The new European research project MOSAICO, which stands for 'Management, Orchestration and Supervision of AI-agent COmmunities', has just been officially signed, and will be funded as part of the Horizon Europe cluster 4 programme. It stems from the 2024 ‘Fundamentals of Software Engineering’ call, for which the European Commission received 63 proposals, with only 4 winners, including MOSAICO.
This is a new project won by IMT Atlantique's Department of Automation, Production Engineering and Computer Science (DAPI), the 2nd European project coordinated by Massimo Tisi, associate professor at the DAPI/ LS2N (UMR CNRS 6004). MOSAICO, which has a total budget of €5.2 millions (including €750 K for IMT Atlantique), will bring together 12 partners for 3 years, and will be launched in their presence in January 2025 in Nantes.
The new tools of artificial intelligence
The new tools of artificial intelligence, also known as generative AI, which make content production easier, have turned our daily lives upside down as they enter the lives of businesses and organisations at breakneck speed. To carry out traditional software engineering tasks, such as producing software code, analysing code, drawing up specifications and debugging in the event of problems, developers are increasingly turning to these tools, which enable them to work much more quickly. In most cases, developers use just one AI assistant, i.e. a generative AI: ChatGPT, Copilot, Llama, or MISTRAL, etc. ‘Although language models continue to grow in size and performance, phenomena known as ‘hallucinations’ of a single AI agent seem largely inevitable,’ explains Massimo Tisi.
What if tomorrow, to increase the quality of the response, we no longer used just one AI, but several AIs, which would work together to produce a more reliable response? This is the very idea behind the European MOSAICO project: to set up a solutions platform that offers software developers the possibility of having several AIs communicate with development environments to generate collaboration between these ‘AI assistants’ by proposing a communication protocol. ‘As it happens between humans, the quality of work increases with the specialisation of workers on tasks, organised collaboration and discussion between players from different backgrounds. Unlike humans, the instantiation of the multiple AI agents required, as well as the collaboration and discussion between them, is very fast and inexpensive, making this approach particularly advantageous’.
4 partners to evaluate use cases
MOSAICO will propose a theoretical and technical framework for implementing this approach and scaling it up to very large groups of collaborative agents, i.e. communities of AI agents. The solutions developed will be grouped together in an integrated platform that will manage the communication, orchestration, governance, quality assessment, benchmarking and reuse of AI agents. MOSAICO will integrate with existing development environments to present results to software engineers, and allow expert users to intervene in the decisions made by the AI.
Théo Le Calvar, researcher, Massimo Tisi, professor and coordinator of the MOSAICO project
and Julien Prud'homme, head of European programmes and strategic european partners.
The performance and reliability of MOSAICO's technologies and tools for carrying out specific software engineering tasks will be assessed in the context of four different usage scenarios from the immersive technologies, banking/finance, aerospace and Internet of Things sectors. More specifically, MOSAICO will be helping to create 3D content and code for associated technologies (such as virtual reality headsets) with Immersion, a Bordeaux-based company that creates immersive content. The second use case will be with the National Bank of Greece for the creation of software offering personalised investment recommendations to customers. With Collins Aerospace, which works in the critical software sector for the aeronautics industry, MOSAICO will be used to certify the software creation process. Finally, MOSAICO will be used to increase code re-use for UNPARALLEL, a Portuguese SME that manages an Internet of Things portfolio/catalogue.
The MOSAICO project has 12 partners in all: these 4 partners from the business world, who will therefore have a front-row seat to assess the benefits of the new platform, but also academics, the University of York, LIST in Luxembourg, the University of L'Aquilla and IMT Atlantique of course, and finally Intrasoft Net company, Codium AI, Eclipse Foundation and F6S.
by Pierre-Hervé VAILLANT
