Pictured at the launch of CLARITY is Professor Alan Smeaton DCU, Deputy Director of CLARITY CSET, Micheal Martin, T.D, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Professor Barry Smyth, UCD Director of CLARITY CSET; Professor Frank Gannon, Director General SFI.
Micheál Martin, TD, Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment has announced a €16.4 million investment to establish CLARITY, a new Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET). This ground breaking research centre will focus on the so-called ‘Sensor Web’, which captures the intersection between two important research areas – Adaptive Sensing and Information Discovery.
The new cutting-edge CLARITY CSET is a partnership between University College Dublin and Dublin City University, supported by research at the Tyndall National Institute Cork. The CLARITY CSET Director is Professor Barry Smyth, of UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.
"Sensors help us to learn more about ourselves and the world in which we live, and the next generation of sensor technologies will be cheap, connected and reliable, enabling exciting new application areas,” said Professor Barry Smyth, Director of CLARITY.
“We have already, for example, been using wearable sensors to design garments that are capable of monitoring the posture of the wearer, helping back-pain prone knowledge-workers to improve their seated posture. Other applications include the networks of sensors that are capable of monitoring water quality, with a view to identifying and signaling potential pollution events.”
Science Foundation Ireland is investing €11.8 million in the Centre over the next five years with the Centre’s industrial partners contributing €4.6 million. They include IBM, Vodafone, Ericsson and UCD spin-out ChangingWorlds, as well as national agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
“This investment will establish CLARITY as a truly unique world-class multidisciplinary research centre,” said Minister Martin announcing the funding. “By linking academic researchers with industry partners in Ireland, SFI CSETs such as CLARITY will play a significant role in building Ireland’s new knowledge-driven economy”.
The core aim of this innovative research centre is ‘bringing information to life’. The research will investigate the integration of sensor data from the physical world with sophisticated information processing and artificial intelligence techniques from computer science. CLARITY aims to develop systems that can sense, process and analyse what is happening in the real world and respond in an appropriate manner.
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