Overview

Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd (K4A) is a distributed institute based in London (UK), with two main streams of activities, on one side pioneering Machine Learning methods of pattern analysis, statistical modeling, and computational learning and on the other transform these into technologies for large scale applications in Open Education. It is therefore an advocate of Artificial Intelligence and Big data in Open Education.

The unique ways in which K4A supports its 1000+ researchers and 62 member institutions is by co-funding more than 260 events, 60+ machine learning challenges, 20.000 academic video lectures and creating machine learning tools and software.

While retaining some of the structuring elements and mechanisms (such as the Pump-Priming and Challenges programmes) of its predecessor NoE, PASCAL1 and PASCAL 2, K4A refocuses the institute towards the emerging challenges created by the ever expanding applications of adaptive systems technology and their central role in the development of artificial cognitive systems of different scales. This is mainly combined towards open education and Open Educational Resources (OER). Learning technology is key to, for instance, making robots more versatile, effective and autonomous, and to endowing machines with advanced interaction capabilities. K4A responds to these challenges not only through the research topics it addresses but also by engaging in technology transfer through an Industrial Club to effect rapid deployment of the developed technologies into a wide variety of applications.

In addition, its Challenges, Pump Prime and Harvest programmes, counting altogether more than 60 projects, provides opportunities for close collaboration between academic and industry researchers. Other noteworthy outreach activities include curriculum development, brokerage of expertise, public outreach, and liaison with relevant R&D projects. Furthermore, K4A has adopted an open membership policy allowing for active inclusion in Network activities, of researchers working at non-beneficiary institutions.

K4A has organised, funded and co-funded around 250 events (conferences, symposiums, workshops and seminars) to bring together the community of technology users with those researchers who have developed tools, proofs of concept and demonstrations of feasibility. These events are also binge used for public outreach purposes and mark the beginning of massive video recording which preceded MOOCs. This activity lead to the funding, creation and support of VideoLectures.Net, an award winning website with 20.000 academic talks.

The Foundation has an extended professional and research community of over 60 members, some of the most important research and development centres in the field of Machine Learning, a research field in Artificial Intelligence in Europe, and a wide Researchers community. K4A has also developed an innovative series of video journals in connection with its members.

The aim of the Foundation is therefore to combine open education and machine learning and to reduce the current gap between new trends in education, on the one hand, and advanced technologies in artificial intelligence, on the other, with the ultimate goal of securing the future of open education. K4A explores the new and rapidly-changing global trends in higher education, and how intelligent and advanced technologies have influenced education in general. It also promotes the use of machine learning in many relevant application domains such as;

Standard developments in Machine Learning, Big Data	Advanced developments in ICT and Education
Machine Vision	Technologies for Open Educational Resources
Speech	Open and Massive Learning Environments
Haptics	Innovative Business Models in Publishing
Brain-Computer Interface	Open innovation, science and education in a systemic way
User-modeling for computer human interaction	Accessible, open national digital learning repositories
Multimodal integration	Open frameworks and standards for interoperability and portability
Natural Language Processing	Develop accessible, open national digital learning repositories
Information Retrieval	Enable personalization, and collaboration
Textual Information Access	Better connectivity between formal, and non-formal and informal learning