The work plan of SIMPATICO has interleaved different kinds of activities:
• research and development activities, aiming at delivering tools and techniques to improve and simplify the interaction of citizens with e-services;
• system integration activities, aiming at assembling and deploying the SIMPATICO Platform, the open software platform that integrates the developed techniques and enacts them on top of the existing PA systems for on-line service delivery;
• validation activities, aiming at evaluating effectiveness and impact of the proposed approach in the three project pilots.
All these activities have produced important achievements, which have both been exploited during the project execution and created the basis for further developments and adoptions beyond the end of the project.
In particular, we can list the following main accomplishment of the project:
• In-production environment. In Trento SIMPATICO is integrated with the city e-service portal and in a production setting. It is (and will) being used after project end by citizen in a free and un-constrained way. More than 400 people used SIMPATICO saving 57% of time in completing a form and reducing the number of requests for clarification by up to 70%. These number are fast increasing as SIMPATICO is constantly growing alongside the growth of Trento’s e-service system.
• Citizen engagement and co-creation. The co-creation approach adopted in SIMPATICO produced a clear and tangible added value. This was particularly true in the Galicia pilot, where co-creation brought the team to develop a component (the eService Manager) that was not foreseen at all in the workplan and resulted to be one of the most appreciated components by civil servants.
• Scientific excellence. The project addressed advanced topics in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistic producing important research results published on 19 scientific papers, 14 Datasets and language corpora, all openly available in a public repository.
• SIMPATICO Platform. SIMPATICO produced mature technologies (TRL 6) that can be applied on top on any IT legacy system of a PA, as the Trento case confirmed. The open paradigm adopted during the development of SIMPATICO assure that there are no technical barriers to instance the system in a given technical environment.
Dissemination activities have concentrated on the definition and execution of a dissemination strategy aimed at maximizing the outreach of project outcomes and the engagement of all actors necessary for a successful project execution. Specific targets have been the scientific community, the broader audience of experts on public services and Artificial Intelligence, and the society (paying attention in particular to the local / national press and media agencies).
Finally SIMPATICO has performed dedicated activities to ensure sustainability and exploitation of project results. As results of these activities, SIMPATICO outcomes have already been adopted in 2 follow-up R&D projects (EIT-Digital projects BRIDGE and CaPe), involving both SIMPATICO research partners and SIMPATICO business partners. Also, SIMPATICO outcomes have been exploited in one initiative aiming at their replication and adoption by PAs: project SPRINT aiming at the integration of SIMPATICO results in existing Italian e-service delivery platform and at its reusage by Italian municipalities.
