We are a multidisciplinary group of young scientists, researchers, IT professionals and social activists whose key focus is on multiple positive applications of ICT: for better intergenerational cooperation, social inclusion and cohesion by engaging older adults to facilitate their involvement in co-creating modern ICT solutions through:

• intergenerational cooperation in both physical and virtual environments, like location-based games rooted in technical, historical and cultural context,
• direct collaboration with younger adults, like mixed group hackathons,
• empowerment of older adults towards better crafted ICT-based solutions, like co-design workshops.

The Kobo project creates spaces where people, science and technology meet to learn and contribute to the greater good for all of us. Kobo in Japanese means a workshop or a studio. Our Kobo is an evolution of a well established Living Lab concept from MIT — it is our approach to a distributed Living Lab 2.0, allowing us to meet people where they naturally spend time and bring them the hottest technology underpinned with science.

As an NGO, Kobo Association brings together young scientist from major universities and research institutes based in Warsaw, Poland, including:

• Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology,
• National Information Processing Institute,
• Polish Academy of Science,
• University of Warsaw,
• Warsaw University of Technology,
• SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities,

as well as IT professionals and non-government activists. Within its framework we conduct long term activities and research focused on various aspects of human-computer interaction of older adults, including its social, participatory and intergenerational character, new interfaces like Voice Assistants (VA), Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR) and Mixed Reality alongside with major underlying trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Complex Event Processing (CEP).

In particular, based on the Living Lab concept Kobo Association members take part in long-term interdisciplinary studies and research touching upon various aspects of applied computer science, including data science, artificial intelligence, social informatics and human-computer interaction alongside with current state-of-the-art in psychology, social science and economics, including neuroscience, psychophysiology and cognitive studies in the context of aging societies, Active Assisted Living (AAL) and the needs of older adults to improve their standard and quality of life.

Our members are deeply involved in advanced and exploratory research in various fields of applied computer science, including new interfaces like voice assistants or virtual and augmented reality, as well as vital concepts as smart cities, Internet of Things coupled with crowdsourcing and citizen science. We present our results at major conferenceslike CSCW, CHI, ICSE and with major publishers such as Springer or Elsevier.

Our website is currently undergoing changes to provide better user experience and information about our activities and achievements. Please visit us again soon.