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A vision for a technologically and digitally enabled future for the Irish co-operative agrifood sector, with the skills of human beings remaining integrally engaged, was presented today at the final conference of the LeadFarm 5.0 project, held in Maynooth, Co. Kildare.
The conference was opened by the Minister of State for Skills and Further Education, Niall Collins TD. The initiative started in May 2022 spearheaded by ICOS Skillnet in collaboration with Léargas and supported by the EU Erasmus+ programme.
In the future, advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics and big data will be integrated into all aspects of daily life. This integration aims to solve social challenges, improve quality of life and enhance the success of enterprises.
The LeadFarm project focused on developing a competency framework and roadmap for Irish agrifood co-operatives to transition the skills of their people towards 'Society 5.0' or the 'super-intelligent society'. It has been a collaborative effort involving a broad and diverse range of co-operatives including management, farmers and workers from Ireland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Latvia and Portugal.
A training curriculum emerging from the project emphasises human skills acquisition in areas such as digitalisation, sustainability, management and entrepreneurship while highlighting the potential to balance digital advancements with human-robot collaboration. The approach aims to improve employment opportunities and skills in rural Ireland, creating a sustainable future for the industry.
Minister Niall Collins TD said:
"I congratulate the ICOS Skillnet for taking proactive steps to clarify the competencies required for the adoption of digital innovation by agri-food cooperatives. Initiatives like this ensure that Ireland shapes its future rather than simply respond to technological change ".
ICOS President Edward Carr said:
"The purpose of this conference is to disseminate the outcomes of the LeadFarm 5.0 project to as many stakeholders as possible. It outlines the good work carried out by this pan-European initiative and showcases the benefits to cooperatives and farmers across Europe.
"ICOS is the lead partner in this project. This is with the specific aim to support various stakeholders, including co-operatives, social enterprises, boards of directors, farmers, trainers, and educators, with a particular focus on those at risk of exclusion, such as youth and women.
"The concept is about ensuring the long-term sustainability of the industry through skill and talent development. We are focused on creating a more digitally aware society that will be human-centred and will take advantage of technology to tackle problems that affect the whole of society as well as our own industry.
"The agri-food co-operative sector must participate, join this trend, and support the creation of a society which is aware and committed to the problems it faces, avoiding becoming a sector that remains a trace of the technological past."
International collaboration and engagement of the lead partners from seven countries has fostered international collaboration and the exchange of best practices. All intellectual outputs have been secured for practical application within Ireland, ensuring the Irish agrifood sector can be aware and prepared for significant technological advancements.
Minister Niall Collins acknowledged the importance of the project's achievements and the promotion of future success for Irish cooperative enterprises within the framework of Society 5.0.
Further Background:
LeadFarm 5.0 arises from the need to improve the knowledge, capacities and skills of European agri-food co-operatives regarding the use of digital innovations that can be easily adapted to new agricultural models that will largely replace the intensive industrial farming model and that will require changes in business decision-making processes.
Agrifood co-operatives need to imp

Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the newest addition to the state-of-the-art Claude family of AI models, is more intelligent and one-fifth of the price of Claude 3 Opus.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the latest and most capable model from artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company Anthropic, is generally available today in Amazon Bedrock as part of Anthropic's Claude family of AI models. Amazon Bedrock offers the broadest selection of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies, along with the capabilities and enterprise security customers need to quickly build and deploy generative AI applications.
Data from Anthropic shows that Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets a new industry standard for intelligence. According to Anthropic, the new model outperforms other models available today, including OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, as well as Anthropic's own previously most capable model, Claude 3 Opus, in areas including expert knowledge, coding, and complex reasoning. Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers better intelligence and speed than Opus at one-fifth of the price. View Claude 3.5 Sonnet benchmarks.
What can Claude 3.5 Sonnet do?
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the ideal model for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support, orchestrating multi-step workflows, streamlining code translations, and creating revenue-generating user-facing applications.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is particularly adept at creative writing, representing a step-change in its ability to understand nuance and humour. The new model can produce high-quality written content with a more natural, human-like tone that sounds more authentic and relatable than previous versions of Claude.
The multimodal Claude 3.5 Sonnet also excels at processing images with state-of-the-art vision, particularly when interpreting charts and graphs - helping to get faster, deeper insights from data. It can accurately decipher text from imperfect images - for example, poorly scanned documents - and in doing so, glean more insights than from text alone.
Other Claude 3.5 Sonnet strengths include:
Advanced coding capabilities: When instructed and provided with the relevant tools, autonomously writing, editing, and running code with sophisticated reasoning and advanced troubleshooting capabilities, offering best-in-class accuracy.
Improved understanding of context: Handling intricate inquiries by understanding user context and orchestrating multi-step workflows. This enables round-the-clock support for customer service applications in particular, impressively fast response times, natural-sounding interactions, and significantly improved customer satisfaction.
Enhanced data science & analysis capabilities: Augmenting human expertise in data science by navigating unstructured data, and leveraging multiple user-provided tools to generate insights. When given access to a coding environment, it produces high-quality statistical visualisations and actionable predictions, ranging from business strategies to real-time product trends.
AWS customers across a range of industries have already been accessing the state-of-the-art Claude models through Amazon Bedrock, enhancing their ability to rapidly test, build, and deploy generative AI applications across their organisations.
Improving customer connections: DoorDash, a technology company that connects consumers with their favorite local businesses in more than 30 countries worldwide, receives hundreds of thousands of requests for assistance through its contact centre each day. The company has incorporated Anthropic's Claude 3 models in Amazon Bedrock with Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex to build a generative AI contact centre solution to streamline customer support.
By deploying Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock as the foundation, DoorDash reduced generative AI application development time by 50%. The solution is currently fielding hundreds of thousands of support calls each day and has driven material reductions in call volumes, while t

College students from Dublin have been learning data science skills and putting them into practice to suggest policies that could support people facing homelessness.
The students from Larkin Community College and St. Joseph's, Fairview, used publicly available short-term letting data to find out how much housing is available to rent across four areas - the city of Dublin, Dunleary, Fingal, and South Dublin.
They presented their findings at a recent showcase event, detailing how many people could be supported into housing from the €242 million of funding allocated by the Irish government to tackle homelessness.
Analytics and AI leader SAS sponsored the project, which is part of the global education initiative P-TECH, founded by IBM. It aims to equip young people with the academic, technical and professional skills required for 21st-century jobs and ongoing education. It includes a number of partners from industry and education, as well as a school and two colleges.
As part of the five-week course, the students visited SAS' Irish headquarters in Dublin, where they took part in a range of team-building activities and learned how to use software such as SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics. They also developed their project management and presentation skills.
Jean de Villiers, Head of Analytics at SAS Ireland, said:
"As always, it was a pleasure to work with such inquisitive and talented students who discovered how data can be used to devise solutions to real-world problems. In just a few weeks, the team learned valuable new data analytics skills that could help set them up for a future career in tech.
"Demand for use of data across every industry, including the appetite for artificial intelligence (AI), means that it's critical to the economy and our society that the next generation have the opportunity to learn data literacy and analytics skills. The tech industry offers highly rewarding career pathways, and we want to open them up to as many people as possible."
There is a major shortage of people with the data-related skills that businesses are looking for. SAS conducted a survey of decision-makers from major firms in the UK & Ireland, with an average of 27,000 employees, which revealed that 44% of firms surveyed plan to invest in AI technology but 63% said their staff did not have the AI skills necessary and 61% did not have enough staff to deliver the benefits of AI.
Compounding this problem, 53% of respondents were unsure what AI qualifications and skills were needed.
De Villiers added:
"Initiatives like P-Tech play a key role in ensuring that organisations have the capabilities they need to make the most of new technologies so they can innovate and grow - and we are pleased to be able to share our expertise through training."
Alongside SAS and IBM, other P-Tech industry partners include Irish Life, Salesforce, Cisco, Virgin Media and Irish Water.
SAS offers a number of training courses aimed at people who want to gain or build on their data analytics skills.

Ideas are still fresh in the air at National College of Ireland (NCI) On Tuesday, June 18th, 2024, the fifth annual Research Day took place in the research block in Mayor Sq. The event was also live streamed on Microsoft Teams, this dual access meant that those who could not attend in person for any reason did not have to miss an amazing day of ideas, presentations, and collaboration.
What is Research Day?
Research Day is an annual event that welcomes NCI staff and faculty to present their research ideas and celebrates their contributions to academia and industry. Every year academics from across NCI (Computing, Business, Psychology, and Education), gather to present their work. Members of the Early Learning Initiative (ELI) and the Library also present their work alongside some special guest speakers.
It is a day to be enormously proud of as there is an exciting, collaborative buzz in the air. The atmosphere is electric as everyone is open and enthusiastic about sharing their research ideas and listening to the innovative ideas of others. It is an opportunity for the entire staff to come together and applaud each other's hard work.
At NCI they want to applaud everyone who presented their research on Tuesday. From ELI's discussion of how to look towards creating a restorative community to the work presented by the Psychology department exploring mental health referrals for children and young people who have been involved in social care, to the Cloud Competency Centre team presenting their data versioning framework research, and that is just to name a few!
The day was filled with a broad range of research discussions.
"Research Day is an extremely exciting event. It is wonderful to bring so many colleagues together from multiple departments to explore the broad and exciting research being conducted at NCI. This year there were eighteen presentations scheduled, which is an amazing number that highlights the many brilliant, hardworking members of staff who are making significant contributions to their fields through a diverse range of innovative research projects.
We look forward to continually celebrating research and innovation." said Dr Arghir-Nicolae Moldovan, Assistant Professor in Computing.
National College of Ireland is thrilled to share that for this year's Research Day, they welcomed Keynote Speaker, Associate Professor Sinéad McNally from the School of Language, Literacy & Early Childhood Education, DCU Institute of Education, Dublin City University.
Sinéad's presentation was entitled "Meaningful Consultation with Autistic Students for Inclusive Education from Early Childhood through to University."
This research explored how important the role of play is in a child's life, and how the role of play has not really been explored before. For children who have autism, the role of play has not been explored before in any way. The study explores what play is from the perspective of children, specifically focusing on what play is from the perspective of children with autism. The outlook of play for neurotypical and neurodivergent children is quite similar.
When we understand how children view play, we can begin to understand how play can be used for learning. The study stresses that children with autism have a right to have their voices heard and a right to be included in shaping their own educational journey. Looking at what play is and why it is crucial for children's development is one of the core elements of this research.
Sinéad's presentation was very impressive. Three key points that stood out surrounded how play is an organic part of childhood. It should be a daily part of childhood, and there are three kinds of play that are especially important to neurotypical and neurodivergent children.
Playing in the yard, having the freedom to choose to play, and having a soft form of challenge in the play is so important. These three factors allow us to see the fun of play. Another key point was that play is simply play.

As health data continues to be a prized target for hackers, here's how to minimise the fallout from a breach impacting your own health records.
Medical data is among the most sensitive information we share with organisations. That's why it's given "special category" status by the GDPR - meaning additional protections are required. But nothing is 100% breach-proof. That means it's more important than ever that you understand what to do in the event your data is compromised - to minimise the fallout.
Among the medical data potentially at risk is your:
Medical insurance policy numbers or similar
Personally identifiable information (PII), home and email address, and birth date
Passwords to key medical, insurance and financial accounts
Medical history, including treatments and prescriptions
Billing and payment information, including credit and debit card and bank account details
This information could be used by threat actors to run up bills on your credit card, open new lines of credit, access and drain your bank account, or impersonate you to obtain expensive medical services and prescription medication.
Check out ESET Ireland's latest blog for 8 steps to take following a data breach.
Guest post by ESET Ireland. You can follow ESET Ireland on X (ex-Twitter), Facebook or LinkedIn for more cybersecurity tips.

Over 80 senior industry leaders across the Cork business community gathered to explore the transformative power of Generative AI and the key considerations necessary to unlock the potential of the technology to enhance growth and productivity.
The event featured contributions from local business leaders and AI experts including Colman O'Flynn, Vice President Strategic Transformation and Cork Site Lead at Dell Technologies Ireland; Conor Healy, Cork Chamber CEO; Neil Bowden, AI Business Development Executive at Dell Technologies in Ireland; Kevin O'Leary, Country Manager at Dassault Systèmes; Avril Power, Co-founder of Giyst; and James Callanan, Senior Product Manager at Johnson Controls Ireland.
New survey research conducted among business leaders revealed that 63% percent of organisations in Cork are already using AI to transform operations. A lack of understanding of the potential of AI was the number one obstacle facing businesses in Cork as they look to seek to become innovation leaders in the age of AI, followed by a lack of skills.
Colman O'Flynn, Vice President of Strategic Transformation and Cork Site Lead at Dell Technologies in Ireland, said, "Dell Technologies is deeply committed to empowering businesses of all sizes on their AI journey. With a deep and long-standing presence in Cork, we believe we have an important role to play in helping organizations across the region harness the transformative power of AI to enhance growth.
That's why we're proud to bring together Cork's thriving business community for the second event in our Powering AI series. By bringing together industry leaders and AI experts to discuss the key considerations necessary for unlocking the potential of AI, Dell can help to power the AI journey for organisations in Cork and beyond and advance competitiveness."
Conor Healy, CEO of Cork Chamber said, "Now more than ever, a business's ability to adapt and evolve at pace are key to growth and success. This event offered the opportunity to discuss the safeguards that organisations are implementing to allow for a considered approach to embracing the new technologies, and the successful strategies that are allowing teams to embrace the wealth of opportunities arising by harnessing artificial intelligence."