B1: Competency Catalyst Phase II

NSF融合加速器支持以使用为基础、以团队为基础的多学科努力，以应对国家重要性的挑战，并将在不久的将来产生对社会有价值的成果。该融合加速器第二阶段项目旨在提高重新安置美国劳动力的效率和效果。要实现这一目标，Competency Catalyst有两个主要交付内容。第一个是一个名为“技能同步”的应用程序，它使公司能够传达特定的再培训需求，并帮助大学通过针对他们的加速项目做出回应。第二个是“C2平台”，从知识、技能和能力(KSA)的角度描述和调整工作要求和再技能机会。Skill sync建立在C2平台上，用人力资源部门和大学项目之间的直接、实时通信取代了现有的手动流程。Sgarsync将立即提高公司重新培训员工的能力，而C2平台将催化和支持与劳动力相关的更大生态系统，包括其他融合加速器项目和专注于改善人才管道的国家努力。Skill Sync和C2平台将由一个由学习技术员、人工智能研究人员、教育和劳动力发展专业人员、开放数据架构师以及基于能力的培训专家组成的多学科团队设计和开发。Skill sync将与多个公司-大学配对进行试点，以提高不同人群的技能。完成试点后，Comperency Catalyst团队计划将C2平台作为公共产品进行维护，并将Skill Sync作为一种由公司付费并免费提供给大学的订阅服务。能力催化剂将建立在多种使能技术的基础上，包括：(A)佐治亚理工学院基于人工智能的Jill Watson对话助理；(B)证书引擎的开放数据基础设施；(C)数字能力提取工具和由教育工作人员开发的开放源码能力和技能系统。开发方法将包括参与性研究、以人为中心的设计、快速原型制作和中试测试。C2平台将以编程方式从国家来源获取数据，并应用最新的自然语言理解和机器学习方法，将这些数据表示为具有与外部资源的关系和链接的结构化KSA集合。在Skill sync中，可以根据重要性对这些内容进行编辑和排序，以代表公司需求。C2平台将提供开放的比对评分服务，Skill Sync将使用该服务分析所需的KSA与可用的教育和培训资源之间的匹配。此外，Skill sync的用户将能够与吉尔·沃森互动，以更好地了解大学如何看待学习者获得的技能。这将帮助公司用对大学合作伙伴有意义的术语来定义他们的需求。在Skill Sync和C2平台的设计和开发过程中，将考虑公平和偏见问题，包括人工智能和机器学习模型中的偏见和公平性等问题。该项目还将研究人工智能、增强的数字通信和社会技术行为变化对改善公司-大学再技能合作伙伴关系的相对贡献。预计的贡献包括基于KSA评估和调整工作和培训的新技术，以及一个新的公共开放数据资源，由与国家工作储存库、课程教学大纲、证书和教育资源相关的KSA组成。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The NSF Convergence Accelerator supports use-inspired, team-based, multidisciplinary efforts that address challenges of national importance and will produce deliverables of value to society in the near future.This Convergence Accelerator Phase II project aims to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of reskilling America’s workforce. To accomplish this, the Competency Catalyst has two major deliverables. The first is an application called "Skillsync" that enables companies to communicate specific reskilling needs and helps colleges respond with accelerated programs that target them. The second is a “C2 platform” that describes and aligns job requirements and reskilling opportunities in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). Skillsync is built on the C2 platform and replaces existing manual processes with direct, real-time communication between human resource departments and college programs. Skillsync will immediately improve the ability of companies to reskill their workforce, while the C2 platform will catalyze and support a larger ecosystem of workforce-related applications, including other Convergence Accelerator projects and national efforts focused on improving the talent pipeline. Skillsync and the C2 platform will be designed and developed by a multidisciplinary team of learning technologists, AI researchers, education and workforce development professionals, open data architects, and experts in competency-based training. Skillsync will be piloted with multiple company-college pairs to upskill a diverse population of workers. After completing the pilots, the Competency Catalyst team plans to maintain the C2 platform as a public good, and to offer Skillsync as a subscription service paid for by companies and free to colleges. The Competency Catalyst will build on multiple enabling technologies, including (a) the Jill Watson AI-based conversational assistant from the Georgia Institute of Technology; (b) the Credential Engine’s open data infrastructure; and (c) digital competency extraction tools and the open-source Competency and Skills System (CaSS) developed by Eduworks. The development approach will include participatory research, human-centered design, rapid prototyping, and pilot testing. The C2 platform will programmatically ingest data from national sources and apply recent natural language understanding and machine learning methods to represent these data as structured sets of KSAs with relations and links to external resources. In Skillsync, these can be edited and ordered by importance to represent company needs. The C2 platform will offer an open alignment score service that Skillsync will use to analyze matches between desired KSAs and available educational and training resources. In addition, Skillsync users will be able to engage with Jill Watson to better understand how colleges view the skills that learners acquire. This will assist companies in defining their needs in terms that are meaningful to college partners. Equity and bias issues will be considered throughout the design and development of the Skillsync and the C2 platform, including issues such as bias and fairness in AI and machine-learned models. The project will also research the relative contributions of AI, enhanced digital communication, and socio-technological behavioral change to improving company-college reskilling partnerships. Anticipated contributions include new techniques for evaluating and aligning jobs and training based on KSAs and a new public open data resource consisting of the KSAs associated with national repositories of jobs, course syllabi, credentials, and educational resources.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.