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SCAD’s New AI Insights Report Accelerates Creative Value

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SCADask Research Finds AI Is Shifting from Production to Direction — and SCAD Is Building the Curriculum to Match

SAVANNAH, Ga., June 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is excited to present the SCAD AI Insights 2026 Report, developed by the university’s applied research unit, SCADask. Drawing on a pre-summit survey of more than 100 creative leaders across entertainment, technology, healthcare, and automotive sectors, and on summit proceedings featuring practitioners from NVIDIA, Google, Adobe, Netflix, Amazon, Canva, Deloitte Digital, The Coca-Cola Company, and others, the report argues that the most consequential challenge in creative practice today is directional.

Survey data anchors the case: AI is driving its biggest efficiency gains where work is generative: research and insights synthesis at 76%, content creation at 67%, ideation at 63%. But 63% of practitioners still define their primary KPI for AI success as time saved, while output quality, customer outcomes, and revenue growth together account for just 16%. The field, the report concludes, is measuring what’s easiest to count.

“This report confirms something we’ve been teaching at SCAD for several years: the most durable creative skill has never been production speed, its judgment,” said Nye Warburton, Dean of the School of Creative Technology at SCAD. “AI accelerates the making. It doesn’t replace the knowing. The designers, directors, and strategists who will lead in this moment are the ones who can look at what a machine generates and ask, ‘Does this feel right?’ Building on taste, context, and intention that’s what a creative education is for.”

Direction Over Fluency: What Creative Leaders Want
Across the summit, a consistent signal emerged: hiring is moving toward resilience and direction, not tool fluency. Creative direction and storytelling lead the human skills gaining most ground — at 61% and 56% respectively — followed by strategy at 44%, research synthesis at 40%, and data literacy at 33%. Prompt craft and technical integration ranks near the bottom. What practitioners are reaching for, the report finds, is interpretive. This moment represents a restructuring of how the industry looks at the creative role.

Students Building with OpenUSD and Omniverse: The Summit’s 48-Hour AI Jam
At this year’s summit, SCAD launched its first AI Summit Jam, a 48-hour sprint powered by NVIDIA. Eighteen teams of more than 70 students across disciplines were challenged to scale 3D content and simulation using digital twins, OpenUSD, and NVIDIA Omniverse, integrating directly into existing pipelines with access to SCAD’s Satellite AI Lab.

The solutions students produced spanned industries and scales: 2D documentation converted to 4D preservation, immersive worldbuilding, a digital twin of hospital foot traffic, a customizable coral reef, and rescue robot training simulations for collapsed interiors. The work that would take quarters to learn was compressed or eliminated by AI-driven platforms, allowing students with the least technical background to keep pace.

The winning team, Project R.E.M. (Remember Every Moment), built a system that lets people capture and step back inside their own memories — assembling a production pipeline across Blender, Unreal Engine 5, Luma AI, Meshy, and Figma within the 48-hour window. Integrating 3D Gaussian splats into Unreal Engine required engineering work-arounds; the team solved it and then went further, identifying a practical path to consumer adoption and use cases the brief hadn’t specified, including applications for individuals with visual or memory impairments.

Dan Schneider, Enterprise Platforms Product Specialist at NVIDIA, observed: “I’m amazed that the students were able to ideate and build such a memorable product in just 48 hours — all while learning new toolsets.”

The AI Jam is a direct expression of the report’s core argument. Multi-agent orchestration, identified by 31% of survey respondents as the emerging AI trend most likely to reshape their industry, is not a future skill. SCAD students are already building it.

How SCAD Is Responding
SCAD is building curriculum and studio infrastructure to develop the direction layer — not just tool fluency:

Bachelor of Design in Applied AI program: A first-of-its-kind program preparing students to steer emerging technologies with intention.Satellite AI Lab: Specialized R&D hubs where students and faculty prototype AI integrations with industry partners, building the organizational and technical fluency the report identifies as the next competitive edge.AI Jam Challenges: High-pressure studio environments that encourage students to move beyond prompting and into building complex, ethical technical pipelines with creativity and innovation in mind.SCAD AI Values: A university-wide framework emphasizing human creativity, ethical responsibility, transparency, and intentional human-AI collaboration across creative disciplines.

Human-AI collaboration studios lead university investment priorities at 65% across survey respondents, ahead of all other categories. SCAD is already there.

The SCAD AI Insights 2026 report is available now. To learn more about AI education at SCAD and the future of design, visit scad.edu.

