The Welcome project starts with a kick-off meeting, on 11, 12 and 13 February, on UPF’s Poblenou campus and is to gather fifteen partners.

Within the framework of the European project Welcome, endowed with over 4 million euros, coordinated by Leo Wanner, ICREA research professor with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, with the participation of the Government of Catalonia, a mobile application for the reception of migrants will be created.

The Welcome project is to get under way with a kick-off meeting, on 11, 12 and 13 February, on UPF’s Poblenou campus and will bring together fifteen partners, six research institutions, three IT companies and six entities that focus on the integration and reception of migrants that will be participating in this European project, from the UK, Germany, Greece and the Czech Republic, as well as Galicia and Catalonia. Welcome will enjoy the technical guidance of the Catalan Government’s Secretariat for Equality, Migration and Citizenship.

Technology with a significant social and economic impact

The aim of the Welcome project is to research and develop smart technologies to support the reception and integration of newcomers to Europe. It will offer customized psychological and social solutions that are satisfactory both for migrants and for the public authorities.

The app to be created in the project will help newcomers upon their arrival and also during their adaptation and inclusion, responding to their most common demands.

The application will be developed in contexts of registration, orientation, language teaching, civic education, and social inclusion, all of them adapted to the profile of the interlocutors and through immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies. The project results will be validated in order to demonstrate its applicability to different European contexts.