Category Archives: grant

Mar 2009 Session Chair Pervasive 2009

I’ve been asked to be a session chair on Navigation during Pervasive 2009. This is the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan. This session includes papers I’m looking forward to hearing more about including, “Realistic Driving Trips for Location Privacy” by John Krumm, “Enhancing Navigation Information with Tactile Output Embedded into the Steering Wheel” by Dagmar Kern, Eva Hornecker, Paul Marshall, Albrecht Schmidt, Yvonne Rogers, “Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation with Enhanced Spatial Reasoning” by Harlan Hile, Radek Grzeszczuk, Alan Liu, Ramakrishna Vedantham, Jana Kosecka, Gaetano Borriello.

This annual conference is the premier forum for researchers to present their latest results in all areas related to architecture, design, implementation, application and evaluation of pervasive computing. My colleague Albrecht will chair the session our paper is in on the final morning of the conference.

Read more about the program or register for the conference.

March 2009 CAPSIL events in the USA

From March 16th – 20th the CAPSIL consortium comes together in the USA for several leading events we have organised to reach out to the independent living research and development community and the US based policy and funding bodies. We are doing this by having events from panel sessions with members of the European Commission to small meetings between the European Commission, CAPSIL and US funding agencies. I fly to Las Vegas on the 15th and then to Washington DC on the evening of the 17th, I fly back to Dublin on the evening of the 20th, so it’s a packed week of events.

NCOA logo
On the March 17 at 1-2pm in Bally’s – Las Vegas 4 (South Tower – Third Floor) CAPSIL with host a panel session on Technologies for Successful Aging. This panel is part of the Aging in America conference, the 2009 Annual Conference of the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging. This panel includes an Overview of CAPSIL, State of the Art of Technology in Aging in the EU, US and Asia along with our Roadmap – Recommendations for the Future.

From the 18th to the 20th of March the CAPSIL consortium comes together in Washington DC for our 4th General Assembly, 4th working session along with a very large program of events with US based funding and decision makers. Our 3 days of events are being hosted at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville Maryland.

The CAPSIL consortium will be holding our 4th general assembly during this time along with further time devoted to roadmap development. Over the course of three days CAPSIL will host bilateral meetings between representatives from the EU with representatives from the US. Those from the EU include, members of CAPSIL, representatives of the Delegation of the European Commission in Washington DC, representatives of the European Commission, Information Society & Media D-G and representatives of the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme. Those from the US for example include, representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Further meetings with the NSF and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering will happen during this three day period.

The goal for these bilateral meetings is to further understand the activities underway in each area focussed on independent living supported by technology and to strengthen the opportunities for EU and US researchers to collaborate. There are many funded and unfunded research and development programs in the EU, US and Japan and if the agencies can aid, rely and build on each others efforts then the collective efforts of not just one region but all can be brought to bear on the challenges in independent living.

March 2009 Cloud Computing

As part of our applied research project Dviz I’ve been building up an understanding and appreciation of the incredibly over-hyped area of cloud computing. However, for Dviz it is important as it allows us to develop a scaleable approach to the delivery of the infrastructure. Dviz is a collaborative digital technology research project between Twelve Horses, IADT and UCD, and is funded by the NDRC. This project brings together a diverse skill set from both its commercial partner and university research teams to realise an innovative visualisation platform with strong commercial potential.

Cloud computing refers to a style of computing in which resources are provided as a service over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure. The canonical example is Google Docs, a functional word processing office app delivered entirely via one’s web browser [1]. The level of interest in Cloud Computing as an accessible service for the realisation of new web based applications has been growing over the past year with both academic research [6] and is also leaking into mainstream discussion [5]. Discussion on how the cloud will impact high performance computing [4] and other areas such as its use in Green IT are also ongoing.

Quote: “Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT.” [4]

Some of the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact include [2]:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • Storage-as-a-Service
  • Data-as-a-Service
  • Platform-as-a-Service
  • Software-as-a-Service

UCSB & IBM T.J. Watson Research five-layer grouping.

Discussions on cloud ontologies have come to light that provide a great starting point for taxonomy discussions [3].

