Juha Heikkilä joined the European Commission in 1998 and currently works in its Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect). For more than 11 years, he has been working in the unit now called Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, first as a Project Officer, since 2008 as the Deputy Head of Unit, and since May 2014 as the Head of Unit. The unit has been funding a multidisciplinary research programme on Cognitive Systems and Robotics for about 12 years, focusing on smarter and more flexible robots and artificial systems. Previously, Juha Heikkilä was involved in computational and corpus linguistic research at the University of Helsinki, and he did a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.