Since 2014 Juha Heikkilä has been the Head of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence unit in the European Commission Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, which develops the Commission policy and activities in Artificial Intelligence. The Commission has been funding a multidisciplinary programme on Cognitive Systems, Robotics and AI since 2004, focusing on smart robots and artificial systems, and in 2014 it set up a Public-Private Partnership in Robotics. Previously, Juha 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.