About the project

The project aims to provide career counseling based on advanced analytics of users’ profile, extracted automatically from various data sources: the school situation, CV, social media profiles or answers from web forms.

The users of CareProfSys will receive recommendations of occupations held by people with similar profiles, using ontological inferences and machine learning classification algorithms.

The database of profiles will be filled with information about professionals having occupations from “Romanian Occupations’ Classification” (COR) ontology (developed within the project), aligned with the European list of qualifications ESCO.

A conversational agent will also offer customized advice about recommended occupations, while virtual 3D scenes will help users to visualize their future work activities.

Besides students and high school pupils, the system will have several other stakeholders as well: career counseling centers from high-schools and universities, higher education institution, government, hiring companies.

The system will exploit the latest technologies: semantic web, ontologies, machine learning, social network connectors, virtual reality on the web, recommendation agents and modern big data analytics application programming interfaces.

Thus, the concept of a smart career path profiling system will be validated and tested by implementing it in an observed environment – the career development center from a Romanian university.

The main objective of CareProfSys is to validate and test the concept of a smart Career Path Profiling System by implementing it in an observed environment - CCOC UNSTPB. The system is based on the analysis of several data sources (social networks, educational background, psychological tests), which are input for the "Romanian Occupations’ Classification" (COR) ontology-based recommendation algorithm (developed within the project).

The specific objectives of the project are: (a) to build curated users’ profiles, in a quick and accurate manner - create social connectors via current social networks APIs, create PDF extractors, Web forms processors and other Web scraping modules, combine and transform all data sources into structured data, validate and analyse those data with the aid of expert psychologists; (b) to create the COR ontology and update it with users profiles; (c) to recommend occupations from the COR ontology to users (pupils, students and graduates who want to change their careers), based on their profiles, via a customized algorithm; (d) to give extra-information (text-based or 3D scenes) about the recommended occupations; (e) to offer counseling support to users (students and pupils) via modern human-computer interaction tools, e.g. Web-VR based or virtual rooms for interviews and chatbots; (f) to offer a flexible tool which is easily customized to support career and school counselors from high-schools and universities; (g) to provide the possibility of easy-develop of several other add-ons in the future; (h) to embed the product into a university ecology - implement it as pilot in CCOC-UNSTPB; (i) to attract potential users from other universities and high-schools, by heavily promoting it; (j) to offer a tool with regional value.

Phase I: System design and COR ontology development (specific objectives a-j)

  • Executive summary
  • Scientific report
  • A1.1. Design and technological choices (Objectives a-j)
    • Literature review on career guidance practices and support tools
    • Online interviews and surveys: conducting and analyzing the results
    • Identifying system user requirements
    • Selection of technologies and development of necessary algorithms
    • Identifying system software requirements
    • Detailed system design
  • A1.2. COR ontology and exploitation framework development (objectives b, f, g)
    • Development of the COR ontology
    • Development of the ontology exploitation framework

Phase II: System development and testing (specific objectives a-j)

  • Executive summary
  • Scientific report
  • A2.1 CareProfSys development, testing & optimization (objectives a-j):
    • Development of the data extraction method
    • Development of the data processing module
    • Development of services in the system
    • Web platform development
    • Testing and optimization

Phase III: Implementation of the CareProfSys system in the UNSTPB-CCOC center (specific objectives f and h)

  • Executive summary
  • Scientific report
  • A3.1. CareProfSys deployment & improvement in UNSTPB-CCOC (objectives f and h):
    • Preparation and execution of the first experiment
    • Evaluation of the first experiment and improvement of the system
    • Preparation and execution of the second experiment
    • Evaluation of the second experiment and improvement of the system