InnovationCity Ruhr: a prime example for social and technological innovation

The project “InnovationCity Ruhr” deals with the reconstruction of the city of Bottrop with regard to energy saving measures. The aim is to make the city more environmental friendly in order to create a model for other industrial cities. Until the conclusion of the project in the year 2020, it is planned to change the surface of Bottrop in several positive ways. This paper focuses on the description of the project to give the reader an example of what exactly is done within the scope of InnovationCity Ruhr. Besides that, the link to the subject of sociology shall be given in order to show that the project is a prime example for social innovation.Paper based on the report for the course “Social Factors of Innovation” in 2013-2014, with the responsibility of António Brandão Moniz, at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Universidade Nova Lisbo

Structural change in the ruhr region: problems, potentials and developments

Due to the decline of the heavy industries in the Ruhr region, the area has to reinvent itself. The orientation towards service industries proves to be a difficult task for the district and its population. This paper examines the challenges, problems and potentials of the Ruhr region against the backdrop of its economical history out of a sociological perspective. Thereby the economical situation and its outcome towards the population stand in the foreground of the paper.Paper based in the report made for the course “Sociology of New Information Technologies” in 2013-14 at the Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia Universidade Nova de Lisboa, under the supervision of Prof. Antonio B. Moni

Understanding future skills: requirements for better data

Deliverable 6.3 focuses on data necessary for a comprehensive analysis of skills for digitalisation. Reliable data is needed to make appropriate decisions for the New Skills Agenda for Europe, national initiatives, and VET systems. Qualitative assessments of Tasks 6.1 to 6.4 are contrasted with quantitative WP3 data to identify gaps in data, indicators and measures that support monitoring of skill requirements. The main outcome is that there are still gaps in European data on skills that leave stakeholders partially blindfolded when looking at changes in skill demand and resulting needs for adaptations of skill supply. The report formulates requirements for the improvement of data

Understanding future skills and enriching the skills debate

This 3rd report of the Deliverable 6.1 builds on the framework for future skills and the skills categorisation developed in the 1st and 2nd reports of the Deliverable 6.1. The report focuses on empirical results of the Beyond 4.0 project on the topic of skills within the digital transformation. It draws from the range of empirical data collected during the qualitative research undertaken in Work Packages 4 and 8 of the BEYOND 4.0 project by identifying illustrative examples exemplifying the impact of digitalisation on the five categories of the aforementioned skills categorisation, presents and discusses the findings along the lines of skills demand and skills supply-sides issues, and accordingly, presents a number of recommendations for policymakers

Understanding future skills and enriching the skills debate

Deliverable 6.1 includes a framework for new or increasingly important skills within the digital transformation. This report updates an earlier version that was submitted in December 2019 and reflects progress and new insights. It includes results from a more detailed analysis of future skill demands performed within task 6.2 (which is based on a systematic literature review on skill needs for the digital transformation). These results were used to check and refine the skills ca- tegorisation developed in the first version of the report. Another progress was made within the chapter on the quantitative part of changes in skill demand (section 5) : The availability of data was reassessed by considering several further datasets

Education and Training in Inclusive Welfare States

This working paper analyses opportunities for inclusiveness in the context of the digital transfor-mation. There are fears that digitalisation will create new cleavages in societies, and there will be gaps in skills needed in digital working life. Older workers and immigrants, in particular, are in a vulnerable position. The theoretical approaches of social investment and combined capabilities stress the needs for upskilling. These are identified to develop digital and non-digital skills to cope with the challenges of the digital transformation. We show that it is not enough to develop indi-vidual capabilities. To really improve inclusiveness, combined capabilities are needed, which take into account institutional arrangements and corresponding public services

Interacting Skills: High Road Strategies for Digital Transformation

Understood as skilled labour, talent is one of the systemic conditions included in Stam’s model of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In line with the ‘high road perspective’, employers need to harness the skills of their workers in order to achieve both the economic and social goals resulting from successful digital transformation. The skills categorisation developed as part of the BEYOND 4.0 project forms the basis of the theoretical framing for this chapter. The categorisation includes newly emerging skills and skills that are becoming increasingly important in light of digital transformation. The categorisation distinguishes between four transversal skill categories: digital skills on the one hand and personal, social and methodological skills (taken together, also described as non-digital skills) on the other. In addition to these transversal skill categories, job-specific skills related to concrete work tasks and work experience are also seen as playing a critical role. Using the lens of interacting skills, this chapter draws on findings from empirical data from Work Package 6 Understanding future skills: empowering groups to propose one way for companies to develop innovative solutions for the digital transformation. The premise of the chapter is that the uptake and adoption of new digital technologies requires a new approach to thinking about skills. Five practical actions or steps that HR professionals and functional managers in companies can take when developing and implementing company-based skills initiatives in response to digital tranformation are presented. </p

Evaluating assembly and variant calling software for strain-resolved analysis of large DNA viruses

Infection with human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) can cause severe complications in immunocompromised individuals and congenitally infected children. Characterizing heterogeneous viral populations and their evolution by high-throughput sequencing of clinical specimens requires the accurate assembly of individual strains or sequence variants and suitable variant calling methods. However, the performance of most methods has not been assessed for populations composed of low divergent viral strains with large genomes, such as HCMV. In an extensive benchmarking study, we evaluated 15 assemblers and 6 variant callers on 10 lab-generated benchmark data sets created with two different library preparation protocols, to identify best practices and challenges for analyzing such data. Most assemblers, especially metaSPAdes and IVA, performed well across a range of metrics in recovering abundant strains. However, only one, Savage, recovered low abundant strains and in a highly fragmented manner. Two variant callers, LoFreq and VarScan2, excelled across all strain abundances. Both shared a large fraction of false positive variant calls, which were strongly enriched in T to G changes in a ‘G.G’ context. The magnitude of this context-dependent systematic error is linked to the experimental protocol. We provide all benchmarking data, results and the entire benchmarking workflow named QuasiModo, Quasispecies Metric determination on omics, under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (https://github.com/hzi-bifo/Quasimodo), to enable full reproducibility and further benchmarking on these and other data.Deutsches Zentrum für Infektionsforschun