Projects_old

Clique

Research in data analysis is being transformed by access to large-scale data resources. An area of particular importance in data analysis is the study of collections of entities and the links between them. Clique (http://www.cliquecluster.org) is an SFI-funded Strategic Research Cluster based at DERI and UCD comprising of six academic principal investigators, industry collaborators and collaborating academics that focuses on the analysis and visualisation of large graphs and networks, specifically social networks and biological networks. The research cluster addresses the development of computational techniques for the analysis and visualisation of such network data.

Clique addresses four of the core research challenges in network analysis and visualisation. These are the identification of coherent communities, the identification of nodes that have pivotal roles, the identification of network structure that is remarkable or anomalous and the question of how to model and analyse information flow. In particular the research will address datasets that are massive, multi-attribute and dynamic. These research challenges require diverse expertise and Clique brings together experts on three aspects of network analysis, i.e. experts on visualisation, matrix decomposition techniques and probabilistic modelling. Our research agenda is driven by the requirements of companies operating in Ireland and the technology will be applied in internet services, fraud detection and bioinformatics.

Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET)

The main goal of CONET is to build a strong community in the area of Cooperating Objects capable of conducting the needed research to achieve the vision of Mark Weiser. Therefore, the objectives of CONET are the following:

1. Create a visible and integrated community of researchers on the topics related to Cooperating Objects capable of driving the domain in the coming years.
2. Identify, arise awareneess and steer academic research efforts towards industry-relevant issues without forgetting fundamental scientific issues; make the community more reactive to novel issues and approaches, and to coordinate its efforts; establish tight relationships with the European industry, leveraging interactions with leading US institutions in the field.
3. Stimulate cooperation between researchers in order to achieve a lasting and sustainable architecture that is able to cope with the vision of Cooperating Objects.

COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies (COST-AT)

The main objective of the Action is to support and promote the harmonization of nationallyfunded high-quality research towards a new paradigm for next-generation distributed systems based on the notion of agreement between computational agents, fostering research excellence and sowing the seeds for technology transfer to industry.
 
Primary objectives

•  European research excellence: to facilitate harmonization and improvement in the quality, profile, and industrial relevance of European research in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, drawing on relevant prior work from related areas and disciplines;
• Technology transfer: to gain competitive advantage for the European ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) industry in open distributed software systems. 

Secondary objectives

• Joint Research: to promote innovative and pragmatic joint research across the community fractions related to Agreement Technologies in different COST member states, and worldwide;
• Interdisciplinary Research: to promote interdisciplinary research in the field of Agreement Technologies aimed at a robust understanding of the notion of agreement among computational entities;
• Early integration of young researchers: to promote a rapid integration and sustained involvement of early-stage researchers in the community building process;
• Capacity Building: to promote high-quality teaching in all aspects related to the Agreement Technology paradigm.
• Awareness: to raise awareness of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies technology among the target groups of the Action; and
• Early Adoption: to encourage the early adoption of Agreement Technologies and applications in industry.

EA Training 2.0 (EATrain2)

Innovative Enterprise Architecture Education and Training Based on Web 2.0 Technologies

The aim of EATrain2 is to identify the training and educational needs of employees in both public and private sector and university students regarding Enterprise Architecture (EA) and to fulfil these needs using innovative pedagogies and practices based on Web 2.0 technologies and active, problem-based learning approaches.

Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment (eCAALYX)

eCAALYX is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under the AAL Joint Programme (Strategic Objectives addressed: ICT-based Solutions for Prevention and Management of Chronic Conditions of Elderly People). The project builds on the strengths of the infrastructure and functionality already developed in the original CAALYX project (2007/2008).

Fast and Advanced Storyboard Tools (FAST)

The main objective of the project is to create a new a visual programming environment that will facilitate the development of complex front-end gadgets, involving execution of relatively complex business processes that rely on back-end semantic Web services. The approach adopted will be user-centric rather than program-centric: instead of first building programs that orchestrate available semantic Web services and then try to figure out how to implement interaction with the users at given points of the process execution flow, programmers will start from the front-end gadgets that the user will see and interact with, and then, afterwards, they will visually establish the connection to back-end Web services going through process execution flows if necessary. The way programmers will visually establish this connection will follow an approach similar to what sequence diagrams in UML look like.

