News Archives - Page 9 of 14

Immersive Job Taste VR apps offer Virtual Internship

5 August 2020

by paris News

Many young people in today’s labor market are out of work, and youth unemployment is a serious problem in many countries. Can virtual reality (VR) help to mitigate this problem? The technology potentially has wider possibilities to engage and be accepted by the youth.

The Virtual Internship project is developing a concept of “Immersive Job Taste”, an interactive VR experience of a workplace that aims to give a feeling of going through an average workday of a professional with elements of basic training. Instead of simply presenting information about jobs and professions, this is directly conveyed by getting the inside experience of being a trainee at a workplace. It is important to note that Immersive Job Taste is different from workplace training as it only provides a ‘peek’ into a certain profession without necessarily covering all the details and specifics.

The main target audiences of the project are young job seekers who can be aided in selecting a career path at school or a welfare center, choosing the first or a new occupation, often after a period of being unemployed.

The catalogue of the Immersive Job Taste apps includes VR experiences of a wind turbine electrician, car mechanic, road construction worker, fishery worker, and tinsmith. Each VR app includes such components as a presentation of a workplace, several typical tasks, feedback on performance, gamification, and advice on applying for jobs in the specific industry.

The project is implemented by a partnership between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. The scenarios and the typical workplace tasks for each profession are being developed in collaboration with local industry and professional societies. The virtual internship apps and room-scale VR equipment have been installed and used in a test mode at selected career centers in Norway since 2019.

For more information see:

https://news.media-and-learning.eu/type/featured-articles/vr-facilitating-youth-employment/

https://www.ntnu.edu/imtel/virtual-internship

Wind turbine electrician

Fishery worker

Road construction worker

Car mechanics

A translator protective mask

3 August 2020

by paris News

What do you think when hearing about protective masks? Are you thinking that it keeps you safe? Maybe you feel a bit of reserved to live normally… Or they make you choke under the hot summer sun… However, in any case we should comply with the experts’ instructions! Undoubtedly, no one can claim that they provide you with comfort or it’s a humanlike habit…

It’s time to think about them in a different way!

COVID-19 pandemic brought in our lives the use of protective masks. No one was used to wear it in a daily basis, nor they were made for this purpose. The latter explains in a great extent the discomfort that their use bring. Nevertheless, right after the pandemic outburst many companies and researchers are focusing in making them more comfortable or taking advantage of its use in order to make people perceive them as a useful gadget!

A Japanese startup company (Donut Robotics) moved to this direction. More specifically, it has developed a smart mask that via the smartphone’s Bluetooth connection, it instantly translates words spoken in 9 different languages. Mask’s name is C-FACE and is designed and developed to not only protect our health against coronavirus, but it also facilitates communication by simultaneously translating the words spoken by the wearer. In this way, C-Face allows you to make calls, amplify your voice, transcribe the words spoken and translate them into nine different languages: Japanese, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese.

Bringing together entrepreneurship and innovation is a matter of thinking out of the box, after all!

Read the full article

Learning from the COVID-19 crisis: teaching, learning and technology in a changing world

21 July 2020

by paris News

#EUDigitalEducation

Learning from the COVID-19 crisis: teaching, learning and technology in a changing world

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the widespread closure of school and campus buildings in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. More than 100 million learners, educators, education and training staff in Europe and around the world were affected. To ensure that learning, teaching and assessment could continue, digital technologies were used on a massive and unprecedented scale.

In September 2020, the European Commission intends to update its Digital Education Action Plan and work further to promote high quality and inclusive education and training in the digital age. The new Action Plan will be an important part of the Next Generation EU recovery plan, supporting Member States, education and training institutions as well as citizens in their efforts to deal with the digital change.

To ensure that the new Digital Education Action Plan draws lessons from experience during COVID-19 crisis and supports education and training through the long-term digital transformation, the Commission is launching this public consultation.

Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, commented:
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed the largest disruption to education and training in Europe’s recent history. 100 million students, teachers and education staff globally have been affected, and many of them have turned to digital education to continue the academic year. For many, this has been the first time they have fully used digital technologies for teaching and learning. With this public consultation, we would like to understand and learn from all these experiences. We are all part of this discussion – let us work together and ensure that the new Digital Education Action Plan paves the way for truly inclusive and high-quality digital education in Europe.”

The consultation seeks the views of respondents on the overall impact of the COVID-19-provoked disruption on education and training systems, their expectations until the end of the crisis and in the recovery period. The consultation concludes with a set of questions on respondents’ vision for digital education in Europe.