References:

  1. Cloud computing: Threat or Menace?
  2. A crack in the madness of clouds
  3. A better way to understand cloud computing
  4. Berkeley Releases Cloud Computing Study Detailed Report [ PDF ]
  5. Cloud computing ascends the mainstream
  6. Tech Titans Building Boom
  7. Cloud Computing Journal

Feb 2009 Clique Strategic Research Cluster funded: €3.56 million

I am one of the six principal investigators for Clique which was announced by the Irish Tánaiste as an Science Foundation Ireland funded (SFI) Strategic Research Cluster. Our industry partners, in this joint initiative are IBM, Idiro Technologies and Norkom Technologies. Our academic partners are UCD and DERI in Galway. Clique runs from 2009 – 2013 and has a focus on the analysis and visualisation of large graphs and networks, specifically social and biological networks. This is a very exciting development for my research as it will allow me to hire a number of postdocs and postgraduates but more importantly to work in a research eco-system with domain experts, industry partners, rich data sources and collaborators interested in various aspects of the end-to-end problems in visual analytics.


Many of the Clique team will be based in the UCD CASL

While these companies are providing matching funding and resources the SFI is providing €3.56 million over the course of 5 years. In total with industry and SFI funding the program has funding in excess of €5 million. The academic principal investigators involved are, Prof. Pádraig Cunningham, Prof. Denis Shields, Prof. Brendan Murphy, Dr. Aaron Quigley, Dr. Neil Hurley and Dr. Conor Hayes. The funding will be used to hire postdoctoral researchers and pay postgraduate scholarships.

The development of this research cluster has been a long time in the making. I’ve been an IBM visiting scientist since 2005 and others have been collaborating with Idiro and Norkom over a number of years. This cluster was first proposed over 1 year ago when 40 similar clusters were proposed to the SFI. The process to select these five from the forty has included a preliminary expression of interest (then review), full detailed proposal (then reviews), site visit (international panel), SFI review and board review and final the official announcement by the government! It’s a very rigourous process aimed to ensure the best research is funded, the value for the Irish tax payer is strong and the potential for industry is high.

I look forward to blogging about new team members, new research ideas, papers, outputs and commercilisation in the years to come!

[ Read SFI News Release ]

“SFI Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) will help link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, and grow partnerships with industry that could make an important contribution to Ireland and its economy.

The SRC programme has been designed to facilitate the clustering of outstanding researchers to carry out joint research activities in areas of strategic importance to Ireland (in ICT and/or BioTech sectors), while also giving the time and resources to attract and cultivate strong industry partnerships that can inform and enhance their research programmes.”

Apr 2008 SFI Funded CSET: CLARITY

Science Foundation Ireland is to fund a €16.4m technology partnership between UCD, DCU and Tyndall in the CLARITY CSET. I’m one of the collaborators in this centre and other academics in my research group such as Simon and Paddy and in my school in UCD are leading researchers in this world class research effort.

This CSET has grown out of the AIC who helped us secure our SFI UREKA grant in 2007 for ODCSSS, which continues to this day. Congrats to Barry and Alan and the rest of the CLARITY PIs.

Interested students should keep an eye open for future calls for both postgraduate and postdoctoral research positions with this new CSET.
News Coverage:

Apr 2008 EU Coordinating Action: CAPSIL

I have recently become the UCD PI for an EU Support Action CAPSIL we coordinate. CAPSIL is an ‘International Support of a Common Awareness and Knowledge Platform for Studying and Enabling Independent Living’. Our first kick off meeting is in London on April 10th with follow up meetings in Japan, Boston, Oregon and Ireland.

The aging of society is the single most important aspect of health care in the 21st century. Many intriguing ICT solutions are being developed within the EU, USA, and Japan for helping older people remain independent longer. However, these solutions tend to be fragmented and heterogeneous. The CAPSIL Coordinating Support Action (CSA) team is a strategic international coalition of University and Industrial partners that already have extensive teams developing hardware/software/knowledge solutions to independent living based on user requirements. All partners of CAPSIL are already members of regional and national centres on aging engaged in the process of helping to establish public policy and international standards. This support action is to launch initiatives, coordinated and disseminated by a series of workshops in the US, EU, and Japan (two per year for two years), with three fundamental goals:

* to develop a detailed CAPSIL Roadmap for EU research to achieve effective and sustainable solutions to independent living based on an in-depth analysis of independent living requirements and the ICT scenarios developed or under development in the EU, as well as the US and Japan (societies where the aging of the population are currently on par or exceeding the challenges that will be found within the EU).

* to support aging research by proposing procedures to incorporate all of these diverse solutions into WiKi entries (CAPSIL WiKi). These CAPSILs will enable researchers and the ICT industry to get the information they need to quickly and easily test solutions for prolonging independent living within the many and various heterogeneous communities. Only with this knowledge will the relevance and efficacy of technological solutions be maintained and be empowered with the capability to be adapted for various cultures.

* to use the CAPSIL Roadmap and the CAPSIL Workshops to help policy makers in the US and Japan coordinate research agendas and funding efforts across the three continents.