SCAD: The University for Creative Careers
SCAD is a private, nonprofit, accredited university, offering 100 graduate and undergraduate degree programs across locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and online via SCADnow. SCAD enrolls approximately 18,500 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 100 countries. The future-minded SCAD curriculum engages professional-level technology and myriad advanced learning resources, affording students opportunities for internships, professional certifications, and real-world assignments with corporate partners through SCADpro, the university’s renowned research lab and prototype generator. SCAD has earned top rankings for degree programs in interior design, architecture, film, fashion, digital media, and more. Career success is woven into every fiber of the university, resulting in a superior alumni employment rate. A 2025 study found that 99% of recent SCAD graduates were employed, pursuing further education, or both within 12 months of graduation. SCAD provides students and alumni with ongoing career support through personal coaching, alumni programs, a professional presentation studio, and more. Visit scad.edu.

SCADask
SCADask is an applied research studio that leverages the university’s collective expertise to facilitate and generate strategic insights for business and media partners. Our design-centered research identifies business opportunities that reveal the future of commerce, creativity, and culture. SCADask initiatives include the university’s annual Al Summit, an event that unites design and technology luminaries with SCAD leadership, faculty partners, and students to discuss Al’s impact on design, education, and creative careers. SCADask research and award-winning publications like The Future of the American Dream and the Al Insights 2024 and 2025 reports have been featured in USA Today, Fast Company, Paste Magazine, AP News, Yahoo! Finance, California Business Journal, and more. To partner with us on custom research, email research@scad.edu.

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SOURCE Savannah College of Art and Design

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New ProEssentials v11: Native WinUI Charting Library, 100M Points in 15ms, Following Microsoft’s Vision for True Native Swap-Chain Rendering

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30 years of evolution in native C++ rendering that bypasses the managed XAML layer entirely and renders straight on the GPU via Direct3D compute shaders, in native x64 and ARM64, ready for Microsoft’s Windows on Arm and Copilot+ PCs. A fresh pass of 100M new data points renders to screen in ~65ms. The same engine powers WinUI, WPF, WinForms, MFC, and C++ from one codebase, with .NET 10 — built for real-time scientific, engineering, and financial data.

DALLAS, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Gigasoft has released ProEssentials v11, bringing its 30-year native C++ charting engine to WinUI. Every other WinUI chart today renders through managed XAML — ProEssentials renders directly to a Direct3D composition swap chain, the native path Microsoft built WinUI around. The result: 100 million data points re-rendered in roughly 15ms, a fully fresh 100M-point frame on screen in about 65ms.

v11 also ships a native ARM64 engine, ProEssentials runs native on Microsoft’s Windows on Arm and Copilot+ PCs. .NET 10 arrives across the WinUI, WPF, and WinForms interfaces, with Direct3D compute shaders doing the heavy lifting on every architecture. A side-by-side native WinUI chart performance comparison against the major vendors is published on gigasoft.com.

The engine underneath is the same native C++ core Gigasoft has refined since 1993 — deliberately kept native behind a thin .NET wrapper, never rewritten in managed code. One engine drives WinUI, WPF, WinForms, MFC, and C++, so a chart moves between frameworks by changing the control type, not the charting code. Don’t take the numbers on faith — clone the open-source 100M-point WinUI demo and benchmark it on your own hardware.

“ProEssentials is the undisputed heavyweight of Windows desktop charting. Version 11 brings its three-decade native C++ engine to WinUI 3, native ARM64, and .NET 10. We’re proud to ship the world’s first charting component to faithfully deliver on Microsoft’s goal for WinUI as the modern, native, performant interface — presenting directly through a composition swap chain instead of a managed XAML layer,” said Robert Dede, founder of Gigasoft.

ProEssentials is not only for shipping products. It is the tool engineers reach for on their own side projects — R&D experiments, rapid prototypes, proof-of-concept demos, test-and-measurement utilities, internal data analysis, and the one-off tools engineering firms are always building. Any company serious about engineering will find countless uses for it, and with v11’s AI charting code assistance many of those ideas become working applications in a few hours. Licensing is perpetual and royalty-free, generous for multi-developer teams — worth putting in front of your CTO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer. A no-hassle evaluation download is available at gigasoft.com.

Contact:
Robert Dede, BSEE, Founder
Gigasoft, Inc.
***@gigasoft.com

Photo(s):
https://www.prlog.org/13152577

Press release distributed by PRLog

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SOURCE Gigasoft, Inc.

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Global Times: Here Come China’s ‘next new three’: AI, robotics and innovative drugs spearhead a new round of industrial upgrading

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BEIJING, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — From four-legged inspection robots operating in European nuclear power plants to automatic coffee-making robotic arms serving travelers at airports and transit hubs around the globe and smart AI systems supporting local Chinese teaching in Thai schools, these varied overseas applications offer a vivid snapshot of how China’s “next new three” industries are expanding globally.

