FEB researchers and colleague from German Centre for AI receive IFAC IMS Best Paper Award

FEB-researchers Christos Emmanouilidis, Jéssica Zotelli, Sabine Waschull, Jos Bokhorst and colleague Katharina Hengel have received the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Best Paper Award 2025 from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). They received the award for their paper titled ‘Co-Creation Design Patterns for Human-AI Teaming in Manufacturing and Multi-Domain Decision-Making’.

Christos Emmanouilidis is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business’ (FEB) Department of Operations. Jéssica Zotelli, Sabine Waschull and Jos Bokhorst are also affliated with FEB’s Department of Operations. Their co-author Katharina Hengel is a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). This paper introduces a co-creative approach based on human-AI teaming design patterns tailored to human-centric AI-enabled decision-making systems with explicit consideration of multi-stakeholder teams, human-AI teaming types, and related decision risks. The paper will be published by ELSEVIER, IFAC-PapersOnline.

The HumAIne Project

Emmanouilidis: “Co-creation approaches are needed for the design of human-AI teaming solutions. Stakeholders in the co-creation process bring in different perspectives but are not necessarily aware of the variety and nature of requirements and design options. This is especially so as outcomes of human-AI interaction are never exactly pre-designed, but are of an emergent nature. Co-creation design patterns significantly facilitate stakeholders synergies during the co-creation process.” The research on co-creation for the design of human-AI teaming solutions, was funded by the HumAIne project, in which Emmanouilidis, Zotelli, Waschull, Hengel (DFKI), and Bokhorst are all involved. The HumAIne project’s research focuses on developing, validating, and promoting an integrated platform for Human-AI collaborative decision-making, applied to diverse sectors, such as Manufacturing, Energy, e-Government Services, e-Healthcare, and Customer Service Management. The humAIne solutions were recently demonstrated in a public workshop at the House of Connections in Groningen, attracting interest from industrial and AI-communities.

About IFAC

The IFAC IMS Best Paper awards celebrate excellence in research, innovation, and sustainability and reward valuable contributions to science, industry, and society. The International Federations of Automatic Control (IFAC) is multinational federation that is concerned with automation from the perspectives of science, engineering, management, and society. IFAC is tasked with promoting the science and technology of automation in all systems, whether for example, engineering, physical, biological, social or economic, in both theory and application. IFAC has numerous technical committees, organizes conferences and promotes the development of automation science, technology and management. Every three years the IFAC communities get together in the IFAC World Congress, planned to be organised in Korea in 2026, and in the Netherlands in 2029.