propose a new idea.
I am first in queue to team up with people related with medicine (contact me, please) and I have some ideas that I have never seen working before.
Let’s team up!

The biggest obstacle I see for you is to argue the novelty. Bots are not a new idea .

A convincing, turing-test-passing bot would be quite novel though!

I guess the angle to take here would be to suggest that a world-wide collaborative community of all sorts of (not necessarily acadamic) backgrounds has the potential to achieve things where smaller but more ‘professional’ groups fail.

AKA the ‘wikipedia’ versus ‘specialized encyclopedias’ approach. We all know which approach of those had the most impact by now… Can we pitch chatbots.org, and various initiatives (like Erwin’s recent transcript-focused one) as the ‘wikipedia of chatbots’?

Mind you, for knowledge databases this has been done before, most notoriously the MindPixel project before the owner of that took his own life. But for actually collaborating on all aspects, exchanging thoughts, code, data ... I can testify that this forum, in the brief period I have spent here, has already helped me tremendously - to improve my bot. There must be a case to make for ‘scaling up’ there. (though, as it stands, no way I am open-sourcing actual code )

Maybe said ‘central transcripts’ platform, with a bit of spicing up in terms of ‘research possibilities it opens’ etc etc, could be made the centerpiece of such a grant application? It sure would be unique and highly welcomed by many!

More details about FET project under the link below:
http://bit.ly/FETproject

Wouter Smet - Aug 28, 2013:

AKA the ‘wikipedia’ versus ‘specialized encyclopedias’ approach. We all know which approach of those had the most impact by now… Can we pitch chatbots.org, and various initiatives (like Erwin’s recent transcript-focused one) as the ‘wikipedia of chatbots’?

- Like !

@Dryhay, that looks less like information on FET and more like a motivational ‘I need YOU… To contribute code’ (only the Uncle Sam guy is missing) pamflet. Wrong link?

A robot FET project is one of the six finalists selected by the European Commission:

Robot Companions for Citizens: soft skinned and intelligent robots have highly developed perceptive, cognitive and emotional skills, and can help people, radically hanging the way humans interact with machines.

Commission Selects Six Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Projects to Compete for Research Funding

That’s very good that EC cupports such projects.
We have to start developing our own one and fulfill EC requirements.

http://www.bit.ly/FETproject