The questionnaire has become available in all official EU languages by 9 July 2020. The public consultation will be open until 4 September 2020.

More information:

About the consultation and link to the questionnaire can be found here:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12453-Digital-Education-Action-Plan/public-consultation

About the launch of the pubic consultation

https://ec.europa.eu/education/news/public-consultation-new-digital-education-action-plan_en

Italy: renewing education is the key to re-start

13 July 2020

by paris News

Italy is preparing to make crucial decisions to revive the economy.

Among the most critical challenges that the Government will have to face is that of embracing the green revolution, sustainability and enhancing the opportunities offered by digital technology.

In this context, the development of human capital is decisive for equipping professionals with skills capable of solving increasingly complex and profoundly different problems than in the past.

This is what the Dean of LUISS Business School, Paolo Boccardelli, is writing in a recent article. LUISS Business School is one of the top management schools in Europe and, albeit most of the considerations are related to academic education, they also apply very well to lower level of education such as those which the New Metro Project is aimed at.

According to prof. Boccardelli, the training system will have to rest on three pillars:

digital skills
domain skills
transversal skills

The new professions will require more sophisticated skills. It is estimated that in the next twenty years 90% of jobs will require digital skills and that by 2022, worldwide, 75 million jobs will be replaced and 133 million new jobs will arise (in areas such as cybersecurity, big data, sustainability, regulation and privacy).

Quickly investing in the training of digital skills in Italian companies becomes an imperative need to face the significant and widespread digital skills gap.

Also, transversal skills such as emotional intelligence, critical thinking, analytical thinking, problem-solving, ability to un-learn and re-learn, creativity, and orientation towards innovation and entrepreneurship will be increasingly indispensable.

It appears necessary to renew the Italian educational offer in an almost radical way, in terms of content and methods.

La Repubblica – Affari & Finanza, June 29th, 2020

Italian Companies: upskilling, re-skilling and hiring trends

9 July 2020

by paris News

In Italy, more than half of the companies offered their employees online courses during the lockdown, with great satisfaction also for the workers who took part in it and who declared they preferred the e-learning methods to the traditional ones, for flexibility and convenience of avoiding travel.

This is what emerged from a survey carried out by Infojobs on 109 companies, mainly SMEs.

The same survey showed that workers want to focus more on upskilling, while companies would like to shift the focus of reskilling training.

Above all in Italy reskilling (i.e. investing in enhancing the potential of people to face better changing scenarios) will be a central trend in 2020, with particular attention to training in the resilience of the workforce, the ability to withstand future and partially changing scenarios unpredictable.

In a survey conducted by Deloitte, Italian companies have declared the top three of the trends for which to invest both in training and in hiring:

In the first place, the desire to learn, flexibility and curiosity: in fact, as many as 68% of Italian companies say that their talent acquisition strategy is concentrated on the selection of “great learners”.

In the second place, the sense of belonging: all companies agree that the creation of a sense of belonging, personal relationships and an organizational culture positively impacts productivity.

In the third place, dealing with the well-being of people in the company: Italian companies believe that it will be crucial to integrate well-being in the way work is designed.

Public-private apprenticeship: the Swiss model

7 July 2020

by paris with No Comment News

One of the major concerns of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that artificial intelligence and automation – robots – will eliminate jobs, both blue-collar and white-collar roles in various industries.

But robots can never replace life, breathing, human thinking entirely in the workplace. The real challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, therefore, is not robots, but adequate training for humans to carry out the available jobs. Reskilling is one of the primary needs and challenges of our era, and many of these skills cannot be learned in the university classroom.

A new model is needed, and apprenticeship – in which Swiss companies have been committed for a long time – is something that global companies should also consider.

Many Swiss companies have adapted their apprenticeship models to increase their talent pool abroad by offering apprenticeship programs in the United States.

During the National Apprenticeship Week in Washington, DC in November, the Embassy of Switzerland showed how the Swiss-style apprenticeship model can be adapted for various companies and sectors and how it can be useful to people of all ages and backgrounds with principles of lifelong learning.

At the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work Summit in New York, which took place at the same time as the National Apprenticeship Week, companies and leaders examined the scale of the expected changes in the workplace of the future – changes that can only be addressed from public-private partnerships. There is a surplus of educated people who do not yet have the skills to meet the needs of companies, companies with jobs that don’t have qualified candidates. With apprenticeships, the government and the private sector can work together to train and reallocate workers quickly, efficiently, and adequately to fill these gaps, while offering opportunities for smart but underutilized communities.

