(Crealis) -- Raqmiyat, a leading UAE-based systems integrator, announced the launch of its new Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative called 'Campus to Corporate', which aims to help new graduates from key colleges and universities in the UAE to better equip and prepare themselves for the country's highly competitive job market.

The well-attended kick off event was recently held at the University of Sharjah campus where consultants and experts from Raqmiyat guided graduates on the challenges and appropriate techniques to successfully navigate the recruitment process. The new CSR initiative is expected to complement Raqmiyat's planned internship program that aims to provide new graduates with the opportunity to train and gain experience from the corporate world.

The 'Campus to Corporate' CSR initiative relies on Raqmiyat's expansive knowledge of global industries and various regional industry segments and utilizes this as a platform to provide training and development for fresh graduates in the UAE. Further, the initiative at the University of Sharjah bore testament to the company's continued commitment to the development of talent within the region.

"Today's generation of students needs to be aware that the country's job market has become fierce and highly-competitive and one of the ways to keep them one step ahead is to be well-versed and knowledgeable on new trends and innovations, within their desired industries," said Mabel Kuri. "We believe that adequate knowledge, combined with proper motivation and exposure to real-life situations can help increase the chances of our local students to succeed in the competitive market here and abroad. The 'Campus to Corporate' CSR initiative demonstrates our interest in grooming UAE's next batch of professionals, and the successful response we have received from this initial launch has prompted us to further this initiative across the country's top colleges and universities."

Overwhelmed with the positive response to the 'Campus to Corporate' launch, Raqmiyat is now looking towards partnering with more UAE-based universities and colleges to help bolster the CSR initiative.

"We are highly appreciative of this initiative taken by Raqmiyat, as this will definitely help our students become more dynamic and performance-oriented members of the work force. Such programs are absolutely essential at a time like this, especially from a key market player who is strong in providing unique solutions to the various sectors in the UAE," concluded Rana Kabbani, Coordinator - Career Advising and Student Training Office, University of Sharjah.





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(Crealis) -- A candidature led by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and ESADE Business School has been selected following a European call for proposals to launch a major project aimed at stimulating innovation in the field of sustainable energy. The project, known as InnoEnergy, will entail an initial investment of €450 million over the next four years. The initiative is supported by the recently created European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The EIT was set up on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, renowned as a world leader in innovation.

The EIT, whose aim is to achieve greater integration of universities, companies and research centers, issued a call for proposals to create three pan-European Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). InnoEnergy will be the sustainable energy KIC. The other two will focus on the information society and climate change.

Participating partners

The two lead institutions submitted their proposal in collaboration with the energy sector companies Gas Natural–Unión Fenosa, Iberdrola, EDF, Vatenfall, ABB and Total. Other partners involved in designing the candidature were the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm (Sweden), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC), the Energy, Environment and Technology Research Center (CIEMAT), and the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). A total of 35 universities, companies and research centers are partners in the InnoEnergy project.

The goal for the first four years is to train over 1500 students in specific international programs aimed at producing technology leaders with a strong entrepreneurial culture, create more than 60 new patents, and launch over 50 startups. It is also anticipated that 90 new products will be put on the market in the first four years that the project is underway. The project will run until 2017.

InnoEnergy will have six operational centers located in Barcelona, Stockholm, Karlsruhe, Grenoble, Eindhoven and Krakow. These centers will be responsible for coordinating various subthemes related to sustainable energy.

The Spanish center of operations, known as Co-Location Center Iberia, will be based in Barcelona. The Center will bring together Spanish and Portuguese partners and coordinate all the InnoEnergy projects that focus on renewable energies (wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and marine energy). It will also coordinate a large-scale project on industrial energy efficiency.

In addition to the UPC and the ESADE Business School, the other main partners involved in the Barcelona center are FENOSA, IREC, CIEMAT and the Portuguese university IST. Associated partners who have joined the initial group are Tecnalia, Alstom-Ecotècnia, Galp Energía, EdP and Agbar. In the future it is expected that other key Spanish companies in the sector and SMEs specializing in the renewable energy field will also come on board.