Jan 2008 Oracle/SFI Grant success and review

Professor Paddy Nixon holds a €2.5m SFI award in Secure and Predictable Pervasive Systems. This core grant has allowed us over the past 3 years to develop the systems research group (SRG) in UCD into a international leading group in massive scale distributed systems, software engineering, visualisation and sensor based systems.

This grant, along with many others has allowed us to grow the SRG into a team of 5 Faculty, 6 PostDocs, 29 PhD students, and 3 research programmers (43 staff).

Recently, I was a co-investigator on an SFI Industry Research supplement award to Paddy’s main grant with Oracle. I’m bringing my Pervasive Computing and Info Vis experience to this project. Over the past few month Dr. Benoit Gaudin has done an outstanding job on the first phase of this research project.

The impact of this industry academic collaboration was felt today in an Oracle review of the early stage of the project. We presented our research results and plans to two Oracle Vice Presidents and an Executive Technical Advisor along with a larger Oracle team. The presentation, research methodology and direction (and of course results) were all very well received.

We hope this collaboration grows over time with Dr. Gaudin leading the delivery over the coming 18 months.

If you are interested in a PhD working on real industry problems related to Oracle please contact me as we will soon have an advert for 2 PhD posts in UCD.

Jan 2008 TRIL Centre IDA Review

Tril logo

Along with my co-Principal Investigators in the TRIL Centre (Technology Research for Independent Living) we presented to an external review panel on our work to date and plans for 2008 across the 5 strands within TRIL. I presented on the TRIL Technology Platform (TTP) which is headed up by Michael McGrath (Intel), Paddy Nixon (UCD) and myself Aaron Quigley (UCD).

I’ve only recently joined this team but I was very proud to present the outcomes of the TTP work to date. Across the strands the team have made great strides in clinical research, IT research, ethnographic research and developments targeted at key areas in ageing. Ageing is both a social and a biological process where I like to focus on the challenges, opportunities and excitement which it presents rather than the typical view of disconnection and decline.

The TRIL Centre is a coordinated collection of research projects addressing the physical, cognitive and social consequences of ageing, all informed by ethnographic research and supported by a shared pool of knowledge and
engineering resources.

Jan 2008 CLARITY SFI site-visit

I’ve been involved with the Adaptive Information Cluster in UCD and DCU for a number of years. Primarily through ODCSSS, our undergraduate research internship program which they helped support with funds for the first couple of years. More recently this group of the Principal Investigators along with their associate PIs and affiliated collaborators (of which I am just 1) and their numerous industrial partners presented their bid for a CSET entitled CLARITY to an independent site visit panel. This review is part of the SFI process in the high quality peer review to decide on a CSET.

Side note…..

I’ve only been back in Ireland a few years and I’ve been through a few of these CSET visits and reviews. They are always an interesting experience. Last year I was on Computer Engineering grant review panel myself for the Foundation for Science and the Technology Portugal (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) so it’s always a challenging prospect for everyone involved to ensure the best quality research gets funded be it locally, nationally or internationally. By remote review to Canada and the UK and personally in Australia I got to see the full force of their NSERC/EPSRC/CRC processes which are all entirely different dynamics.
From my experience a few key aspects of successful grant review include:

  • Quality research should be the first and last metric for evaluation
  • An international panel for small countries or for larger grants
  • Zero interference from the funding body to the reviewers/panel
  • A clear understanding of the national/international funding context by the panellists
  • Both breath and depth in the review panels in terms of topics and governance.

From what I’ve seen, the SFI is one of the leaders in getting grant reviews right. They are improving the local ecosystem for research not just because they follow good practice but because they help define it.

Dec 2007 Grant Success: CASL Scientific Computing Sensor Facility

A group of us in the UCD CASL were awarded €620,000 as part of a successful grant application under the 2007 SFI Equipment Call. This is a great success for CASL as the grant involved researchers from 4 different schools (Computer Science & Informatics, Mathematical Sciences, Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering, and Geological Sciences). This equipment supports large-scale experiments with complex multimedia sensing and processing at terabyte scales.

UCD’s Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) is a collaborative research laboratory which leverages the unique mix of expertise at UCD in various fields. CASL puts computer scientists, information scientists, mathematicians, electronic engineers, geologists, biologists and financial academics in the same space to work on grand-challenge problems.

CASL brings together 25 nationally- and internationally-funded and recognised principle investigators (PIs) with over 150 graduate and post-doctoral researchers from the UCD Schools of Business, Computer Science and Informatics, Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering, Geological Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, and the UCD Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. These are organised into overlapping thematic areas including informatics, sensor systems, computational biology, computational and data-intensive science, and mathematical finance.