Category Archives: sfi

June 2009 4th ODCSSS Program

This is the 4th year for the ODCSSS program. ODCSSS is a 12 week undergraduate summer research internship program between the University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin City University (DCU) Ireland which starts on June 2nd 2009. This program offers a distributed and interdisciplinary research environment at the forefront of ICT research. The theme for 2009 is “Technologies for bridging the digital-physical divide: sensing the environment“. Each ODCSSS student is engaged in a research project with a faculty member and mentor which provides them an opportunity to experience research.

This year we have, yet again, an impressive set of research interns coming here for the summer. Our 2009 research launch event will be held in the Guinness Store House Dublin on June 2nd with a strong line of research presentations for academia, industry and applied research labs.

As UCD director for this program I wish all the research interns based here and in DCU all the very best in their summer research. To see some past images view this flickr set called ODCSSS SET


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.

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:

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 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.

Aug 2007 ODCSSS research internship

[ ODCSSS Feed ]

Over the past 12 weeks we have had 24 students from around the world working on 12 research projects in DCU and 12 projects in UCD. The site involved two directors, myself and Dr. Gabriel Muntean in DCU along with 24 supervisors and dozens of mentors and postgraduate students. The experience for the students was a very good one and the research outcomes are still being distilled into research publication (5+ so far) along with follow on research projects.

ODCSSS is an SFI funded Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge Award that we were awarded through a competitive grant process in late 2006. This site lasts for 3 years and the grant supported the intake in 2007 and will do so again in 2008 and 2009. We hope the theme for 2008 will grow out of our experience, projects, students and mentors from 2007. While running this site was a lot of work, the opportunity to see undergraduate students engaging in computer science research is invaluable for them and for the further development of 4th level Ireland.

Friday the 24th of August saw the final research day for the DCU-UCD ODCSSS UREKA research site. This event held at DCU attracted over 60 people and was of great interest to all. Starting with a prize giving ceremony and introductions the day progressed to the main research event which was held as a research poster session. The event finished with a certificate presentation to all 24 students who participated in this years research internship. Other events from this day included a tour and a social event see [ ODCSSS Feed ].

An email from the SFI came out today to announce the calls for other people to apply for a UREKA grant. I’m including it here in case any academic in Ireland would like to talk to us about our experience in developing and running a UREKA site.

From the SFI:
Proposals for the 2008 Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge Award (UREKA) are now invited.
Application submission deadline for UREKA Sites and International Exchange Programme is 1pm on Friday, October 26th 2007
Application submission deadline for UREKA Supplements: 1pm on Friday, 25th January 2008

Group Shot

June 2007 Hdip and ODCSSS Feeds

The School of Computer Science in UCD has been running a very successful and popular H. Dip. in Computer Science for a number of year. As the new course director I have started to revamp this course and improve its industrial relevance starting in 2007. Ongoing developments will solidify our role as the leading conversion course for non-computing majors into computer science in Ireland. I maintain an RSS feed which you can subscribe to in a number of ways: Higher Diploma Computer Science News Feed

The H. Dip. in Computer Science UCD is a conversion course which gives graduates from non-computing disciplines a sound theoretical foundation and practical exposure to Computer Science. In addition, the course may qualify participants to study for an M.Sc. in Computer Science. The course is made up of 10 modules of Computer Science, where a module typically consists of 24 lectures and additional practical sessions.

ODCSSS Poster

June 5th saw 12 students join us in Computer Science and Informatics in UCD for the UREKA (SFI) funded ODCSSS research summer school. In total there are 24 International research undergraduate projects in Ireland for “Technologies for Aiding Human Memory”. ODCSSS 2007 News

ODCSSS the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School is a paid research internship program for undergraduate students funded in part by the Science Foundation Ireland under their UREKA program. ODCSSS is a four-year collaborative internship program between the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University College Dublin and the School of Computing at the Dublin City University.

This year we had over 100 applications from around the world. In 2007 we have students coming from Universities in Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand and the USA. The primary goal of this research program is to afford exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to participate and contribute to exciting yet challenging research projects and to inspire them to go on to undertake research careers.