Dr Juha Heikkilä joined the European Commission in 1998 and currently works in its Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. Since 2014 he has been the Head of its Robotics and Artificial Intelligence unit. The Commission has been funding a multidisciplinary research programme on Cognitive Systems, Robotics and AI for 13 years, focusing on smart and flexible robots and artificial systems. In recent years, the annual budget has been €70-80 million. At the beginning of 2014, a Public-Private Partnership in Robotics was set up, bringing together all the key European stakeholders in this area. In this partnership the European Commission will invest up to €700 million via the Horizon 2020 framework programme in roadmap-based research and innovation between 2014 and 2020. Previously, Dr Heikkilä was involved in computational and corpus linguistic research at the University of Helsinki, and he has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge.