Esade, Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC) have renewed their academic alliance Fusion Point within the framework of the ‘ATTRACT Academy’.
News
Cooperation projects
'ATTRACT Academy': A European academic alliance to boost education in technology, science and AI
Date
15 July 2022
This is a new European academic project aimed at promoting excellence in multidisciplinary education by means of several programs focused on innovation, technology, design, science and artificial intelligence to tackle and solve the challenges facing society in the coming years.
‘ATTRACT Academy’ is part of ATTRACT, a pioneering venture funded by the EU program ‘Horizon 2020’ which aims to help modernize the European economy and enhance people’s lives by creating products, services, companies and jobs. Within this new framework of collaboration, Esade, IED and UPC, through Fusion Point, have designed new specialist training courses that enable students to work with prestigious research groups on transforming and maximizing the benefits of new technologies for purposes of research and development for society by seeking applications in everyday life.
Collaboration with scientists
‘ATTRACT Academy’ offers students all the opportunities of the entrepreneurial, scientific and technological ecosystem to encourage multidisciplinary teams of students, in collaboration with the faculty of Esade, IED and UPC and researchers from different entities such as CERN IdeaSquare — the European organization for nuclear research — to work on new solutions for the future of humanity. The Technology for Social Innovation program falls under this agreement. During this course, students from IED, ETSIT (Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering) in Barcelona, FIB (Barcelona school of computing) at UPC and the Master in Business Analytics at Esade will receive an introduction to the technologies of top-level European research centers and work with scientists on finding tech applications for solving social challenges.
This academic alliance also develops the new Challenge-Based Innovation for Artificial Intelligence (CBI4AI) program which focuses on Artificial Intelligence, a field that has changed the paradigm of the present-day social and business world and requires a new relationship to be established between technology and society, in keeping with the principles of sustainability and ethics. The course takes place at different locations, i.e., Fusion Point on the Esade Innovation Rambla, and at the UPC North Campus and CERN, and has a three-point goal: (1) to provide a unique learning experience; (2) to propose innovative applications for the technologies developed by the ATTRACT project; and (3) to develop solutions for key challenges for humanity by means of Artificial Intelligence.
In addition, the Challenge-Based Innovation (CBI) program, driven by IdeaSquare and the CERN Innovation Department, now in its eighth edition this academic year, is also part of this alliance, ATTRACT Academy.
Innovation focused on human beings
Likewise, within the framework of the European ATTRACT initiative, through Fusion Point, an intensive summer version of the Technology for Social Innovation program is taught at Esade, in which students of this business school apply design methods to identify disruptive applications for cutting-edge technologies. In this respect, the course is aimed at exploring the human, technological, financial and social aspects of creating organizations able to deliver these innovations to the world in a sustainable manner.
You may be interested in:
