Reflections from our General Assembly in Berlin
SEISMEC’s latest General Assembly took place in Berlin, Germany, on September 5-6, 2024. We shared two intense and extremely productive days to brainstorm ideas, put together a plan and align the vision of what our pilot design, execution and monitoring should look like – in anticipation of the upcoming milestone for our first year anniversary and the official kick-off of piloting efforts.
Read on for a recap of the meeting and our main reflections on how the future looks like for SEISMEC.
Day 1 – Setting the stage for our pilots’ implementation
The day began with a joint welcome from both the coordination team at Erasmus University and our host, Technical University of Berlin, which helped highlight the meeting’s goals and expectations. The focus was clear: assess SEISMEC’s achievements so far and prepare for the next phase of the pilot implementation.
This led to an in-depth session to introduce the mechanisms we will be using to frame the pilot implementation plan, which also served to lay the foundation for our multi-sectoral pilots and ensure all partners involved are aligned in terms of the envisioned timelines, KPIs and the overarching integration of our CAPS framework as the shared motif and driving force connecting the different pieces in our piloting puzzle.
Immediately after, we jumped directly from theory to practice with a series of quick-fire pitches, where each pilot leader had 2 minutes to go through their main proposition: overall goal and ambition, target personas and role and the user journey in conjunction with key CAPS factors at play.
To further solidify this vision, speed dating rounds were assigned for each pilot together with a set of prompts to kickstart in-depth discussions, foster cross-fertilization and facilitate the necessary internal matchmaking for future collaboration.
After a fully-packed morning agenda, our afternoon was devoted to breakout sessions to start unearthing the wider issues and potential applicability that can be unlocked within our pilot scenarios. This is a fundamental part of our ongoing work in the pilots’ transversal analysis and monitoring (led by our colleagues at University College Cork), which revolves around the themes of cybersecurity and privacy, trust and understanding, inclusion, in-work learning and industrial competitiveness.
As the last item in the agenda for the day, partners had the chance to participate in a data management and ethics workshop led by Erasmus University, where they were guided through a hypothetical use case to get hands-on experience on key procedures and critical requirements that must be met in the context of our human-centric approach for SEISMEC.
To wrap up our first day in Berlin, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner and tour of the AEG am Humboldthain historical industrial plant, one of the largest (and oldest!) industrial sites in Berlin, which still is home to the building designs of architect Peter Behrens, the creator of the Werkbund artistic movement, a predecessor of Bauhaus.
Day 2 – Increasing visibility, transparency and advocating for humans
Friday came, and with it the last day of our get-together. This time, the menu included two different workshops: one covered the basics of communication and dissemination; the second provided a thorough introduction into explainability as it relates to our work around AI.
In the first one, partners were shown the current status of the project’s promotional efforts so far, and given useful tips and advice on how to effectively communicate their involvement and results in SEISMEC using the project’s available channel and resources to their advantage.
In the second workshop, our colleagues from CERTH walked us through the key concepts around explainable AI methods and techniques, and how they tie into SEISMEC’s ambition to provide real-time, easy-to-understand explanations to foster user trust, boost insights and robustness and improve error identification and analysis.
Stay tuned for more updates as SEISMEC steadily continues its journey to pilot the shift towards human-centricity in European industry!
