The objective of WELCOME is to research and develop intelligent technologies for support of the reception and integration of migrants in Europe. Unlike the majority of the projects that address the problem of migrant integration by frontends with “one-for-all” interfaces for information acquisition and services, WELCOME will offer a personalized and psychologically and socially competent solution for both migrants and public administrations. It will develop immersive and intelligent services, in which embodied intelligent multilingual agents will act as dedicated personalized assistants of migrants in contexts of registration, orientation, language teaching, civic education, and social and societal inclusion. The agents will be personalized in the sense that they will dynamically adapt their interaction behavior to the topic, given context and the profile of the interlocutor.

To provide “real-life” experience and thus deeper and swifter integration, immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies will be used. For public administrations, decision support technologies that will draw upon visual analytics and semantic reasoning techniques will be developed. To achieve its objective, WELCOME will innovate in the areas of human – multiple service-oriented agent interaction, multilingual spoken language technologies, knowledge processing, immersive personalized education and social inclusion technologies, and decision support strategies. WELCOME’s solution will be validated and its portability to different European contexts demonstrated in three pilot use cases.

Both WELCOME as a whole and its individual technologies are expected to have a very significant societal and economic impact. WELCOME counts with a highly competent Consortium of 15 partners: 6 research institutions, 3 ICT companies, and 6 entities related to migrant reception and integration. To increase its impact and dissemination, WELCOME involves the International Migrant Organization as subcontractor.