IMS2020 is a project (www.ims2020.net), funded by the NMP division of the European Commission within the IMS Framework (CSA-CA 233469) with the aim of creating an innovation roadmap towards Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) in the year 2020. One key dimension of the roadmap is the development of competences in emerging areas such as sustainable manufacturing, products and services; energy efficiency and key technologies for next generation manufacturing.

TARGET project has established close collaboration with the IMS2020, namely contributing to the roadmap concenring 'Innovation, Competence Development and Education'

In the beginning of this week in Milan at the Politecnico the IFIP WG5.7 14th SIG Workshop on Experimental Learning on Sustainable Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering was held. There two papers, describing progress and findings of the TARGET project were presented:

• Claudia Ribeiro, Pauline Jepp, Joao Pereira, Manuel Fradinho on "Lessons Learnt in Building Serious Games and Virtual Worlds for Competence Development"
• William Seager, Martin Ruskov, Angela Sasse, Manuel Fradinho on "Eliciting and Modelling Expertise for Serious Game Design"

Also a third paper was presented in collaboration with members of the TARGET project:

• Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, Johann Riedel, Manuel Fradinho, Wim Westra on "Addressing Research Fragmentation in Serious Gaming for Manufacturing"

The proceedings of the workshop, including these three full papers, can be found at its website.

A talk about the TARGET authoring system for competence development was held by Georg Öttl at the authoring systems workshop in Graz (German). The description of the workshop as well as the links to the slides are available at http://css.uni-graz.at/projects/authoringSystems/.

INESC-ID has developed a Non-Player Character to assume the role of HR. Her name is Rebecca. Her avatar is implemented in Unity whilst the backend is the TARGET agent framework, which also makes use of AIML to support dialogue. The feedback from user surrogates was very positive, who prefered the proposed approach to option based dialogue.