Source: https://bit.ly/2ZMPBN9

Education for future generations: the impact of COVID-19

6 July 2020

by paris News

What could the long stop due to the crown-virus emergency mean for education?

Stopping could be what the industry needed to rethink how we educate and question what we need to teach and what we are preparing our students for.

Most of the students in educational institutions today come from generation Z, a generation that has grown up in a truly globalized world. This generation (under 25 years) will likely reflect on their education following a truly global pandemic, with many facing cancelled exams, sporting events and even graduation.

This generation is defined by technology and expresses itself through apps such as Messenger, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Still, it is also a generation that sees the power to work collaboratively the way to solve the most significant challenges in the world: climate change and mental greeting are at the top of their list.

Generation Alpha, the children of millennials, is the most racially diverse generation in the world, and one in which technology is simply an extension of its consciousness and identity, with social media as a lifestyle. To date, they are perhaps unaware of the impact of the global pandemic on their education.

The world of education, therefore, wonders what students should prepare for in the future. According to a World Economic Forum report, 65% of elementary school children today will work in types of jobs that don’t exist yet.

Let’s see how education must change to be able to better prepare young students for what the future might hold:

Educating citizens in an interconnected world: COVID-19 has confirmed how globally interconnected we are.
Redefine the role of the educator: the role of educators will have to move towards facilitating the development of young people as contributing members of society. Resilience and adaptability will be crucial for the next generations who enter the job.
Teach the necessary life skills for the future: some of the essential skills that employers will seek will be creativity, communication and collaboration, along with empathy and emotional intelligence.
Unlocking technology to offer education: educators around the world are experimenting with new possibilities of doing things differently and with greater flexibility with consequent potential benefits related to access to education for students across the globe.

More importantly, we hope that for Generation Z, Alpha and the generations to come, these experiences of isolation and remote learning away from their peers, teachers and classrooms serve as a cautious reminder of the importance of our human need for social direct interaction.

Source: https://bit.ly/3grKvwo

Analysis of online learning in China during the coronavirus epidemic

3 July 2020

by paris News

The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly transformed learning and teaching around the world. In the People’s Republic of China, for example, at least 260 million students from elementary school to high school enrolled in online platforms during the epidemic.

This period highlighted a series of critical factors on which it is crucial to reflect:

Connection

A prerequisite for moving from physical classrooms to online learning is a good home Internet connection. Connectivity is much better in urban areas than in rural areas (which rely on wireless data connections from a cell phone in the absence of a landline connection).

Accessibility

To make online learning accessible even for the less advantaged areas, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has urged national telecommunications companies to improve network coverage and offer discounted data plans to students of low-income families. Also, it has taken steps to strengthen TV networks with educational content.

Devices

Often online learning takes several hours a day, which is why users prefer a desktop or laptop computer over mobile phones or mini-pads due to the limited screen size and the difficulty in simultaneously viewing teachers, contents and classmates. This also led to an increase in computer sales.

Mode

The combination of recorded lessons and live streaming allowed students to preview and study recorded videos and online materials independently. They can then participate in live streaming lessons by preparing questions better and interacting with their teachers and classmates.

Digital literacy

Digital literacy skills have become fundamental for teachers. Most of young teachers quickly learn how to manage live streaming lessons. However, some older teachers face significant difficulties, making their lack of digital literacy a severe obstacle to effective teaching.

Interaction

The real-time interaction offered by streaming platforms encourages students to participate, ask questions, engage and share their opinions more comfortably.

But teachers also struggle with the technical limitations of online platforms, such as the inconvenience of writing on a blackboard with a computer mouse.

Online vs Offline

Most of the students are more digitally trained and comfortable with online learning (according to a survey, 83% was satisfactory, and 47% very satisfactory). However, most students expressed strong wishes to return to the old mode. Interactions between students, teachers and facilities in a traditional classroom environment cannot be totally replaced by online learning.

Conclusions

The increase in online learning in the People’s Republic of China during the coronavirus epidemic highlights the importance of infrastructure (networks and devices), platforms (stability, interactions and improvement capacity) and preparation of teachers, students and parents. But this does not make online learning a substitute for face-to-face education. Mixed schooling using online and offline learning through public-private partnerships could become the new norm, even after the pandemic.

source: https://bit.ly/2YSYxRI

Considerations about careers path in engineering in India.

