During the first 12 months of its lifetime, WELCOME achieved two of its five milestones. In particular, the Consortium, firstly, successfully initiated the Project by establishing the Project identity in terms of its website and compiling a series of plans and guidelines for the research and development activities in the Project, including (i) the project management and quality assurance plan, the (ii) initial privacy, data protection, social and ethical issues preliminary guide for WELCOME design and development, (iii) the initial dissemination plan and communication material, (v) the preliminary user requirements and use case scenarios, (vi) the initial evaluation plan, and (vii) the initial self-assessment plan. Secondly, the Consortium developed the roadmap towards the implementation of the WELCOME platform, designed the architecture of the platform and set up an operational skeleton of it, in which the individual module shells are able to interact with each other. The development of the individual modules (such as, e.g. the mobile WELCOME Application, automatic speech recognition, language analysis and generation, text-to-speech synthesis, agent core and dialogue management, knowledge base, and visual analytics based decision support) also progressed. Important advances have been furthermore made with respect to the study of the psycho-social variables that need to be taken into account when personalizing the interaction between intelligent agents and individuals with different cultural and social backgrounds, who are furthermore potentially traumatized from experiences in their countries of origin. Finally, the Consortium advanced in the design and implementation of virtual environment setups - especially in the context of language teaching scenarios and in the development of a visual analytics-based decision support workbench, to be used by the authorities and NGOs for a better assistance of TCNs.
