B1 (Future Jobs and AI): Skill-XR: An Affordable and Scalable X-Reality (XR) Platform for Skills Training and Analytics in Manufacturing Workforce Education

SkillXR融合加速器第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响和潜在的社会效益是培训、技能前培训和技能提升、远程技能培训，以及在制造业和教育部门实现新的见解。 制造业的扩张对国民经济中的就业增长产生了乘数效应。 随着工作和技能的变化和发展，再培训和提高技能将成为经济可持续发展的必要步骤，更重要的是，随着我们在COVID-19大流行期间的复苏。 SkillXR平台的目标是通过消除当前对昂贵的软件开发和咨询中介的需求来破坏当前的劳动力发展模式，以创建和维护增强，虚拟和混合现实（XR）应用程序。 通过我们在小型和大型制造业和劳动力教育领域的合作伙伴关系，我们将在未来十年内将未来的劳动力从学徒制转变为新兴行业的现实盈利技能。我们与小企业，少数民族企业家，游戏博物馆和农村教育的重点合作伙伴关系促进了公平的机会。SkillXR的通用性质将扩大我们最初计划的制造教育领域之外的影响，使其在许多其他领域变得无处不在，包括机器人、建筑、工厂运营、教育，最终是日常空间认知辅助。我们的技能提升和学习分析平台计划在五到六年内影响数万人，十年内影响数百万人。这支高度跨学科的团队将带来制造、计算机视觉和人工智能（AI）、空间界面和交互、学习科学、学习分析、认知心理学和视觉游戏化界面等方面的知识。我们将与主要合作伙伴密切合作，使用设计-研究驱动的融合框架，开发基于研究的原型并将其转化为产品和服务，以影响我们的熟练劳动力和经济。我们新兴产品平台的两个方面将（1）使主题专家（教练，教师，培训师）能够创作基于AI的XR个性化培训应用程序，而不需要编程或复杂应用程序的先验知识，以及（2）低成本的基于AI的硬件方法来获得个性化的用户分析任务“在职”，以进行可扩展的劳动力评估和优化。我们的方法为各种工业用例提供了极高的灵活性，通过数百万应用程序的即插即用实现了可重用性，并跟踪最终用户的空间和性能分析。通过结合基础和应用研究，我们的团队将开发几个高保真协作云架构，以及一系列可重新配置和广泛适用的工作流程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact and potential societal benefits of the SkillXR Convergence Accelerator Phase II project are training, pre- and upskilling, remote skilling, and enabling new insights in the manufacturing and education sectors. There is a multiplier effect on job growth in the national economy through expansions in manufacturing. As jobs and skills change and evolve, retraining and upskilling will become necessary steps towards economic sustainability, more importantly so as we recover during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the SkillXR platform is to disrupt current modes of workforce development by eliminating the current need for expensive software development and consulting intermediaries to create and maintain augmented, virtual and mixed reality (XR) applications. Through our partnerships within the small and large manufacturing industry and workforce education, we will transition the future workforce from acquisition of apprenticeships to real-world profitable skills in emerging industries over the next decade. Our focused partnerships with small businesses, minority entrepreneurs, play museums, and rural education promotes equitable access. The general-purpose nature of SkillXR will amplify the impact beyond our initial planned manufacturing education area to become ubiquitous across many other fields including robotics, construction, plant operations, education, and eventually everyday spatial cognitive assistance. Our pre-upskilling and learning analytics platform is planned to impact tens of thousands in five to six years and millions within a decade. Rural communities especially will benefit, as manufacturing represents twice the amount of earnings there, versus non-rural areas.The highly interdisciplinary team brings knowledge spanning manufacturing, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), spatial interfaces and interactions, learning sciences, learning analytics, cognitive psychology, and visual gamified interfaces. We will collaborate closely with key partners using a design-research driven convergence framework to develop and transform research-based prototypes into products and services to impact our skilled workforce and economy. The two sides of our emerging product platform will (1) enable the authoring of AI-based XR personalized training applications by subject matter experts (coaches, teachers, trainers), without the need for prior knowledge in programming or sophisticated applications, and (2) a low-cost AI-based hardware approach to get personalized user analytics of tasks “on-the-job” for scalable workforce assessment and optimization. Our approach permits extreme flexibility for various industrial use cases, reusability through plug-and-play for millions of applications, as well as tracking end-user spatial and performance analytics across time. By combining both basic and applied research our team will develop several high-fidelity collaborative cloud-based architectures, and a series of reconfigurable and widely applicable workflows.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.