Welcome to the third edition of our ‘DISCOVER THE HUMANTECH WORK’ blogs, a series in which we discuss the HumanTech work packages (WPs) with our WP Leaders!
Let’s continue this series with WP8 — focused on dissemination and communication. Giulia Pastor and Andrea Torres from AUSTRALO will present key insights on the work done and the most exciting achievements so far.
WP8 is the work package responsible for the project’s dissemination, communication, and exploitation activities. It is led by AUSTRALO, with DFKI in charge of exploitation and standardisation and Hypercliq handling IPR activities.
The whole HumanTech team has invested a lot of effort in the first two years of activities to ensure that the exciting work carried out by our technical partners is well-promoted and all the HumanTech stakeholders are aware of what is happening in the project.
In addition, a significant part of WP8’s job is to MAKE THE PROJECT RESULTS OPEN to everyone interested, in line with the open science principles.
To achieve this important objective, our technical partners have published six open-access scientific publications, which can be consulted and downloaded on our HumanTech website.
They also participated in 24 events, workshops, conferences, and media appearances and won 3 prestigious awards:
- 2 first place awards in the Object Pose Estimation Challenge (BOP Challenge, ECCV 2022) | Partner: DFKI
- 3 first place awards at the Object Pose Estimation Challenge (BOP Challenge, ICCV 2023) | Partner: DFKI
- 3rd place in the CV4AEC workshop’s Scan-to-BIM challenge at CVPR 2023 | Partner| DFKI + RPTU
In HumanTech, communication and dissemination are the keys to the project’s success.
All the key scientific stakeholders must be aware of the project activities; however, we must keep in mind that HumanTech stands for Human-centered technologies for a safer and greener construction industry and has the main scope of providing new technologies to make this sector more worker-secure and green.
With this in mind, we created different blog posts and social media campaigns, underlying, on one side, the project’s technical achievements and, on the other side, the benefits that the new technologies we are developing will bring to our end users, the workers, and the construction companies.
In the NEWS section of our website, you can find insightful articles on our technologies and their benefits, together with articles summarising the first-year achievements and progress updates before our first review meeting.
To explain different aspects of HumanTech — from our pilots to our learning materials to skill construction workers — in a clear, didactic and engaging way, we have conducted several video interviews with different team members. Also, videos and animations to showcase different project updates, demos, learning pills and activities within our Tech4EUconstruction cluster.
In WP8, we believe that our colleagues, the multidisciplinary professionals from 21 organisations in 10 countries who make up the HumanTech team, are best placed to explain the work they are developing. This is why we have given them space to present themself, their background, skills, vision of the project and the importance of their work for the construction industry in the series of interviews: ‘Meet the HumanTech team’.
In parallel, we launched a new series, ‘Unlocking the Future of Research‘, in which researchers, PhD students and junior staff working on the project explain what it means for a young professional and/or researcher to work on an EU project and what this can do to their future careers.
In HumanTech, we value our community.
In June 2023, we joined forces with our sister projects BEEYONDERS, and RoBétArmé, to create the collaborative cluster Tech4EUconstruction. Funded by the European Commission, under the call HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01-12, the three projects aim to develop and demonstrate new technologies to digitalise further and automatise the European building sector, increasing its safety and attractivity for workers. Furthermore, the cluster seeks to stimulate the EU’s sovereignty in the industry, decreasing the need for technological imports.
The main objective of our Tech4EUconstruction cluster is to share knowledge between the projects on different aspects:
- Mutual exchange of technical expertise and project innovations
- Implement joint communication campaigns to raise cluster awareness
- Share knowledge and plans on exploitation actions
- Mutually promote the projects’ principal activities and achievements
- Co-organisation of events, workshops, panels, etc.
In less than one year, we organised two successful workshops at the European Robotics Forum 2023 and 2024. We also launched a new campaign called Words of Innovation, in which experts from our projects delved into essential and innovative aspects of their work by defining simple keywords. They briefly explained the technologies and strategies they are developing to address the challenges facing today’s European construction industry.
In addition, we invited other EU projects working in the same field to join our cluster: we can proudly say that now we have eight EU-funded projects onboard!
Looking ahead, the Tech4EUConstruction cluster will organise new social media campaigns (stay tuned: soon, we will launch an insightful campaign related to scientific publications), participate in joint workshops during central EU and international conferences and events (next step: SustainablePlaces 2024), and invite the recently funded EU projects working on our same topics.
And this is just the beginning!
Beyond dissemination and communication.
WP8 is not just the work package dedicated to dissemination and communication; it also covers the project’s Exploitation, standardisation, and IPR activities. Thanks to the expertise of our Exploitation and IPR managers – Jason Rambach and George Kartsounis, and the great service offered by the Horizon Results Booster, we deeply analysed three Key Exploitable Results (KER1 Intention-controlled exoskeleton, KER2 Scan2BIM software and KER3 Spherical ToF camera), preparing the first Exploitation plan for the project. In addition, we also established a shared understanding and agreement regarding IPR among partners involved in developing the KERs.
Take a look at our progress on WP6, Human Factors – Training, Usability and Assessment, presented by Gloria Callinan, Project Support Officer at the Technological University of the Shannon, and stay tuned to our news and social media (LinkedIn and Twitter) to stay up to date!