Global Standards for Assessments in a Digital First

World: A Future Perspective

Registration and Sponsorship is open for India-ATP 2019

MEET THE KEYNOTERS

India-ATP prepares to host its fifth annual conference Friday, December 20th in New Delhi. Keynoters include Dr. Sandhya Chintala, Vice President of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) and Executive Director of the Sector Skills Council  of NASSCOM.  The National Association of Software and Service Companies is the chamber of commerce of the IT-BPM Industry. In her role with SSC NASSCOM, Dr. Chintala addresses the Education & Skills Development Initiative of this industry body.

Dr. Chintala has a rich background in international and national education management. Her role at NASSCOM includes providing the roadmap for IT-BPM industry's - NASSCOM education initiatives and to serve as a liaison between industry, academia and government towards making India the preferred global destination for all IT and BPM/ITeS requirements.

As an educator, Dr. Chintala's research publications and activities are related to the successful development and implementation of educational frameworks enabling change management and sustainable governance processes, technology enabled teaching-learning methods, e-content solutions and the design and development of quality assurance strategies.  As a strategist, Dr. Chintala has, identified and executed programs to develop ready-to-deploy talent by laying standards for skill requirements in the IT-BPM industry. Her focus is to identify job roles and career paths for the benefit of students and academia, to facilitate a clear understanding of career opportunities provided by this industry and to streamline multiple approaches towards a national standard.

Also addressing this year's delegates is Jaydeep Singh, Founder & CEO of Empass Learning.  Empass is an AI-powered Talent Solutions platform focused on digital assessment solutions. Empass helps Enterprise and Academic institutions tackle the issues of hiring, training and employee engagement.  All solutions developed by Empass have the ‘ubiquitous’ mobile user in mind, something that differentiates it from other providers of learning & assessment solutions. Empass Learning’s flagship product is a gamified, assessment platform that makes it possible for users to assess the most ‘in-demand’ skills, ‘on-demand’ and is used by clients that range from IT, Pharmaceuticals, Technology Startups, Language Training and Academic verticals. 

Singh has more than 23+ years experience in Consulting & Business Development roles with large global telecom, IT and EdTech brands. Since 2011, Singh has worked as a consultant & advisor to global and Indian companies in the technology-based learning space. His notable clients include, Simplilearn, Xebia and ITpreneurs.

Singh founded Empass Learning in 2017. The company was one of the first few selected ventures for NASSCOM’s 10,000 Startups program in the state of Haryana. Empass has been recognized as the ‘brightest start-ups of the year in the HRtech space’ by IDG Media at their prestigious Demo event.  Singh is extremely passionate about using technology to simplify and address the limitations posed by the traditional learning and assessment methodologies. He is actively engaged with Industry-Academia collaboration initiatives that aim to skill up the workforce on emerging  technologies as member of the curriculum advisory boards of leading Universities in India that includes, Amity University, Manav Rachna University.

And back this year by invitation is Paul Edelblut,Vice President Cognitive Computing, Vantage Labs He has primary responsibility to oversee major account activity for all of Vantage’s cognitive computing technologies across 4 operating companies in the global market. Paul’s projects are active on 4 continents serving tens of millions of customers applying Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks to improve the process and efficiency for all customers.

In his session, “Eliminating cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity influences in reading assessment” he will address the current limitations of reading comprehension assessments and discuss how an innovative new validation process, (ACE*) leverages functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to overcome these limitations. 

 Attendees will learn how fNIRS technology is used in validating reading comprehension assessments; the application of biological measures to traditional assessments; and the value of the data used in ACE* validation for elimination of equity issues in global assessments.  *ACE  (Adolescent Comprehension Evaluation) is a new, patent-pending, web-based application and reading comprehension validation process that can be used to monitor reading comprehension with the initial focus on student reading comprehension in year 6-8.  ACE has been developed through a series of entrepreneurial-oriented grants from Drexel University and the National Science Foundation (National Science Foundation, n.d.). The ACE team has identified  a number of real concerns in that market addressed by ACE: the need for a quick and easy reading comprehension measure that gathers data on a regular basis, the need for actionable data that teachers can use in real time to adjust instruction, and the need for a direct reading comprehension progress monitoring measure to measure students in an equitable and fair process.