On Monday 3 October, CEN and CENELEC hosted the fourth edition of their Standards+Innovation Awards, an event that celebrates and acknowledges the important contribution of research and innovation to standardization.
During the event, three winners were awarded, one per each category:
- The winner of the ‘Project’ category is ARETE (Augmented reality interactive educational system), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework program under grant agreement No 856533. The project was nominated by UNE, the Spanish National Standardization Body. ARETE aims to build a Europe-wide competitive ecosystem that supports the dissemination of augmented reality and virtual reality in education. ARETE has launched the new CEN Workshop on 'eXtended Reality (XR) for Learning and Performance Augmentation', which had its kick-off meeting in September under the stewardship of CEN/TC 353 ‘Technologies supporting education and learning processes’. The TC is informed and engaged in the elaboration of the CWA and hopefully will use it in the future as a basis for another standardization deliverable. Additionally, ARETE’s partners have actively promoted standardization in ISO, ETSI and IEEE.
- The winner of the ‘Individual Researcher’ category is Antonio SANSONETTI, a senior researcher at the Italian Institute of Cultural Heritage. His research focuses on materials composing works of art, the study of decay mechanisms, and conservation treatment. He transferred experience from his research activity to CEN/TC 346 ‘Conservation of Cultural heritage’, of which he is the Chairman. Standardization in the field of Cultural Heritage can indicate appropriate diagnostic studies to be performed, help improve methodology, protocols, and guidelines to allow implementation of best practices for conservation, and increase the development of materials, tools, and technologies giving economic importance to a specific market for Cultural Heritage.
- Finally, the winner of the third category ‘Young Researcher’ is Ivan NAVARRO GONZÀLEZ. As part of the course on Innovation and Standardization Management at the Rotterdam School of Management, Ivan wrote an essay showing how standards can positively contribute to innovation by looking at standards through the lenses of idea generation and constraints theories.
You can find out more about all of the 2022 nominees here and the recording of the ceremony is available here.