Firefly (Firefly)

We believe that a new metaphor for creating time-based task-oriented learning material bundles and for delivering them to learners is needed. More specifically, the objective of the Firefly project is to develop an authoring and a playback environment for the creation and delivery of time-based, multi-media, instructional materials which can be shared and embedded.

A web-based service (using a web server) is being created which delivers such bundled instructional content that contains multi-step, recipe-like elements to step learners through the process of a task with the aim of educating and guiding them in the task. There is no client-side component other than the now ubiquitous Flash Player

A Beta version of the Firefly project implementation can be found at the Planergize website. Have a look at the Planergize Wedding Planning page to see how Firefly technology is applied in the wedding planning domain.

iMP (iMP)

iMP - Intelligent Metadata-driven Processing and distribution of audiovisual media, an FP7/ICT-2007.4.4 STREP.

iMP will create architecture, workflow and applications for intelligent metadata-driven processing and distribution of digital movies and entertainment. The goal is to enable a ‘Virtual Film Factory’ in which creative professionals can work together to create and customise programmes from Petabyte-scale digital repositories, using semantic technologies to organise data and drive its processing.

Líon 2

Systematic and human-centric access to knowledge is critical for solving today's problems – on individual, organisational and global levels. To develop new solutions and enable innovation, it is essential to interlink people, organisations and information in a "network of knowledge”. Although knowledge is inherently strongly interconnected, this interconnectedness is not reflected in the current structure of the Web and other information systems: the "information fabric” is not optimal for supporting the development of solutions and innovation. To develop the right tools and methods for enabling networked knowledge on a global scale is an enormous and extremely important challenge. Only by interconnecting this global knowledge and by creating the right collaboration methods can we hope to tackle current and future problems. Imagine a world with networked global knowledge and collaboration, where problems like climate change would be tackled far more effectively, resulting in proactive collective action.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and its industry partners are taking on these challenges, executing a research agenda and outreach activities targeted at supporting people, organisations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale by enabling networked knowledge using Semantic Web technologies.

The Semantic Web is emerging with the availability of more formal data sources coming online. DERI is one of the main contributors to this work, and is now ready to tackle the next step. It is our hypothesis that networked knowledge can assist people, organisations and systems with their individual as well as collective problem solving, enabling innovation and increased productivity and also helping to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds through the inclusion of emerging sensor technologies as an additional source of knowledge about the real world. An application in the healthcare domain is remote patient monitoring and the integration of sensor measurements into a patient's health records, thus enabling their use and interpretation anywhere in the world.

We use the Web as a living laboratory to enable us to validate our approaches and hypothesis, and to have global impact by creating standards. True global networks of knowledge require a technological foundation and the engagement of many users, both of which are now available through the Web. Ireland has a unique opportunity to take the lead in this area, providing the key technologies to networked knowledge societies, whilst benefiting industry.

Líon 2 is an SFI funded Centre for Science, Engineering & Technology (CSET). It sets out an ambitious programme of consolidation, growth, collaboration and sustainability over five years, building on the results and achievements of the previous CSET grant (Líon-1). DERI is applying its research output across key application research domains including: Telecommunications, eBusiness & Financial Services, eLearning, Healthcare & Life Sciences, eScience and eGovernment.

A critical aspect of DERI's SFI-funded activities is the strong alignment between DERI's core research, and the research and development activities carried out by its industry partners. DERI has attracted eight industrial partners in this proposal for second-round funding, evidence of the value to industry of DERI's research. They are Cisco, Nortel, Ericsson, Storm, Cyntelix, OpenLink Software, Celtrak and Fidelity. These partners provide a cost share contribution to the research. DERI has created initiatives such as DERI LABS, DERI LAND and the DERI Entrepreneurial Forum, which help bridge the gap between research and its industrial application. The purpose of these initiatives is to create and encourage an environment where commercial ideas, market potential and likely routes to markets can be explored. DERI will extend these activities as part of this proposal to achieve a closer engagement with industry.

