Web Summit 2017: A Future in Responsibility

Over three and a half days last week in Lisbon, Portugal,81,000 attendees, speakers, journalists, and volunteers gathered to discuss thefuture of technology at Web Summit 2017. While the conference wasn’tspecifically geared to explore learning and development, understanding howtechnology shapes our daily lives helps us understand how we can use technologyto help support learning.

Opening night kicked off with a surprise keynote by thelegendary physicist Stephen Hawking, who called for a responsible approach totechnological development with creation of a European regulatory committee tohelp develop a code of ethics around artificial intelligence and responsibledevelopment. Margrethe Vestager, European commissioner for competition; AntónioGuterres, secretary-general of the United Nations; and António Costa, prime ministerof Portugal, echoed the same sentiment, in addition to creating checks andbalances to ensure fair competition and using technology to combat futureworldwide crises like climate change and growing inequality. Al Gore, former vicepresident of the United States, closed the conference with a rousing call toaction to push forward efforts in addressing climate change using technologicalinnovations.

Over 2,100 startups pitched their products and ideas to acommunity of investors. Some of them in the education and workforce developmentspace were:

• teambay: Based in Berlin, Germany,teambay’s HR solution creates a continuous internal dialogue and analyzesanonymous employee feedback, with promises to boost company productivity.Employees are given weekly bite-sized questions about various aspects of theirworkplace. The simplicity of the questions, and the anonymity, allowsmanagement to get vital, honest feedback to create a better workplace culture. teambaycurrently focuses its product on companies with 200 – 5,000 employees.
• Devscore: Based out of the UnitedKingdom, Devscore utilizes an API with GitHub, pairing it with machine learningto validate developer code. Each developer is given a score based on factorssuch as the complexity of their code, syntax adherence, and functionality—whichassists recruiters and companies in getting quality engineers. Future expansionwill create a community for beginners to develop their coding careers and buildtheir scores through curated courses online.
• Eurekos: Based in Nivå, Denmark,Eurekos has developed what it calls the “Next Generation Digital LearningEnvironment” to replace the LMS. Thecompany initially began in the enterprise space and eventually partnered with alarge university in Holland to develop 4,000 courses over the span of two and ahalf years, with teachers creating their own courses in the system. With100,000 users, Eurekos’s system has integrated xAPI and cmi5 standards with aspecial focus on using social networking within each module.
• Areeka: Based in Vienna, Austria, Amlogyhas created the Areeka mobile app using AR with schoolbooks, bringingsustainable, faster, and more fun learning to schools. The founders, who are bothrefugees, found when they immigrated to a new country that they had difficultywith the language in school. Recognizing that more interactive, visual 3-Dmodels can assist in learning, they work with book publishers and theeducational ministries in various European countries to develop illustrations.

Figure 1: Demonstration of Areeka

In addition to the startups looking to improveand change the current education and workplace development landscape,presenters at the Web Summit previewed what the future could look like withtechnology leading the way. Uber Elevate will be doing test flights in urbanair transportation to move ride-sharing into the skies; Kernal wants to put achip in the human brain to improve neurodegenerative disease and cognition; andthe future of marketing will combine analysis of social media accounts withmachine learning and artificial intelligence to personalize advertisingdirectly to individual consumers. Technology is moving at an incredible speed,and it’s only a matter of time before companies like Kernal and technologieslike artificial intelligence will change the entire landscape of learning.