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Researcher Jordi Madrenas, from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the UPC, is part of an international team that has been working for some weeks to implement next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) inspired by the neural networks of the human brain and that surpasses the limitations of current AI and advancement in low-power AI. In her environment, Martina Massana-Massip, is a UPC student who, with other students from the University Grenoble Alpes and Aalto University, is preparing the first sessions of the UIReading Club, the first European inter-university reading club. The two projects have received support from the university alliance Unite! Through a fund, the Unite! Seed Fund, which finances student projects of researchers and teachers from the nine universities that are part of the alliance, including the Catalan Polytechnic. These are just some examples of the opportunities that have opened up in the UPC community since it is part of Unite!, one of the European university alliances promoted by the European Commission to build the future European Higher Education Area.
Together with the UPC, they are part of the Unite! alliance. the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany); Aalto University (Finland); the Graz University of Technology (Austria); Grenoble IPN Graduate School of Engineering and Management-University Grenoble Alpes (France); the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden); the Politécnico Di Torino (Italy), the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (Poland). Together they add up to a community of more than 280,000 students who, with the teaching and research staff and the technical administration and services staff, become a large conglomerate of talent and knowledge.
What should the engineers of the future be like?
These alliances are introducing new ways of working on university internationalization. Members share the purpose of transforming the higher education and research system in Europe to address the immediate future. “We have to rethink the system and translate current education and research into proposals for everyone,” explains Lourdes Reig, vice-rector for International Policy at the UPC and head of Unite! in college. For the vice-rector, "The new European university system has to be interdisciplinary, interconnected, inclusive, digitalized and focused on solving challenges, and doing so requires a joint effort from the nine universities that are part of it."
Unite!, with a clearly technological vocation, is redefining what the engineers of the future have to be like, what new skills they have to have, what disciplines and new areas they have to master and what the most appropriate teaching methodologies are to achieve this. In the case of research, the objective is to offer meeting spaces, share infrastructures and projects, which allow for faster progress and which build innovation ecosystems in European regions through a collaboration paradigm. “And also that new and more extensive areas of research are addressed, and that more disruptive solutions are generated that universities would not have been able to provide individually,” says Reig. Today, sustainable energy, artificial intelligence, industry 4.0, health engineering and entrepreneurship are the priority areas in which the nine universities have great experience and recognition.
The alliances are also contributing to changing university management. Interdisciplinary and intellectual teams share good practices in areas such as open science, social commitment, research management, joint doctoral programs... “As we work to achieve the great and ambitious challenge of building the European university, Every step we take we are already changing our institutions: we are improving current universities,” says the vice-rector of the UPC.
Towards the seal of the European qualification
Teaching innovation is the other big priority for Unite!. The alliance is creating and delivering joint master's and doctoral programs and offers a wide range of courses that students from all nine universities can access. It also offers training for the acquisition of skills (methodologies, tools, resources, languages) for teaching, research, administration and services staff. In this environment, the GreenChips-EDU project stands out, for example, led by the Barcelona Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) at the UPC and which seeks to accelerate the training of qualified professionals in the field of microelectronics. through the implementation of new degrees, masters, microcredentials and MBA programs.
The list of joint initiatives between the nine is extensive. Some involve a high level of transformation. This is the case of the definition of the European Qualification Seal, which will promote transnational collaboration in higher education and will undoubtedly influence the competitiveness of the European higher education sector on the world stage. “After the free movement of people and goods, that of university degrees and professional recognition has to be the next step for Europe,” says Reig.
