Our children are growing up in a world filled with screens. How much should we worry about this? Professor Mariek Vanden Abeele (imec-mict-UGent) analyses the benefits and drawbacks of digital connectedness among young people, and tells us how we can ensure healthy screen time.
At the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, starting next academic year, you can opt for an educational track to become a language technologist. A sought-after profile on the job market, so it seems.
We all do it, accepting cookies without thinking when we visit a website. It seems quite harmless, but it is not. In fact, it is downright dangerous, according to human rights expert Professor Joe Cannataci.
Ensuring that every child learns how to code, that is the common goal of several UGent researchers and the educational platform CodeCosmos. They developed a digital co-teacher together for the popular programming language Scratch. A world-first because this is the first tool that can automatically evaluate Scratch exercises. “Coach CoDi goes light years beyond all other feedback tools”, says UGent professor Christophe Scholliers.
Virtually all human rights treaties are much older than the modern technologies that determine the rhythm of our day-to-day lives. But these rights are under threat, especially from large tech companies. Professors Ruben Verborgh and Eva Lievens advocate an entirely new mindset: “The first step must always be to think about what kind of society we want. Only then can we build the technology necessary to achieve it, not the other way around.”
Programming is for younger generations what computer lessons were for today’s twenty and thirty year olds. It is as standard in their curriculum as languages and maths. Only, it’s a rather bumpy ride. Dodona, the project by Peter Dawyndt and Bart Mesuere, can help in smoothing the path.
Inventing technological solutions to make local communities stronger, that is the challenge of Samsung Electronics' Solve for Tomorrow ideas competition. Elisabeth and Rune won the Belgian qualifying round at the beginning of May and will soon go to the European finals with their GameYard.
It is fair to say that Sir Tim Berners-Lee changed the world when he invented the World Wide Web 32 years ago. And his work is far from finished, because he wants a mid-course correction on the web. An absolute necessity, as he himself says, on which he is working together with Ruben Verborgh from Ghent University, among others.
Large companies know more about us than our own mothers. The massive gathering, storing and use of our online data has become commonplace, to such an extent that we have lost control of that data. The Solid project wants to change that. Its ambition? Reform the World Wide Web.
