The new Clarity centre, based in UCD, is a world first in sensor research, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
CLARITY IN NAME and clarity in research outlook. The new €16.4 million Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), launched by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) last Tuesday, offers a blend of expertise that will allow us to see our world in new ways.
"Clarity" is the name chosen for the CSET, a shared initiative to be based at University College Dublin and operated in partnership with Dublin City University and the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork.
The new centre will develop novel sensor technologies and management systems for the information they deliver, intelligently processing this before dispatch to the user, to provide a real-time view of our every day interaction with the world around us.
The early focus will be on human health monitoring and environmental monitoring, according to Clarity's new director, Prof Barry Smyth.
"We are bridging the physical world in which we live and the digital world, and sensors provide that bridge," he says.
Smyth holds the digital chair of computer science in UCD's school of computer science and informatics. Dublin City University's Prof Alan Smeaton will serve as Clarity's deputy director. Clarity will have about 90 full-time staff, including 45 PhD student researchers, and an equal number of academic and post-doctoral staff, says Smyth.
SFI has provided €11.8 million and the seven industrial partners will contribute €4.6 million over the next five years. "One of the things we have locked into this from the early planning is the deep involvement of companies," says Smyth.
The CSET comes after years of research collaboration between the universities via the Adaptive Information Cluster, a cross-disciplinary research centre run by researchers from UCD and DCU, says Smeaton.
The addition of the Tyndall in Cork means that the group can now deal with all of the individual steps in the application of sensor technology, from the creation of novel sensor types and platforms in Tyndall, through to the linking of sensors and signal processors to computers that collate the raw data and extract information.
This is then interpreted by middle-ware systems, before being delivered in a meaningful form to the potential user, says Smeaton.
"The thing that is unique about us in a world context is we are a combination that spans the whole thing," Smeaton adds. While other groups work on specific areas, Clarity has expertise in all of the steps along the way.
The goal is to develop lighter, faster, self-regulating and self-calibrating devices that can interact with a wider sensor population via in-built intelligence, explains Smyth. For example, sensors detecting a river pollution event can warn downstream sensors to begin more frequent sampling or switch to a particular type of sampling.
"You have a huge amount of data sources," says Smeaton. "Where you have a big network of these, they can lean against one another and inform one another."