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.