Blog

Empowering Future Innovators: The Initiative to
Innovation Adoption and Research in Computer Science

VILNIUS TECH – Vilnius Gediminas Technical University

In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, fostering a culture of innovation and research is imperative. MERIT project aims not only to prepare future experts in advanced digital skills, but to educate the society as well. This is a multidimensional task, therefore current society edification activities are oriented into several different directions, ranging from motivating talks and trainings on innovation adoption and its possibilities, to younger generation (secondary school students and teachers) training on a specific modern technology topic as well as join student-teacher-researcher research projects.

As MERIT project executive administrator prof. Dr Simona Ramanauskaitė mentions, “We are open to share the competencies we have. Taking into account the importance of advanced digital skills and ability to utilize the modern technologies in business to the growth of global economy and society development, we actively participate in different events, dedicated to business and industry representatives and managers. They are shaping the strategies of innovation application in the organizations. Therefore, our provided insights and possibilities of new technologies and innovations might speed up and simplify its proper utilization in the enterprise.”.

All MERIT project partners are included in the sharing of their knowledge and presentation of MERIT project results in different fairs, forums, and training for industry associations. During the last year, more than 20 instances of such activities were executed, and more than 1,000 enterprise representatives were trained or introduced to the innovations in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and internet of things areas.

While enterprises are shaping the industry and business area now, younger generation will be responsible for the tomorrow. Therefore, important role in the society edification is dedicated to youth training. In VILNIUS TECH assoc. prof. Dr Pavel Stefanovič is responsible for the younger generation edification. He shares, that “not all schoolteachers are able to introduce pupils with the newest technologies. It is especially relevant currently in Lithuania, as new secondary school program for information technologies lessons was introduced, but time and material for the schools were not provided. Therefore, we, as MERIT project, try to offer a help and organize different initiatives, oriented on proper youth education and involvement in the newest technologies utilization”.

The youth edification activities are systematically oriented to different areas. In MERIT project we organize:

• Dedicated training for secondary school IT teachers to provide guidelines and ideas how they can train pupils in the area of digital technologies.
• Guest lectures and on-hands training for pupils on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity topics. This initiative builds a better understanding of the topics, covering more practical aspects, not included in the secondary school lessons.
• ResearchSchool.tech project was started in Lithuania as a testbed to investigate the possibilities to involve pupils in scientific research projects. On the 23 rd of February 2024 the first enrolment to this initiative was finalized with students-teacher-researcher join project conference. Four projects and their research results were presented, covering topic of Lithuanian text sentiment automated analysis, analysis or website vulnerably dependence on developer preferred tools, prediction of song success in Eurovision song contest.

During all the pupil-oriented activities, more than 2,000 persons were trained. Current impact of the activities is oriented to youths’ education, while we hope this will contribute to the faster and more advanced forming of the society as well as enterprise and research.