Labeled the “next new three,” AI, robotics and innovative drugs represent China’s new core strategic industries and fresh economic growth engines. Their rise marks a major upgrade in China’s industrial and export model. More importantly, this industrial shift is delivering open, inclusive and innovative solutions to support global industrial upgrading and shared development, experts said.

From ‘old three’ to ‘next new three’ 

For decades, China established its global manufacturing foothold by leveraging its labor-cost advantages, with apparel, furniture and home appliances becoming the iconic “old three” of Chinese exports.

In recent years, the export portfolio has undergone a remarkable green and tech transformation. Electric vehicles (EVs), lithium batteries and photovoltaic products, known as the “new three,” have become the backbone of China’s export growth.

Recent industry data demonstrates the strong growth potential of the “next new three” tech sectors: AI, robotics and innovative drugs.

Statistics from global AI platform OpenRouter show that domestic large models registered 36.11 trillion token calls in the week of July 13 to 19, a month-on-month increase of 30.93 percent, with growth sustained for eight straight weeks, according to the People’s Daily.

In the first half of the year, the country’s robotics exports reached 6.29 billion yuan ($929 million), covering 141 countries and regions with the exports of high-end surgical robots recording a striking 3.3-fold year-on-year increase. 

Meanwhile, China’s innovative pharmaceutical sector has gained strong global influence, with outbound technology licensing transactions hitting $110 billion in the first six months of the year. Chinese pharmaceutical companies accounted for eight of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical licensing deals.

Wang Peng, a research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday that the rise of the “next new three” represents China’s industrial shift from exporting manufacturing capacity to exporting high-end innovation.

Competition now centers on original research, core underlying technologies and related services rather than production volume and costs, Wang said.

He noted that these industries help Chinese businesses move up the value chain from assembly processing to research and development, technical services and standard-setting, strengthening China’s position in global industrial chains. 

Mirroring this trend, from January to May this year, China’s total services trade volume rose 6 percent year-on-year, while the services trade deficit narrowed by around 20 percent. Exports of knowledge-intensive services surged 12.2 percent, highlighting the continuous improvement of China’s services export competitiveness and the optimized structure of foreign trade, according to the People’s Daily.

While the “new three” underpin China’s foreign trade fundamentals, the “next new three” seize the commanding heights of future industries. Jointly, they shore up China’s long-term economic competitiveness and inject sustained impetus into high-quality growth, Wang said.

Inclusive technological progress

China’s high-quality exports of products and services have contributed to more inclusive technological progress to the global market, reflecting Chinese enterprises’ core strengths in independent technological research, business model innovation and the ability to integrate global resources, as well as China’s commitment to driving global development and benefiting humanity through technological openness.

Chinese startup DEEP Robotics told the Global Times that its quadruped robot intelligent inspection solution has been officially deployed at Switzerland’s Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant, the largest and highest-output nuclear facility in the European country, providing a Chinese solution for the digital and intelligent upgrading of nuclear power operations and maintenance across Europe.

The quadruped robot can replace human workers to access high-risk areas, perform precise operations and conduct high-frequency regular autonomous inspections 24/7, fundamentally cutting safety risks for on-site maintenance staff. It can also move flexibly through narrow corridors and gaps between dense equipment, covering all key inspection points and significantly reducing monitoring blind spots that traditional inspection devices cannot reach, the firm said.

Chinese robotic firm DoBot told the Global Times that in the commercial services sector, coffee robots equipped with its Nova series collaborative robotic arms have been operating stably in more than 20 types of venues including airports, high-speed railway stations and shopping malls globally, with a track record of producing hundreds of thousands of cups without reported malfunctions.

Overseas landmark applications include unattended Coca-Cola beverage stations along the Mediterranean coast, mobile coffee kiosks in the United Arab Emirates that serve a drink within 45 seconds, and self-operated food trucks deployed in shopping malls in Singapore, the company said.

Chinese AI company iFLYTEK said that its AI-powered intelligent teaching system has helped expand Chinese language learning worldwide and supported the digital development of Chinese education in overseas markets. 

Since a Thai middle school adopted iFLYTEK’s AI-powered intelligent Chinese teaching system in 2025, the technology has acted as a supplementary teaching solution amid growing local demand for Chinese learning and a shortage of qualified language instructors. It has greatly expanded students’ practice opportunities: On average, learners now speak Chinese 12 times per session, compared with only twice in regular classes, Xie Fei, director of iFLYTEK’s Global Chinese Learning Platform, said on Sunday.

