Units

Applied Innovations (DAI)

DERI Applied Innovations (DAI) works with corporate enterprises to create advanced and innovative applications using DERI technology combined with new research into interfaces, applications, and system implementation.

DAI also operates its BizStart program seeking to commercialize DERI technology by partnering researchers with entrepreneurs. The commercialization efforts of DAI involve closely working with CEOs or Entrepreneurs who help develop business and marketing plans around innovative technologies emerging from the DAI labs.

DAI is composed of three sub-units, Advanced Innovative Technology (AIT), Advanced Technology Implementation (ATI), and Advanced Translational Research (ATR). The AIT subunit concentrates on researching and developing new technologies in user interfaces and Enterprise solutions. The ATI subunit works closely with industry partners ranging from SMEs to MNCs to implement specific projects meeting Enterprise needs. The ATR subunit liaises with the other business oriented units in DERI to look for appropriate technologies to fill the needs of commercialization efforts.

Data Intensive Infrastructures Unit (UDI2)

The requirements to analyse and understand the inner workings and underlying fundamental concepts of the Web along with the elevated scalability requirements for the development of new Web infrastructures have demonstrated the necessity of Data Intensive Supercomputing (DISC) infrastructures to support researchers and developers. A prominent characteristic of DISC (as promoted by major players such as Google, Yahoo and MSN), as opposed to classic supercomputing, is the importance of very advanced data management software over high-end hardware configurations. DISC data entries are in fact known to be formed by hundreds or thousands of commodity machines connected using common commercial networking infrastructures. It is then up to the software to be able to deliver high capacity, throughput, scalability, re-configurability and fault tolerance. To be able to conduct credible research and development in the Web domain, DERI requires a DISC infrastructure. As DISC in itself is the subject of ongoing research, the goal of this work programme is to advance the research and applications of data intensive infrastructures, to create, maintain and offer to researchers a state-of-the-art DISC infrastructure, and to research novel algorithms and data structures for scalable handling of large amounts of semantic information. This work programme will draw on DERI’s previous work on large-scale semantic search engines (SWSE) and will be done in cooperation with the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC).

eBusiness and Financial Services Domain (DEB)

Today’s enterprise is increasingly dependent upon content bundling to support business processes, product offerings, services and decision making. There has been explosive growth in the percentage of unstructured content (e.g., scanned documents, business reports, email) that enterprise information systems are expected to deal with. With the increasing importance of electronic commerce channels, regulatory compliance requirements and information search capability for business intelligence insight, this trend is set to continue, requiring enterprise content management systems to become proficient in linking back office data with line-of-sight business content. The growth and value of unstructured information will require new approaches and thinking as to how information is managed and used across the enterprise. Information life cycle management will have to smoothly accommodate all information, ensuring that enterprise content and business information systems are coupled to provide a single all-inclusive enterprise information overview. The application of semantics to business information systems is directed towards grounding the technology in the key areas of extracting business meaning from unstructured information, uncovering meaning within a business context, smarter BIS that can add meaning as they operate, and deducing business information and communicating it to other stake holders.

eGovernment Domain (DEG)

Public administrations are considered the heaviest service industry worldwide. However, they are far from satisfying their constituents, as they usually operate in an ineffective/inefficient way. The impact of the Internet marked a watershed in information technology usage in government and the potential to deliver user-centred, cost-effective services has been well documented. eGovernment further offers the ability to transform not only the way in which most public services are delivered but also the fundamental relationship between government and citizen. Citizen-centric eGovernment aims at improving the provision of public services, citizens’ participation in democratic processes and the internal administrative efficiency. The goal of this work programme is to apply DERI technologies to address current implementation deficits in eGovernment in order to refocus government activities on its clients, i.e., citizens and businesses, and to provide the models, technologies and tools for more effective and efficient public administration systems. This work will provide one-stop, personalised access to the maze of public services for its users, give voice to citizens/businesses and facilitate their participation in public policy formulation and at the service design phase. To achieve these goals, tools will be devised to acquire, share, reuse and process vast amounts of relevant data from multiple and divergent information sources.

Green and Sustainable IT Domain (DGSIT)

Green and Sustainable IT contributing to building an ICT-powered greener future by developing software intensive systems that have a direct impact on sustainability to empower organizations to achieve their green vision. The domain tackles ICT-led sustainability approaches by investigating novel software- and sensor-based solutions to contribute to greener infrastructure, greener supply chains, greener business processes, and carbon management.  In collaboration with industrial partners the domain will identify and develop industry relevant solutions that impacts people and organisation.

Health Care and Life Sciences Domain (DHCLS)

Within healthcare there are three layers which form the integral process of delivering care to patients, also known as the "bench-to-bedside" process of drug delivery. At the bottom layer we have fundamental research into Life Sciences which researches the impact, at molecular level, of diseases to the body. Drugs are then developed which are brought to clinical trial resulting in a discipline known as translational medicine where the impact of the drug is determined and fed back into the research process. Clinical practice involves the treatment of the patient by a clinician. The focus of this work programme is on the "bench-to-bedside" process of drug research and development. It will focus on Life Sciences as part of fundamental research, translational medicine in clinical research, and tele-health as part of clinical practice. The overarching objective is to reduce the cost associated with the drug research and delivery process, raising the efficiency of clinical research through data integration and enabling the self-management of disease by the patient through telehealth.

Industrial Applications Unit (DIA)

The industrial applications unit combines technological novelty with a pragmatic business driven approach to deliver software products for finance, energy and manufacturing markets. Competitive advantage, robustness and secure technologies are the top 3 qualities pursued by the unit. Patenting and commercialization represent other important activities that go in parallel with technology development and applied research.