A key strategic element of the Irish government's and European Union's policies of creating a knowledge economy is investment in research. DERI is supporting Ireland's economic growth and competitiveness and is enabling its knowledge economy by developing collaborative networks and skilled people, e.g., fourth-level graduates. In addition DERI's Outreach Programme is increasing technology awareness through a comprehensive range of Internet courses, lectures and projects aimed at community groups, schools and third-level colleges.

MAARS [C+]

MAARS [C+] is a Commercialization Plus funded project by Enterprise Ireland. It is a short-term advanced commercialization initiative that consolidates MAARS product presence on the Irish, UK and US financial markets via specific targeted actions.

OKKAM (OKKAM)

The goal of the OKKAM project is to enable the Web of Entities, a global digital space for publishing and managing information about entities, where every entity is uniquely identified. Links between these entities can be explicitly specified and exploited in a variety of scenarios. Compared to the WWW, the main differences are that the domain of entities is extended beyond the realm of digital resources to include objects in other realms like products, organizations, associations, countries, events, publications, hotels or people; and the links between entities are extended beyond hyperlinks to include virtually any type of relation. The OKKAM project presents a strategy and an effective work plan to build the pillars of this Web of Entities, not only from a technical point of view, but also from a social, organizational and business-oriented perspective.

PErvasive Computing in Embedded Systems (PECES)

The overarching goal of the PECES project is the creation of a comprehensive software layer to enable the seamless cooperation of embedded devices across various smart spaces on a global scale in a context-dependent, secure and trustworthy manner. The increasing number of devices that is invisibly embedded into our surrounding environment as well as the proliferation of wireless communication and sensing technologies are the basis for visions like ambient intelligence, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. The benefits of these visions and their undeniable impact on the economy and society have led to a number of research and development efforts. These include various European projects such as EMMA or AMIGO that develop specialized middleware abstractions for different application areas such as automotive and traffic control systems or home automation. These efforts have enabled smart spaces that integrate embedded devices in such a way that they interact with a user as a coherent system. However, they fall short of addressing the cooperation of devices across different environments. This results in isolated ‘islands of integration’ with clearly defined boundaries such as the smart home or office. For many future applications, the integration of embedded systems from multiple smart spaces is a primary key to providing a truly seamless user experience. Nomadic users that move through different environments will need to access information provided by systems embedded in their surroundings as well as systems embedded in other smart spaces. Depending on their context and on the targeted application, this can be smart spaces in their vicinity such as ‘smart stores’ or distant places with a specific meaning such as their home or their office or dynamically changing places. PECES is committed to developing the technological basis to enable the global cooperation of embedded devices residing in different smart spaces in a context-dependent, secure, and trustworthy manner.

RuraLlnc

TagBuilder

TagBuilder is a collaborative project with our industrial partner aimed at researching and developing technologies that will facilitate the creation of a highly-scalable, SaaS B2B marketplace – initially for electronic components. This service will greatly improve & streamline the product sourcing process for companies by delivering the following improvements over existing offerings in this space:

• Allow product suppliers (not skilled in the concepts of ontology development) to use a graphical ontology-development tool to rapidly create domain-specific ontologies to describe their product data.
• Enable faceted search of product catalogs based on the ontologies created by the suppliers.
• Facilitate the creation of a network of companies and linked products. This network of companies will be used in many contexts, for example to represent company partner networks or to denote certified compatibility between the product of one company with that of another.

The Stokes

The Science Foundation Ireland Stokes Professorship and Lectureship Programme (briefly "The Stokes") is designed to support the strategic planning for increasing the number of research active faculty members in the short term. The Programme is named after Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) the Irish mathematician and physicist who was born in Skreen, Co. Sligo. Stokes made several important contributions to fluid dynamics (c.f., Navier-Stokes equations), optics and maths physics (c.f., Stokes Theorem). Like Newton, Stokes was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a parliamentary representative for Cambridge University and a President of the Royal Society. Stokes made key contributions to the foundations of what we now call ICT and BIO.

Welcoming Argument Visualisation to Europe (WAVE)

Project WAVE aims to improve the inclusiveness and transparency of EU decision making at the national and European level by using highly integrated, state-of-the-art Argument Visualisation techniques to make the impact of complex EU environmental legislation on climate change more accessible and easy to understand for citizens, special interest groups and decision makers alike. WAVE will deploy Debategraph, an innovative argument visualisation platform, in a multi-lingual, cross border context.