AI-FUSE (AI For Universal Scene Understanding: from cells to ecosystems) main goal is to improve key aspects of scene understanding algorithms, namely generalization capabilities, efficiency, robustness and improved explainability of solutions and evaluations. The AI-FUSE interdisciplinary team will devise new solutions with broader applicability in real world applications than the existing methods. Our objectives include scientific advances in key AI techniques as well as in different and diverse application domains that can make use of these techniques: robotics deployment in human environments, environment monitoring and immunology research.