Information Mining and Retrieval Unit (UIMR)

The low user entry barrier of the Web has resulted in massive amounts of weakly structured data describing objects, concepts, user interests and communities. The goal of this work programme is to develop techniques that exploit this information, providing a means for its reuse and understanding of the dynamics underlying its production. Using techniques developed in the fields of supervised and unsupervised classification, recommendation systems and user and population modelling, this work programme will focus on developing personalisation and task support strategies, mining and modelling of communities and topics, and feature extraction and selection.

Natural Language Processing Unit (UNLP)

Large-scale semantic annotation of unstructured and semi-structured textual data is needed to establish a widespread semantic level of interaction with and integration of information that is hidden in such data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, in connection with ontologies, provide a mechanism for the automatic semantic analysis of textual data, thereby enabling the extraction, integration and indexing of relevant facts and semantic metadata. The objective of this work programme is to develop methods for the efficient application of NLP tools in combination with domain semantics, as specified in ontologies for relevant use cases. For example, e.g., in eBusiness for developing ontology-based information extraction methods for semantic-level extraction of business and finance related events such as acquisitions, transactions, etc. with affected companies for business intelligence; in eGovernment for developing ontology learning methods that include terminology, taxonomy and relation extraction from legal text for automatic support in the development of thesauri and ontologies, to be
used, e.g., in semantic user interaction/navigation support for citizen information systems; in eHealth for developing methods in diagnosis support that are based on text mining and ontology-based information extraction, i.e., through extraction and matching of patient-specific procedures from text fields in Electronic Health Records with information extracted from biomedical scientific literature; and in eScience for developing methods for semantic authoring support, expert community analysis and knowledge discovery based on semantic-level extraction and organisation of topics and relations from scientific literature.

Reasoning and Querying Unit (URQ)

The goal of this work programme is to find the right trade-off between expressive knowledge representation and efficient, scalable reasoning and querying techniques in the open, distributed environment of the Semantic Web. The focus is on improving the scalability and investigating the adequacy of traditional reasoning and query answering techniques for the Web, where several classical assumptions no longer hold as data is heterogeneous, distributed, possibly incomplete or contradictory, structured in different levels of granularity, varying in levels of trust and accessible only by following implicit or explicit security policies.

The objectives include the definition of expressive query and rules languages; the investigation of the interplay between ontology languages, query languages and rules languages; efficient search and inferencing; scalable, distributed reasoning; closing the gaps between the RDF and XML worlds; supporting security and trust assessment on the Web by investigating adequate representation and reasoning techniques for assessing and negotiating trust; and dealing with dynamic, conflicting, uncertain and temporally changing metadata.

Security, Privacy and Trust Unit (USPT)

The Internet in many aspects is a reflection of human society. Thus using the internet opens up not only exciting opportunities, but also risks.

The transition of the Web to Network of Knowledge and the introduction of new technologies such as Linked Data provides new ways to counter those risks, but may also create threats.

The mission of the Security, Privacy and Trust Unit (USPT) in DERI is to deliver solutions that ensure confidence in using Networked Knowledge for Internet users and enterprises. This is done by identifying and assessing risks and by developing new solutions that address them by combining expertise in areas such as privacy, trust, cryptographic techniques, anonymity or provenance, and linked data.

Semantic Collaborative Software Unit (USCS)

The Semantic Web promises better information organisation and selective access, and standard means for formulating and distributing metadata and ontologies. Collaborative software is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals. The objective is to understand and to support the way people work individually and in groups. This work programme investigates how social and collaborative activities as well as their coordination can be improved through semantic technologies such as ontologies, metadata annotations and semantic web protocols, ultimately facilitating the integration of desktop applications and the Web, i.e., focused and integrated personal information management along with information distribution and
collaboration.

Sensor Middleware Unit (USM)

The advent of sensor technologies and the Semantic Web provide the unique opportunity to unify the real and the virtual worlds. It enables the building of very large infrastructures which for the first time facilitate the information-driven real-time integration of the physical world and computers on a global scale. Flexible middleware technology which abstracts from heterogeneous sensor network technologies to higher-level functionalities to enable interconnected sensor networks and processing of sensor data (Sensor Internet) is a cornerstone of enabling Semantic Reality. The sheer size of this system poses quite novel and unique challenges, as it can only be engineered and deployed if a large degree of self-organisation and automation capabilities are being built into the system and its constituents, enabling simple deployment (plug-and-play), dynamic (re-) configuration, flexible component and information integration, and tailored information delivery based on user context and needs in a service-oriented way. This requires semantic descriptions of the user needs and contexts, and of the system's constituents, the data streams they produce, their functionalities and their requirements to enable a machine-understandable information space of real-world entities and their dynamic communication processes on a scale which is beyond the current size of the Internet.

Service Oriented Architectures Unit (USOA)

The Service Oriented Architecture Unit investigates the complementary strengths of Web 2.0 and SOA using semantic Web technologies along with Business Process Management in order to develop techniques and tools for process driven cooperative work accessible via the Web for non IT people. The purpose is to enable domain experts such as business analysts, medical personals, industrial controllers, designers, architects, etc. to use Web based tools and services to manage domain specific applications (creating, annotating, sharing, customising, and aggregating them) without requiring technical skills.

Social Software Unit (USS)

Social software allows people to connect, communicate or collaborate by use of a computer network resulting in shared, interactive spaces creating new methods for connecting people and the information that they have created. Common examples of social software systems include discussion forums, blogs, wikis and online social networks. By utilising Semantic Web technologies in social software systems, we can create new methods for connecting people to other people and also to the information that they have created. This work programme builds on the existing achievements from Líon I (SIOC project, social network analysis collaboration with IBM and the semantic tagging work with Seoul National University) and extends this work to the application domains of eGovernment, eHealth, telecommunications and eBusiness in collaboration with the domain-specific units.