News Story

Transforming Europe towards the Digital Age

John Domingue, Wednesday 16 Dec 2015

This week saw a premier European event “Transforming Europe towards the Digital Age” held in Luxembourg. This event addressed with the digital skills gap which will grow from 335,000 to 825,000 unfilled positions in areas related to ICT by 2020.

The event was opened by the Prime Minister of Luxembourg Xavier Bettel, Jean-Luc Martino the European Chief Information Officer of the Raiffeisen Bank Luxembourg and CIO of the year 2015 for Medium sized businesses and Kirsi Ekroth-Manssila Head of Unit, DG Internal Market, Industry, Entreperneurship and SMEs, European Commission.

Later panels featured key industrial stakeholders such as Karsten Simons, the Manager for Corporate Affairs Europe, Cisco who talked about the Internet of Everything consisting of over 50 billion connected devices and generating 45 million jobs 19 trillion dollars of global revenue. The BBC Steve Herrmann Executive Editor BBC News Online mentioned in his talk how useful Linked Data is for BBC News personalisation.

KMi’s Director joined a panel with Laurent Zibell Policy Adviser for the industriAll European trade union and Carmen Bunzl Boulet a Generation Programme Manager for McKinsey to discuss what digital skills are needed in the workplace to meet today’s industry demands. John’s presentation covered the on-going results of both the FORGE and European Data Science Academy projects which cover eLearning, MOOCs and eBooks in the areas of the Future Internet and Data Science respectively. He also highlighted OU Analyse which has already been used to analyse the learning behaviours of over 45,000 OU students.