Course 5: Technology, innovation and metrics (10/02 – 12/02)

“For every technological trend we discuss in this training course, we more specifically focus on examples within the media domain and reflect upon the influence on media economics.”

Course 5: Trending technologies, blockchain and Media Economics

For those that are following the full program, course 5 is elective.

You can also join for only this course, Because of Covid-19 we have adapted the format in order to enable distance teaching so that all students, taking travel restrictions or personal quarantines into account, can fully take part. This means that this course will be completely online and consist of three one-hour lectures per day.

Click here for more details on designing your own programme.

Businesses, also media businesses, are highly driven by technological trends. Being able to imagine the potential changes due to these new technologies makes it possible for media professionals to still influence the technology in the direction they prefer, to be prepared to start adopting the technology, to invent a new business ecosystem, to create new business models for future new applications of these technologies in the media domain.

This training sheds light on the interplay between upcoming technological evolutions and their(possible) impact on the media industry and their economics. As the media industry takes time to catch up with technological innovations, being informed about trending technologies is important to imagine the future. More profound insights on phenomena like AI, distributed systems, internet-of-things, virtual and augmented reality and distributed systems as blockchain are discussed and innovators in the media and telecom domain present their experiences. This course focuses upon a better understanding of underlying technological building blocks which is needed to imagine the future media landscape and its economics.

Key Objectives

• Acquire knowledge of recent and upcoming technological evolutions that might impact the media industry.
• Acquire knowledge on phenomena like big data, internet-of-things, virtual and augmented reality, distributed systems like blockchain and their underlying technological building blocks.
• Provide insights and best practices on how these technologies are today already implemented in the media industry.
• Adopt innovation as a mindset in day-to-day operations.

Cases and Topics

• Network architecture
• Data ecosystems
• Distributed system
• Artificial intelligence
• Virtual reality & Augmented reality
• 5G
• Internet-of-Things
• Citizen Science
• Voice Virtual Assistants
• Intellectual property

The course curator

Prof. dr Laurence Claeys

Laurence Claeys has been, since 2012, parttime assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) where she lectures bachelor courses in Communication Technologies and Social sciences research methodologies. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (Communication Sciences), an MA in Sociology and a Postgraduate in Gender Studies. She is affiliated at the research centre SMIT (Studies Media Information and Technology) where she is involved in research on Internet-of-Things, algorithmic living, privacy and end-user development.

She became passionate about building bridges between technical and non-technical domains during her time at the  Acatel-Lucent Bell Labs. There she was part of an R&I team which consisted completely out of engineers (and one designer), leaving she had no choice but to learn their language to be able to work together, understand their way of thinking and to influence the new applications. This made her think about the importance of being able to influence technology in the early designing stages with the engineers as these designs influence and shape our society in a more profoundly than people often image.