First Anniversary of the Laboratory for Research and Innovation

The CIC LAB, the Laboratory for Research and Innovation of the Comillas-ICAI Chair for Smart Industry (CIC, its initials in Spanish), has celebrated its first anniversary since its implementation last year. It represents a multidisciplinary space for innovation, aimed at students, in order to facilitate their research on relevant topics for the Chair.

Organized in working groups of 2 to 4 people, students face very diverse challenges, some with a marked technical nature, and others focused on the digital repercussions of Digital Transformation. Since then, further work has been done to put different lines of research on the table that have been continued up to the present time:

• An Inventory of warehouses with drones. Prototyping of drone-type robots to aid in inventory.
• (Deep) Reinforcement Learning. Control of an industrial robot through reinforcement learning.
• Industrial Cybersecurity. A line of work to research patterns and degree of maturity in Cybersecurity of Industrial Companies.
• Logistics. Development of a Traffic Flow Prediction Model using Google API’s to optimize merchandise delivery schedules.
• Foregast 4.0. A project promoted by two of the sponsoring organizations of the Chair for Connected Industry, Enagás and Endesa, for the purpose of sharing methodologies for forecasting.
• Deep Learning: prediction of time series with neural networks.
• Socially Responsible Digital Transformation. This line of work focusses on the impact of advanced automation on the labor market and on models of increasing learning plasticity improvement.

All of the progress made throughout the year in the work of this Laboratory has been recorded in the CIC LAB Activity Report. Diverse collaborations have arisen as a result of several lines of research, such as that of the Department of Psychology of Comillas CIHS (Faculty of Humanities and Social Science) in collaboration with the line of work on Socially Responsible Digital Transformation.

This Summer a large number of students will be brought together in order to respond to a series of challenges proposed by the sponsoring organizations of the Chair for Smart Industry. With this objective, they will provide solutions and put their enormous talent and excellent training at the service of Industry and Society, before concluding their studies.

Currently, the Chair for Connected Industry has some of the country's leading companies in their respective sectors among its sponsoring organizations: twelve world references in the most competitive areas of the economy: ABB, Acerinox, Enagas, Endesa, Gestamp, Grupo Antolín, IBM, Indra, Pladur, Prosegur, Repsol and Saargummi.