Our colleague Jon Barrueco has been awarded the Educaweb 2021 Prize for the best educational project in the category of under 35. Jon is a teacher and researcher at Somorrostro Training Centre, Ph.D. in Telecommunications and has recently been appointed Bilbao AI City Leader.

Jon has presented an Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of, based on an online questionnaire created by a team of guidance professionals and information from students, detecting patterns that allow them to suggest the best options for “motivation, academic results and professional future” to vocational training students.

“It is necessary to use artificial intelligence to help students make decisions about their future”. In addition, he also comments that “Artificial intelligence should be considered as another tool available to guide professionals and teachers”.

The project, called OrientIA, is in the development phase but Jon has already demonstrated in previous projects such as BucovIA or the current SST 4.0 the enormous potential of Artificial Intelligence in the education sector. “I want to make it clear that artificial intelligence should be considered as another tool at the disposal of professionals (in this case academic counsellors and teachers) and never be taken as a tool with a final decision. In this way, this tool will help counsellors to better analyse the current situation of students and predict with a high probability of success the best path for students to follow. In short, it will help to increase the probability of success in academic and career guidance”, says Jon.

Jon expects the application to be up and running in about a year and a half. A lot of data still needs to be collected, the algorithm adjusted and pilot tested to make it as effective and efficient as possible once it is launched.