On March 9th and 10th Zac Woolfitt attended the Media and Learning Conference in Brussels. The programme of this annual conference examines ‘developments, services and uses of media in education and training to […] identify policies and initiatives that promote digital and media competence at all levels of education and training as well as to promote best-practice in the take-up and application of media in education and training.’
This OP was deployed in two phases, focusing on Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G). Its first phase took place at a private residence in Loughborough and ran from March 2017 up to December 2017. This phase 1 is also referred to as the ‘Loughborough pilot’. The second phase took place from February 2020 until present at a comparable residence in Burton-upon-Trent, thereafter, referred to as the ‘Burton pilot’ or ‘phase 2’. Both pilots included bi-directional chargers, Electric Vehicles (EV), Battery Static Storage (BSS) and rooftop solar PhotoVoltaic panels (PV).The main goals of this pilot were to demonstrate the added value of V2H and V2G of using additional energy storage and PV in households.Challenges encountered in the project include interoperability issues, particularly in phase 1, and the unforeseen development of the homeowner selling his house, meaning a new location needed to be found. However, this challenge ultimately provided an excellent opportunity to implement lessons for interoperability and to act upon the recommendations from the intermediate analysis of the Loughborough pilot. This report is mainly focussed on phase 1 (Loughborough), and additional analysis for Burton-upon-Trent (phase 2) can be found in the appendix.
The Dutch hospitality industry, reflecting the wider Dutch society, is increasingly facing social sustainability challenges for a greying population, such as increasing burnout, lifelong learning, and inclusion for those distanced from the job market. Yet, while the past decades have seen notable progress regarding environmental sustainability and good governance, more attention should be paid to social sustainability. This concern is reflected by the top-sector healthcare struggles caused by mounting social welfare pressure, leading to calls by the Dutch government for organizational improvement in social earning capacity. Furthermore, the upcoming EU legislation on CSRD requires greater transparency regarding financial and non-financial reporting this year. Yet, while the existing sustainability accreditation frameworks offer guidance on environmental sustainability and good governance reporting, there must be more guidance on auditing social sustainability. The hospitality industry, as a prominent employer in the Netherlands, thus has a societal and legislative urgency to transition its social earning capacity. Dormben Hotel The Hague OpCo BV (Dormben) has thus sought support in transitioning its social sustainability standards to meet this call. Hotelschool, the Hague leads the consortium, including Green Key Nederland and Dormben, by employing participatory design to present a social sustainability accreditation framework. Initially, Dr. David Brannon and Dr. Melinda Ratkai from Hotelschool The Hague will draft a social sustainability accreditation framework informed by EFRAG. Subsequently, Erik van Wijk, from Green Key Nederland, the hospitality benchmark for sustainability accreditation, and Sander de Jong, from Dormben, will pilot the framework through four participatory workshops involving hospitality operators. Later, during a cross-industry conference, Dr. David Brannon and Dr. Melinda Ratkai will disseminate a social sustainability toolkit across their academic and industry networks. Finally, conference and workshop participants will be invited to form a social sustainability learning community, discussing their social earning capacity based on the revised sustainability accreditation.
Our world is changing rapidly as a result of societal and technological developments that create new opportunities and challenges. Extended Realities (XR) could provide solutions for the problems the world is facing. In this project we apply these novel solutions in food and hospitality. It aims to tackle fundamental questions on how to stimulate a healthy and vital society that is based on a sustainable and innovative economy. This project aims to answer the question: How can Extended Reality (XR) technologies be integrated in the design of immersive food experiences to stimulate sustainable consumption behavior? A multidisciplinary approach, that has demonstrated its strength in the creative industry, will be applied in the hospitality and food sector. The project investigates implications and design considerations for immersion through XR technology that can stimulate sustainable consumption behavior. Based on XR prototypes, physiological data will be collected using biometric measuring devices in combination with self-reports. The effect of stimuli on sustainable consumption behavior during the immersive experience will be tested to introduce XR implementations that can motivate long-term behavioral change in food consumption. The results of the project contribute towards developing innovations in the hospitality sector that can tackle global societal challenges by exploiting the impact of new technology and understanding of consumer behavior to promote a healthy lifestyle and economy. Next to academic publications and conference contributions, the project will develop a handbook for hospitality professionals. It will outline steps and design criteria for the implementation of XR technologies to create immersive experiences that can stimulate sustainable consumption behavior. The knowledge generated in the project will contribute to the development of the curriculum at the Academy for Hotel and Facility at Breda University of Applied Sciences by introducing a technology-driven experience design approach for the course Sustainable Strategic Business Design.
A huge amount of data are being generated, collected, analysed and distributed in a fast pace in our daily life. This data growth requires efficient techniques for analysing and processing high volumes of data, for which preserving privacy effectively is a crucial challenge and even a key necessity, considering the recently coming into effect privacy laws (e.g., the EU General Data Protection Regulation-GDPR). Companies and organisations in their real-world applications need scalable and usable privacy preserving techniques to support them in protecting personal data. This research focuses on efficient and usable privacy preserving techniques in data processing. The research will be conducted in different directions: - Exploring state of the art techniques. - Designing and applying experiments on existing tool-sets. - Evaluating the results of the experiments based on the real-life case studies. - Improving the techniques and/or the tool to meet the requirements of the companies. The proposal will provide results for: - Education: like offering courses, lectures, students projects, solutions for privacy preservation challenges within the educational institutes. - Companies: like providing tool evaluation insights based on case studies and giving proposals for enhancing current challenges. - Research centre (i.e., Creating 010): like expanding its expertise on privacy protection technologies and publishing technical reports and papers. This research will be sustained by pursuing following up projects actively.
