Current research at NCI

A range of research projects are currently being conducted within the School of Computing and the Cloud Competency Centre.

School of Computing

ESTA - Enhancing Speech-language Therapy through AI

The ESTA project is focused on using AI to enhance Speech and Language Therapy for children.

Cloud Competency Centre

The Cloud Competency Centre at the National College of Ireland is bringing forth tangible high-impact synergies across the world. We are actively collaborating with key educational and industrial partners to continuously enhance our instruction, research, and commercial portfolio beyond the traditional boundaries of academia. In particular, our current research areas comprise: 

  • structured parallelism approaches to heterogeneous computing systems such as multi/many-core CPU and GPU Clouds; 
  • scalable data analytics for the solution of domain-specific problems; and, 
  • infrastructure support to data-intensive computational science. 

Avoiding the ad hoc solutions, the overarching aim of our research is to develop a tight integration between specific computational problems, their specific patterns of computation, data access, and communication. Additional details on publications can be found under the NCI’s NORMA repository. 

Digital4Business

Digital4Business is a pan-European consortium that aims to address the overall objectives of the Digital Europe Programme. 

As a future-facing digital agency, National College of Ireland is proud to be a coordinator in a new European online master’s programme, Digital4Business - European masters programme. The Digital4Business Consortium includes 15 partners from seven EU countries — uniting some of Europe’s most prestigious higher education institutes, research centres, training providers and industry partners. Launched in March 2023, Digital4Business is a €19.92 million EU-funded project awarded under the DIGITAL Europe programme with direct financial contribution from the European Commission. DIGITAL4Business seeks to enable Sustainable Digital Transformation for European businesses by focusing on advanced digital skills. It will accelerate digital transformation in Europe, helping businesses grow through innovation and the practical application of advanced digital skills. DIGITAL4Business Official kick-off held at NCI on 21/Mar/2023 with the attendance of two Ministers and other personalities.

d4b

SMARDY 36-month Eureka project “Marketplace for Technology Transfer of R&I Data, Software and Results”

SMARDY will develop a research data marketplace for technology transfer built as a software and data carpentry i.e. developing and teaching workshops on the main data skills required to conduct research. Partners include companies and higher-education institutions in Romania and Ireland. The project aims to develop a research data marketplace where academia, industry, and government, can exchange curated datasets, technology, and tools to foster economic and social development. From a business perspective, such a marketplace puts together data producers and data consumers to foster the delivery of cross-cutting solutions based on an open innovation model.

Funder: Enterprise Ireland.

CERCIRAS “Connecting Education and Research Communities for an Innovative Resource Aware Society” 

CERCIRAS aims to improve the understanding of parallel computing platforms and its system resources trade-offs: time, space, energy, and data.

Funder: EC Horizon 2020

DIGITAL4Security 

The 4-year DIGITAL4Security research project has been recently recommended for funding with a 10M EUR direct financial contribution from the European Commission as part of its Digital Europe Programme. DIGITAL4Security has great potential to impact society positively, and it aligns with the College’s mission to promote research and innovation that addresses sustainable development goals. The project aims to equip European SMEs and Companies across multiple sectors with the cybersecurity management, regulatory, and technical skills they need to prevent and respond to existing and emerging cybersecurity threats, helping to safeguard European industries from cyber-attack. CCC shall receive a direct financial contribution of 630K EUR to carry out research and innovation around our core expertise of Cloud Computing and Data Analytics focused on security aspects. The principal investigator is Dr Adriana E. Chis.

Future Projects

Digital4Sustainability – Accelerating the Digital & Green Transition in the ICT Industry

Digital4Sustainability will focus on fast-tracking the Digital & Green Transition within the ICT sector and throughout European Industry, helping companies to adopt advanced digital technologies to achieve their sustainability goals. The project aims to create a Digital Sustainability Skills Strategy and Training Program, targeting the skills required for ESG initiatives in digital and green areas. It focuses on training professionals through education institutions and upskilling the existing workforce for sustainable industry practices. Digital4Sustainability supports non-tech industries in adopting eco-friendly technologies while enhancing the ICT sector's capacity for reducing energy, carbon, and waste through digital solutions.

GoIPD2023 

An application to the IRC’s Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme for 2023 has been recently recommended for funding. This initiative, funded by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and managed by the IRC, aims to support exceptional researchers in pursuing postdoctoral fellowships at eligible HEIs in Ireland for a duration of two years. This highly competitive Fellowship boasts a success rate of only 5.3% for non-EU STEM applicants. The project will focus on “Parallel Processing of Secure Machine Learning Models based on Residue Number Systems in Cloud Environments”.