SCIENCE FOUNDATION IRELAND:Science Foundation Ireland's research funding opportunities are the envy of ICT developers worldwide

Significant research investment in the software sector in recent years has meant that Ireland has progressed from a mainly manufacturing country into a home for cutting-edge developments in information technology.

Science Foundation Ireland focuses on information and communications technology as one of its strategic research areas.

Since its establishment in 2000, SFI has committed over € 163 million across the software sector for research in higher-education institutions. This includes significant investments in software engineering and artificial intelligence, language technologies, networking and communications systems, knowledge and web-based systems, computer modelling and visualisation systems and information systems.

Due to the ready availability of funding for high-end research, there are now many software research projects ongoing in Ireland, within which cutting-edge developments are regularly occurring.

Before the SFI era, funding for such projects entailed small amounts that were widely dispersed, explains Dr Stephen Flinter, a scientific programme officer in SFI's Information Communications Technology (ICT) division.

"What SFI has done is create much larger teams and bigger projects based on funding a relatively small number of people, but with generous amounts by international standards," he says.

SFI are looking for research that is world-class and can have an international, and not simply national, impact, adds Flinter.

"We try and find the best people and hold them to the same standards that any other world-class funding agency would do. Typically what we do is bring in reviewers from the US or Europe and get them to evaluate project proposals under the same criteria they would use."

Flinter explains that the aim is to create the science and technology that will ultimately feed into developing tangible products and services.

"We are not necessarily looking at bringing a product to market, but more so getting the research to a point where it can be commercialised by either Enterprise Ireland funding or through an industry collaborator," he says.

According to Flinter, collaboration with Ireland's many national and multinational IT companies is a key aspect of many SFI-funded software research projects.

"The SFI Centres for Science, Engineering & Technology and the Strategic Research Clusters would have as a requirement that they have industrial partners, and typically that would be a mix of the big multinationals and the SMEs."

The multinationals involved in collaborating in software research within Irish institutions include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Dell, he adds.

Professor Eugene Freuder is director of the 4C group in University College Cork, otherwise known as the Cork Constraint Computation Centre.

Freuder explains that his group is a world leader in constraint programming, which helps computers help people make better decisions. "In business, there are constraint problems with issues such as employees, meeting schedules, product specification, and supply chain optimisation," he adds.

Professor Barry O'Sullivan, associate director of the 4C group, is also president of the International Association for Constraint Programming, and Freuder was a recipient of the first research excellence award given by the Association.

Constraints are a significant part of artificial intelligence and also overlap with other fields, explains Freuder.

"We are also very prominent in the larger area of artificial intelligence and are playing a major role there," he says, adding that 4C are working closely with industry in order to bring their groundbreaking technologies into the "real world" for the benefit of Irish enterprise.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway is another SFI-funded CSet. After just five years of operation, DERI has now become an internationally recognised institute in semantic web research, education and technology transfer.

Professor Stefan Decker, director of the Institute, explains that the institute is number one in its field. Academics have joined DERI from all over the world, adds Decker. "We now have 120 people working on the ground from 27 different nations," he says, adding that the Institute has now received €24 million in funding, of which € 12.4 comes from SFI.

Projects within DERI include those looking at Web 2.0 and social networking, says Decker.

"We are looking at making the social web more interoperable, allowing people to interconnect and collaborate on the web," he explains. "Collaboration technology is very strong."

One example of a DERI-based research endeavour is the Social Semantic Desktop project, which will ultimately allow people to collaborate with their peers while drastically reducing the amount of time spent filtering and filling in information, explains Decker. "This makes interacting with your computer more pleasurable as it is more intuitive and helps you find information."

Many companies are now setting up bases in Galway in order to work with the researchers at DERI. "Companies from Italy, the Netherlands and the United States are opening up subsidiaries in Galway so that they can collaborate with us, and this is creating employment opportunities for the area."

It is crucial that technology development is informed by business needs, says Professor Vinny Cahill of Trinity College's Distributed Systems Group,who is working in the area of sentient computing, which can have applications ranging from automotive systems to independent living.

Metropolis is a novel interdisciplinary project involving computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research, applying principles of human multisensory perception to create a lifelike depiction of a virtual urban environment with street scenes, crowds and traffic noise.

SFI has provided €2.5 million for the project, led by Professor Carol O'Sullivan and Dr Steve Collins at the Computer Science Department at Trinity College Dublin.

"This is a growing area of research for us and the funding has allowed us to expand it," explains O'Sullivan. "It is taking a new look at how to simulate large crowds of people in an urban environment, looking at it from a psychological and technical point of view."

Industrial collaborators in the project include Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, IBM, Creative Labs, Havok and Demonware. The project has implications for new software games and interactive entertainment as well as being of practical benefit to urban-planning projects, and the group is also working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency, says O'Sullivan.

There is also an outreach project involving the Central Remedial Clinic in Clontarf, as the project has allowed development of assistive technologies for people with disabilities: "We worked together with a game developer called CanDo Interactive to develop an application the kids at the clinic can use to navigate a virtual model of Dublin, so that they can learn about their city."

Dr O'Sullivan says that Ireland is benefiting hugely from the investment in software research. "We are the envy of a lot of people in the States and Europe, and the international researchers in the field are amazed at how well we are doing here in terms of funding. The quality of our research has been increasing hugely."