Two students who participated under the ATTRACT Academy CBI4AI 2023 course, Ander Barrio (UPC, Ghostbusters project) and Gabriel Mari (Esade, TeSI Superhumans & CBI4AI TumorDeTech), have been called to take part in the one-year course Product Development Project (PDP) hosted by Aalto University in Finland. In the course, they will work in interdisciplinary teams to tackle industrial challenges and develop state-of-the-art solutions to real-world problems.
Both students will be part of the Global Teams participating online in the project and will join the local groups in the field during the last two weeks before the final presentation on May 17th. Furthermore, Marçal Garcia (UPC, and CBI4AI alumni), who is currently on Erasmus exchange at Aalto University, will also join the PDP and participate in another team.
Joining forces: two teams that collaborate for collective impact
A collaboration emerged between two teams from different programs after their participation in the Second ATTRACT Academy Gala held in Bologna in June 2023. Students from the Cleanwaters and Filter2Less projects met at this event, and due to proactive communication, they are working together.
The Cleanwaters team was originally part of the BASE consortium in the PDP course and collaborated with ECSENS as their RDI partner. For the current round, Miran Ghafoori and Arkar Nan Htike will merge and work with Laura del Rio and Marc Clascà (UPC) from the TeSI project Filter2Less to act as one of the sponsors for the PDP course with Glassomer as their RDI partner.
The PDP course works under the same premise as ATTRACT Academy: students from different backgrounds such as business, art and design, and technology, interested in product development of industrial or consumer products collaborate to produce a functional prototype of a product or service. In this case, participants will be guided by Aalto University and Fusion Point in the development of the project.
“It’s fantastic to see how the students are leveraging the ATTRACT Academy network and ecosystem, making the most of these opportunities for collaboration beyond the courses. We are looking forward to seeing the results of the PDP final course in Aalto”, explains Mireia Sierra, Program Manager de ATTRACT Academy Fusion Point.
ATTRACT Academy: how it all began
In ATTRACT phase 1, the “Young innovators and entrepreneurs” pilot was launched for students to identify potential innovations within the technologies being developed by the R&D&I projects. This allowed them to interact with the researchers and as a result, more than half of the projects developed proposed ideas and new potential markets that researchers had not considered before.
As a result of the phase 1 successes, the pilot was scaled up, and 10 Student Programs were included in ATTRACT phase 2 to create a new generation of researchers who perceive co-innovation between academia, research infrastructures, and commercial organisations as a natural way of working. Participants are working, applying design thinking methodologies to solve societal challenges inspired by the ATTRACT technologies, often finding alternate uses for these technologies. During this phase, more than 700 young innovators will participate from all over Europe.
More information about the Student Programs is available here.