5 June 2020

by paris News

Interesting considerations from India regarding careers path in engineering both coming from university paths and technical institutes. Of particular significance is the importance they give to enhance the students logical thinking and sustain their holistic development raising what they deem are three important quotients:

– I.Q. (Intelligence quotient);

– E.Q. (Emotional Quotient);

– S.Q. (Spiritual Quotient).

This not only for their professional growth but also to enable students to be successful in life. All aspects which are also taken in due consideration in our NewMetro Project.

Take a look at the complete article here.

Source: https://bit.ly/373d1Rr

5 Top Machine-to-Machine Startups Impacting Industry 4.0

3 June 2020

by paris News

We analyzed 389 machine-to-machine startups impacting Industry 4.0. Minto, Ioticiti, RoboticsX, Elemental Machines, and Weeve develop 5 top solutions. Learn more in our Global Startup Heat Map!

Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on solutions for Industry 4.0. As there is a large number of startups working on a variety of applications, we want to share our insights with you. Today, we take a look at 5 promising machine-to-machine startups.

Heat Map: 5 Top Machine-to-Machine Startups

Using our StartUs Insights Platform, covering 1.116.000+ startups & emerging companies, we looked at innovation in the field of machine-to-machine. For this research, we identified 389 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and technology among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.

The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 startups & emerging companies developing machine-to-machine solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 389 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.

Minto – Condition Monitoring

Condition monitoring involves tracking parameters, such as temperature or vibrations for each asset. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) brings the power of big data and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication to streamline the processes. This enables real-time monitoring of machines for better predictive analytics. In turn, it saves costs resulting from machine down-times and faulty production.

Minto is an Indian startup that develops a smart condition monitoring platform for rotating machines. The startup’s wireless, non-invasive device plugs into moving machines and collects high-resolution data to monitor them. The solution covers process manufacturing, utilities, and energy applications, as well as identifies faults before machines break down.

Ioticiti – Fleet Management

Fleet management solutions aim at minimizing machines’ mileage for the maximum profit and cost savings. M2M-based platforms connect vehicles in a fleet to automate dispatch and performance monitoring. Moreover, they transmit vehicular information in real-time, a feature that helps greatly in case of any accidents or failures for a fast response.

Canadian startup Ioticiti uses the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to build a fleet management product. The startup’s solution equips vehicles with a M2M connectivity platform to map and manage unload wait-times and optimize product deliveries. The solutions can be applies in the construction, cold-chain, and waste management industries.

RoboticsX – Digital Factory

Most industrial processes require humans to operate or automate a single task at a time. Moreover, data generated from a machine generally stays within it. This leads to frequent downtimes, continuous delays, and redundant processes. M2M communication enables interoperability among machines and devices in smart factories.

RoboticsX is a German startup that develops machine-to-machine solutions to empower digital factories. X1 Grid, their manufacturing software platform, transfers data from connected industrial devices to enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs in real-time to increase the efficiency of the factory. The platform also assists engineers in reconfiguring devices without programming.

Elemental Machines – Lab Of The Future

Nowadays science-based industries encounter unique challenges in enterprise asset management. For instance, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) devices and testing tools do not share a lot of data that is crucial for important production decisions. M2M-based solutions automate data collection and optimize R&D activities in multiple industries, such as materials, life sciences, manufacturing, and energy.

The US-based startup Elemental Machines provides M2M solutions for technology-based industries. Their product, Element-D, collects metadata from OEM devices to provide actionable insights about workflows, machine health, and capacity utilization. The startup also provides solutions for monitoring ambient temperature and environmental conditions in manufacturing facilities and containers.

Weeve – Machine Economy

Machine economy involves networked and autonomous machines acting without the need for human intervention. It combines machine learning and M2M interactions to improve operational processes and attain higher production efficiency. This saves costs in hiring human labor needed to monitor systems for maintenance in Industry 4.0.

German startup Weeve offers solutions that bring the benefits of the machine-to-machine economy to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Their product, WeeveMQ, uses the patent-pending MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTTS) protocol for secure M2M, particularly for cases where battery life or computational resources pose a limitation. Additionally, the IoT Wallet, another product from Weeve, facilitates payments between connected IoT devices.

What About The Other 384 Solutions?

While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence so you can achieve your goals faster. The 5 machine-to-machine startups showcased above are promising examples out of 389 we analyzed for this article.

reposted from https://bit.ly/3dh3ysi

NEW METRO

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