From the Co-Location Center Iberia, located at the new Diagonal Besòs Campus in Barcelona, the UPC will coordinate renewable energy research projects with the support of the IREC. The role of the ESADE Business School will be to focus on turning innovation into business and entrepreneurial opportunities. The UPC and ESADE will work together to create a support infrastructure for the Spanish partners involved.

ESADE will be the benchmark business school for KIC InnoEnergy as a whole and home to the ESADE CREAPOLIS Innovation Park, which will foster excellence, networking, and collaborative innovation among the six European co-location centers.

The role of the KICs

Though they are distributed throughout Europe and act independently, the KICs will now become the operational part of the EIT. The KICs are the first and most critical step towards the full development of the recently created institute. With the establishment of the KICs, leading universities, companies and research centers will for the first time work together with the aim of generating the critical mass needed to achieve excellence in innovation.

“The UPC is proud to be coordinating the Co-Location Center Iberia as part of such a significant initiative as KIC InnoEnergy. With support from education and research, the project will have a major impact in the European energy sector and drive innovation,” says Josep Bordonau, professor of electronic engineering at the School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB) and the UPC’s InnoEnergy coordinator.

“Europe needs to demonstrate that it can excel in creating new knowledge,” says Elena Bou, a professor in ESADE’s Department of Operations Management and Innovation and one of the project researchers, together with Professor Bordonau. “Despite everything, Europe hasn’t yet been able to translate knowledge into tangible assets, that is to say, into innovation.”

UPC project chosen as Future Information and Communication Society KIC finalist

In this call for proposals, the EIT has chosen the project Climate-KIC as the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation KIC and the project EIT ICT Labs as the Future Information and Communication Society KIC. In the latter category, the UPC submitted the project TRANSFICS, which has been chosen as a finalist; it has therefore been designated a KIC in recognition of the quality of its research, although there is no financial award.




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(Crealis) -- Using Grid specifications and technologies, the project provides a more robust access protocol for RDF(S) data resources.

Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's School of Computing have created an access protocol for data resources (or information sources) that are defined in RDF(S). RDF(S) is a set of web of data recommendations promoted by the W3C consortium for defining metadata (data about data) in the Web.

RDF(S), one of whose promoters is Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, is actually a combination of the RDF language, used to define metadata, and the RDF Schema, an extension of the RDF language used to define vocabularies, which then structure the metadata defined using RDF.

The use of RDF(S) has now gone beyond the Web and it has started to be used in other contexts. RDF(S) is being used to build ontologies for representing genetic information, for publishing some of the United States or United Kingdom Governments' economic recovery programme databases or even to represent information in the Wikipedia or the New York Times.

The key difference between RDF(S) and other computer languages is that it has been created specifically for the Internet environment and for machine consumption. This way, data accumulated on the network of networks defined in RDF(S) can be processed automatically by computer applications in conformity with user needs, ultimately improving the use of such a vast amount of information.

Grid with web of data

The access protocol to data resources defined using RDF(S), developed by the School of Computing together with teams from Japan (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST) and the United Kingdom (National e-Science Centre), combines Grid technology, enabling the shared and coordinated use of geographically distributed computational resources, and the web of data, which is empowered through Grid specifications and technologies to exploit RDF(S) data resources.

The key advantage of this project is that it offers more robust access to systems making intensive use of this type of resources, as it abstracts the end user away from the technical details of the resource implementation, while providing a mechanism for fine-grained use of their contents.
The result of this research work is a much more powerful and securer tool for exploiting RDF(S) data resources. Systems developers using this type of resources will find this tool very useful, as it provides mechanisms not only for querying, but also for modifying the actual RDF(S) data resources.

The Open Grid Forum's Database Access and Integration Services Working Group started work on creating this protocol in 2006. Since then this working group has output a motivational document and two RDF(S) Grid access specifications, one using a declarative mechanism through the SPARQL query language and another using a conceptual programming mechanism. The first specification is led by AIST and the second by the UPM's School of Computing.

The protocol is now considered to be complete, although it is under ongoing review by a number of teams of experts. The protocol is already being used in several projects partnered by the UPM, like UPGrid or ADMIRE, where middleware technologies are being created to improve data mining and integration tasks from scientific and commercial sources.




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