CRYSTAL (Conversational Systems for Emotional Support and Customer Assistance) will advance research for a next generation of conversational models and systems that implement reliable, friendly and efficient human-machine interactions that can assist humans in tasks beyond automatic information provision, such as emotional support as well as customer assistance. Emotional support provided to vulnerable individuals, such as ageing adults or people experiencing anxiety or depression. Advanced customer assistance provided to call centres, providing customer care and response to customer inquiries, in an empathic, inviting, accurate and efficient manner. Conversational models and systems will be developed by proposing novel learning strategies for domain adaptation, exploring Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering methodologies. User state estimation will be also considered, and strategies, such as behavioural models and stakeholder goals, will guide the policies for dialogue management. Novel evaluation frameworks will be also designed by including automatic metrics, usability as well as human acceptance of the technology. Strict ethical and AI robustness compliance procedures will be applied, as conversational recordings will be collected, anonymised, annotated and encrypted for collaborative work among the project partners. The project will apply extensive staff secondments and foster sustainable knowledge exchange. It will grow the experiences and insights of the partner organisations’ staff via intersectoral and interdisciplinary collaborations, implemented through secondments as well as training and networking activities. Dissemination, communication and exploitation activities will expand the project’s impact pathways.

European policymakers continuously highlight the importance of entrepreneurial and transversal skills for the next generations of students, researchers and innovators to build a resilient society that is able to learn lifelong. In fact, the priority given to entrepreneurship education (EE) is an integral part of every current key policy document (e.g. European Skills Agenda) or strategic plan (e.g. Plan for European Education Area) relating to education inside the EU.Evidently, schools and universities take on a central role for developing entrepreneurial competences amongst learners. Moreover, the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) states the case that the ability to think and act entrepreneurially should be considered not only relevant for graduates that seek careers as entrepreneurs. Rather, entrepreneurial competences matter to all learners in all walks of life.Despite this, EE is not embedded deeply across disciplines and subjects yet. With our Partnership for Initial Entrepreneurship Teacher Education (PIETE) we wanted to make a contribution to change that in the field of initial teacher education (ITE). However, operationalising EntreComp in this context was a challenging experiment. After 3 years of intensive work, we can proudly claim that we were successful in doing so. In terms of intellectual outputs, we have accomplished the following:- a scalable methodology for ITE framework reports that allows to map functionalities, educational priorities and institutional necessities of ITE higher education institutions (esp. for non-ITE stakeholder; applied to contexts of ITE institutions in Poland, Hungary, and Austria)- an EE Capacity Building Compilation to facilitate workshops that foster EE capacity building in the ITE context (applied to 50+ educators during project lifetime)- an EE Teaching Compendium for use in ITE (composed of 15 modules, structurally aligned to EntreComp, pilot-tested among 200+ ITE students & 20 ITE educators- an online EE Awareness Test Center suite that allows to assess conceptual understandings and knowledgeability levels of EE (applied to 170+ ITE educators in Hungary, Austria, and Poland)- a peer reviewed discussion paper on the topic of EE in ITE that analysed the data of the Test Center (from HU, AT, POL)- a Good Practice Collection that showcases 12 EU & outside EU initiatives that successfully put EE into practice within ITE & school contextsPIETE relied on a team of dedicated experts from the fields of entrepreneurship and pre-service teacher education (PIETE Regional Tandems) of 7 organisations from 5 EU countries that were highly motivated to take on the challenge of embedding ITE into EE.Our project has impacted ITE educators & students of the involved organisations (target regions: Szeged - Hungary, Tirol - Austria, Silesia - Poland) and set the base to influence generations of learners taught by them. Given that aspiring teachers educated now will be exercising their profession until the 2060s and beyond, the powerful impact cascade inherent in PIETE becomes evident. This, together with the large dissemination and high quality display of our project results online provides an excellent basis to leverage and sustain PIETE outcomes post project funding. However, with PIETE we did not try to be dogmatic about entrepreneurship education and its place within initial teacher education, but rather realistic on its current relevance for respective educators in their given educational contexts. Moreover, we needed to raise awareness for the benefits of EE first, especially when conceptually understood in a wider sense (as exemplified by EntreComp) before we tried to convince ITE educators to join us on our entrepreneurial journey. This careful and respectful approach has been key success element of PIETE. Besides, we also needed to build a general understanding inside our partnership for how the education of future teachers is rolled out in the PIETE target regions and institutions - not only, but also to become aware of potential barriers and institutional constraints that may hinder introducing more elements of entrepreneurship education to existing teaching activities.These core elements “opened the doors” for integrating EE into ITE. Naturally, a small-scale project like PIETE can only provide excellent starting conditions to enhance and sustain this development. With the end of the project, it is in the hands of the regional tandems, but foremost, each involved ITE partner, to decide on how to continue their entrepreneurial journey. All of them have expressed their commitment to do so with well reflected and context-depending measures. PIETE has prepared them well to go further, inspire others to do alike and, thus, to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial teachers as called for by European policy makers.

(see above)

Digital technology is changing people’s lives and is having a massive impact on education, on the labour market, and on the type of skills needed in the economy and society. Over the past decades, some initiatives have emerged on using digital technologies to provide education and training, but they were limited in scale as there was not a clear incentive for a systemic change and only few educators took the opportunity to use digital technology to support their teaching and to adapt pedagogy. The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the change and exposed the shortcomings that need to be tackled in order to reach effective digital education. The pandemic has not only limited the way people can relate to each other and perform their most basic every-day-tasks, but has also had a significant impact on the regular delivery of education and brought new challenges. On one hand, it makes us rethink the actual education and training systems to fit in the digital era and on the other hand it makes us rethink to which extent they meet the demands of a rapidly changing and increasingly digital world. Besides that, the D2S@UlyssEUs partners are involved in the European University “UlyssEUs” which committed in its Mission Statement to be fully engaged in Digital Transformation and specially in Digital Education transformation through the development of a European Virtual Campus. Considering all these factors, the D2S@UlyssEUs project, proposed by the UlyssEUs Alliance, aims to modernise education, adapt pedagogies and upgrade educators’ digital competencies by harnessing digital technologies for learning. It seeks also to equip all learners with digital transversal skills to live, work, learn and thrive in a world increasingly mediated by digital technologies, and it uses digital technology for the recognition and validation of these skills thanks to Open Badges. The main target groups of D2S@UlyssEUs encompass: - Academic staff members - Students, including with special needs/disabilities -Partners’ institutions and their ecosystem With a duration of 24 months, D2S@UlyssEUs project will achieve the following intellectual outputs: IO1: Fostering a high performing digital education ecosystem , which seeks to upgrade digital pedagogical competences of educators in order to deliver high quality inclusive digital education and to ensure that all learners can participate actively in digital education. IO2 Enhancing students’ Digital Soft skills, aiming at developing transversal skills that therefore provide competitive advantages for students entering the labour market IO3 Creating the “UlyssEUs Digital Soft Skills Passports” , allowing participants to the online courses to translate their learning experiences into skills and bring to the fore these competences on the labour market Project outcomes and activities will have impact at local, national, european and international levels. They will fully support the agenda of developing high quality and inclusive education and training for learners. Educators will acquire new competences and knowledge about distance learning’ pedagogical tools, therefore facilitating more personalised, flexible and student-centred learning. On the other hand, the project will impact students employability as they will develop key, transversal and digital competences providing competitive advantages for students entering the labour market. Partner institutions will also benefit from the D2S@UlyssEUs project by improving capacities, extending course catalogues, sharing food practices and fostring cooperation opportunities.