Production and validation of prototype Adaptive-media¯ based remote soft skills training tool

Nacro Education supports disadvantaged young adults, including young offenders, offering a variety of personalised study programmes, including certified vocational training and work placements. Learners often have low esteem, lack confidence and while they may be developing hard skills, they might easily fall at the job interview hurdle if they don't have the necessary soft skills. To make matters worse, lockdown has highlighted the inequalities disadvantaged young people face learning from home. Soft skills will be one of the advantages humans maintain over machines, so it is vital everyone in society has the opportunity to acquire them.

We are going to prototype a remote soft skills training tool to help disadvantaged young adults develop a good set of soft skills they can use at interviews to complement their hard skills and dramatically increase their chances of getting a placement or job.

We are going to use a cutting-edge AI-based British innovation to help them. Adaptive-media technology is a new immersive digital video format that uses artificial intelligence to adapt video content naturally to the viewer in real-time, based upon how they appear and how they react, just as humans instinctively adapt to each other. It can read the viewers facial inputs through their device camera (e.g. any smartphone, tablet, PC with modern web browser) to analyse the person in real-time and then serve the viewer appropriate content, based upon human factors such as emotion, attention and demographics, usually in the form of digital video. To use a simple analogy, it is like when we meet someone for the first time, we don't need that person's personal information or data to have a conversation, we just adjust and adapt to the person in front of us by analysing their face and reactions.

Adaptive-media fully conforms to GDPR and is NOT doing facial recognition! All users must always first allow their camera to be used and there is no recording or storing of biometric data on any server.

The Adaptive-media based remote soft skills training tool project will be the first adaptive-media pilot to solve an important and urgent learning requirement. It will create interview role play scenarios and evaluation for young adults to practice and acquire the soft skills they need to perform better in interview situations, even when they are unable to attend a physical school or college. The project will hopefully validate the Adaptive-media format, opening up many possible applications.