PhyUM kicked off

Today, the PhyUM Research Center kicked off with our first meeting to constitute the Board of Directors, as defined in the constitution that was approved at the last UNED’s Research and Doctoral Commission. PhyUM Research Center emerges after 9 years of PhyUM as Research Line and in response to the initiatives promoted by the UNED’s Research Results Transfer Office to promote outstanding research initiatives of UNED’s professors.

The beginnings of PhyUM trace back to 2014, following Dr. Santos’ recognition as a young researcher by the IEEE and as an evolution of her previous research endeavors:

At that moment, I realized that one of the domains of the Bloom’s taxonomy had yet to be thoroughly explored within the Artificial Intelligence perspective, specifically the psychomotor domain. This, coupled with my progress into practicing Aikido martial art (which I started after my PhD), prompted me to delve into how Artificial Intelligence could support motor skills learning to provide real-time personalized support during its practice

PhyUM, the acronym of Physical User Modeling, was then conceived and consequently gained relevance in the research community with key contributions such as the position paper “Training the Body: The Potential of AIED to Support Personalized Motor Skills Learning” published in the Special Issue of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAEID) entitled “The Next 25 Years: How Advanced Interactive Learning Technologies will Change the World”.  This journal compiles the research of the AIED community, and this paper defined the SMDD framework to guide the AIED research community into the psychomotor domain and marked a significant stride in the technological conceptualization of PhyUM. Through various international experiences, including stays in Silicon Valley and New York, Dr. Santos gained a profound understanding of the state of the art in the field of human movement computing, and existing open issues in the field, mainly regarding the lack of personalized support, which were put in the core of PhyUM research. These open issues (which initially focused on martial arts) started to be explored in Final Career projects and Master Thesis at the Computer Science School at UNED supervised by Dr. Santos, resulting in innovative prototypes such as AHTROM, KUMITRON, KSAS, iELA and SLT-T.

Nonetheless, soon it was also recognized the need for interdisciplinary approaches to build these intelligent psychomotor systems with a human-centric perspective, so the research spanned computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, ethics, regulations…. Exploring synergies in these domains led to fruitful discussions and collaborations, which ultimately led to the constitution of the PhyUM Research Center, involving researchers and professionals with interest on innovation, knowledge transfer, outreach, and training in scientific and technical aspects, both in basic and applied research, in the emerging field of intelligent psychomotor systems with an interdisciplinary approach.