From industrial robots to boost production efficiency for local factories to AI algorithms that improve local smart ecosystems, China’s “next new three” allow countries at all development levels to access benefits from advanced technologies and narrow the global digital divide, Wang said.

By building a sound global industrial network and rolling out customized technology solutions tailored to local conditions, these technological exports help recipient countries nurture their own industrial capacities and climb up the value chain to move higher up the industrial value chain. In the long run, such efforts will drive the global industrial system toward greater diversification and more balanced development, Wang noted.

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SOURCE Global Times

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KuCoin Marks Ninth Anniversary at Tomorrowland Belgium, Honoring Nine Years of Industry Progress Beyond the Signal

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PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos Islands, July 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On the day of its ninth anniversary, KuCoin welcomed global partners, institutional clients, ecosystem builders and media representatives to the “On Cloud 9 Skybox Experience,” an exclusive celebration at the Tomorrowland Belgium Skybox. Overlooking Tomorrowland’s iconic Mainstage, guests gathered throughout an unforgettable evening as world-renowned artists including Nicky Romero, Alok, Steve Angello and Hardwell delivered performances that brought together people from around the world. Against this backdrop of music, culture and global connection, KuCoin celebrated not only its own nine-year journey, but also the remarkable progress the digital asset industry has achieved together.

The experience formed part of KuCoin’s broader ninth-anniversary campaign, “Beyond the Signal,” reflecting the company’s belief that the industry’s future will be shaped not by short-term market movements alone, but by the trust, innovation and infrastructure that enable lasting progress. Bringing this vision to life in an elevated festival setting, the evening offered guests an opportunity to reflect on nine years of shared growth, collaboration and resilience, while looking ahead together to the next chapter of digital assets.

Against the backdrop of Tomorrowland’s iconic Mainstage, the exclusive Skybox experience with signature champagne rituals brought KuCoin and its guests together to reflect on and celebrate the milestones that have shaped its nine-year journey. From expanding access to digital assets and navigating multiple market cycles to strengthening security and compliance, supporting institutional participation, and advancing innovation across payments, AI and Web3, these milestones also reflected the broader evolution of the digital asset industry toward greater maturity.

The moment celebrated not only how far KuCoin has come, but also the progress the industry has made together. Over the past nine years, markets have risen and fallen, and technologies have continued to evolve. Yet lasting progress has always been driven by the builders, developers, partners and communities working together to create enduring value. That is the idea behind Beyond the Signal.

“Ninth anniversaries are often measured in years. We prefer to measure ours in trust,” said BC Wong, CEO of KuCoin. “The greatest achievement of the past nine years has not been our growth alone, but the confidence our users, partners and community have continued to place in us. Trust is the infrastructure that enables innovation, adoption and long-term progress. As we enter our next decade, we remain committed to building secure, compliant and trusted digital asset infrastructure together with our partners worldwide.”

The celebration also highlighted KuCoin’s expanding partnership with Tomorrowland as the festival’s Exclusive Crypto Exchange and Payments Partner for Tomorrowland Winter and Tomorrowland Belgium 2026–2028. Bringing together one of the world’s most influential cultural events with trusted digital infrastructure, the partnership reflects a shared vision of connecting people across borders and creating meaningful real-world experiences through technology, payments and community. For KuCoin, Tomorrowland is more than a global music festival—it represents the openness, diversity and global community that have always been at the heart of crypto.

Nine years ago, KuCoin set out to make digital assets accessible to more people around the world. Today, its mission has evolved beyond access to helping build the trusted infrastructure that will support the future of digital finance. Beyond music, beyond the celebration and beyond the signal, KuCoin’s ninth anniversary was not only a milestone for the company, but a celebration of how far the industry has come together—and a commitment to building what comes next.

About KuCoin

Founded in 2017, KuCoin is a leading global crypto platform built on trust and security, serving over 45 million users across 200+ countries and regions. Known for its reliability and user-first approach, the platform combines advanced technology, deep liquidity, and strong security safeguards to deliver a seamless trading experience. KuCoin provides access to 1,500+ digital assets through a broad product suite and remains committed to building transparent, compliant, and user-centric digital asset infrastructure for the future of finance, backed by SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, and ISO/IEC 27701:2019 Certifications. In recent years, we have built a strong global compliance foundation, marked by key milestones including AUSTRAC registration in Australia, a MiCA license in Europe, and regulatory progress in other markets.

Learn more at www.kucoin.com.

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SOURCE KuCoin

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