New Tech Post - Technology

rNews to Combine with schema.org for more Accurate Data Identification

Tom Murphy — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:30:59 +0000

At the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) Autumn meeting in Vienna this week the rNews version 1.0 standard will be voted on and hopefully approved. rNews uses RDFa to annotate web pages and embed metadata in these pages, particularly in the field of news publishing.

The IPTC has existed since 1965 and now promulgates digital standards that can be helpful in the exchange of news information. Its list of voting members includes such organisations as Getty Images, Press Association Ltd., the Associated Press and the Xinhua News Agency to name just a few.

The New York Times Company is also a member and just prior to the Autumn meeting we spoke to Evan Sandhaus, Lead Architect of Semantic Platforms in the New York Times Research and Development Department about the development of rNews and its forthcoming integration with schema.org.

We asked Evan how the initiative began: “The impetus came for the most recent work came at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference when I went to a session (Semantic Tools for More Profitable Online Commerce) given by Best Buy’s Jay Myers. His organisation was able to leverage RDFa and the Good Relations ontology to mark up Best Buy data in such a way that it made it more helpful to the search engines, social sites and aggregators.

“I got to thinking that’s really cool that you can do that. I got to thinking is there anything we could do in my sector that would let us do this kind of markup. I realized immediately that it was going to be a standardizations effort.”

So Evan began work on rNews in collaboration with Stuart Myles from the Associated Press, Andreas Gebhard of Getty Images and Michael Steidl, Managing Director of IPTC amongst others.

“As we worked on rNews we originally started with the idea that an RDFa only standard. But we quickly realized that there were competing formats for expressing semantic markup in html documents.

“We thought that the interesting thing was that the data model and the vocabulary that we developed was not tied to a particular implementation but rather as a data model that could have multiple implementations.”

A parallel effort was taking place with Bing, Google and Yahoo who came together to create Schema.org, a vocabulary that people can use to semantically mark up their content. The hope is that if webmasters adopted the vocabulary there would be a much more consistent return on search results for web users amongst other things.

“What we didn’t want to have happen was to release a standard that was competing with schema.org.” Evan says, “We didn’t want the publishers to be faced with a choice between supporting an IPTC standard and a standard that was supported by three major search engines.

“We immediately realised that half of our standard existed in some form already in schema.org. Some of the ideas are so obvious about what you want to mark up that multiple people, working independently, would arrive at them.

“Through this process we were able to integrate many features of rNews into the vocabulary that is published at schema.org”

What that now means is that publishers can use schema.org to implement the rNews data model. We see the schema.org collaboration with IPTC as a commercially supported implementation of the rNews data model.

rNews offers three major benefits:

Better Machine Generated Links: Oftentimes the links that are created to your content are not created by people but by machines. Social sites may have instructions to link to your content and search engines may have crawled to your content and they have display a link to it. Humans would find it easy to identify the content and mark it up accordingly as a headline or as a picture but machines find this sort of identification problematical.

Evan says, “We anticipate rNews empowering machines with the information they need to create attractive links to our content.”

Superior Analytics for Publishers: Because rNews can express whether content is about or mentions a concept it becomes possible to create analytics around the meaning of content rather than just the number of page views. A concept can be an idea like war or terrorism; a person like Barack Obama or a place like New York City.

Better Ad Placement: The possibility exists for ad targeting algorithms to benefit from high fidelity information about the content. “We believe that there is an opportunity to provide these platforms with higher quality metadata about the content that they are targeting.”

“All three of these benefits are contingent on the adoption of the standard and the support that the broader web eco-system provides to the standard. But we see these three reasons as why publishers might want to seriously consider rNews for their publishing stack.”

Seniors at Home: Unobtrusive Ambient Assisted Living

Aoife Connelly — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:00:58 +0000

Tony Kehoe, a retiree in his mid-60's, who had been volunteering with Age Action Ireland in Cork, set up a small group called Care and Repair who helped with small DIY jobs for people over 65. During his time on this project it became apparent to him that the main issue affecting these elderly people was living in isolation and not being in regular contact with their families or carers.

In response, he founded Seniors at Home three years ago. It is a company dedicated to assisting older people to live as independently as possible for as long as possible in their chosen environment while aiming to provide peace of mind to carers and family alike.

“Around the same time I had been playing around with sensors and while I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to see I wasn’t quite sure how to make it happen, that’s when I invited Dermot [Clancy] on board and with his technology background he added considerable weight to the project.”

Dermot says, “My background led naturally into what Tony was talking about and that’s when we started to feel we matched each others needs on the technology side.”

Tony had always harboured ideas of setting up his own company having worked for many years at senior levels in a number of large organisations; "This was a good fit as it was technology driven but for not for the sake of it, it had a social purpose.”

At this point in time Dermot and Tony recruited John Whelan who had a background in Marketing. After doing a couple of studies on the marketplace and attending a number of Ambient Assisted Living conferences in Europe, the three felt they had a clear view of what they wanted to happen next.

“We noted that the industry was pushing very hard on technology side," says Tony, "But that it wasn’t very conscious of the actual needs of people and we hope to try to correct that with our product.”

Seniors at Homes, plan to introduce a range of assisted living products, the first being I’m at Home. The basis for this is a very simple concept that provides the complete technology in a box in the older persons home linked with a number of wireless sensors. Direct contact can then be had between the carers and the individual in the home without making the older person feel threatened by the presence of technology.

Seniors at Home is also the provider of the monitoring solution. I’m at Home will come with a basic computer, data logger and server in one single box so all there’ll be is a single unit and three sensors which will be placed in the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. All they need to do is plug in the box and they’re immediately operational.

“What we do is install in the system a number of default settings. For example, if the older person you’re in charge of doesn’t get out of bed by 1o’clock in the afternoon, if there’s limited activity during the day or no activity in kitchen it will send you an alert. The initial program is for a number of alerts but the true benefit is the individual can set the activity pattern to suit the person they are caring for and can start determining their own sets of alerts.”

This product will enhance the relationship between the carer and the older person as it will introduce a degree of sensitivity into the relationship. When the carer sees something happening which is outside the normal pattern they can call the older person and ask how everything is, are you sleeping okay, are you eating properly, rather than saying I can something on my screen.

For a product like this to survive it will need to have a heavy emphasis on the carers and family members. Tony says, “There is no question the need exists however there is marked reluctance on the part of older people to connect with technology or connect with anything that will put them in contact with a stranger.

“Our target market is going to be the younger person maybe 40 or 50 years old who perhaps feels guilty about not being able to stay in touch with their elderly relative as much as they would like to.”

This is not a product that will tether the carer in one place either. The desire of Tony and Dermot is for the carer to be able to check on the elderly relative as often as they feel they need to and from wherever they might be. It is designed to operate via laptop, texts through a mobile phone and they are working on being able to interrogate the history from a mobile phone also.

“The significant differentiation features from other devices is that because we’re not in the health provider market, our basic focus is on improving the communication process and by the fact we don’t have a monitoring service it enables our system to be borderless, it doesn’t matter what language the customer speaks.”

On a grander scale for Tony, Dermot and John, Enterprise Ireland has recently bought a share in the company making them a promising new start up.

Dermot says that the platform they’ve developed is somewhat overkill for what’s needed at the moment but they have a desire to future proof their product for further features that can be added in as they grow and learn what’s needed.

“We’ve looked at GPS devices that can connect with this so if the older person is at that stage where there is a risk of them leaving the house and wandering the GPS system would be able to monitor their movements.”

As far as the technology behind this goes, the IP is readily available and the company have been able to combine existing technology with what they believe the market to be in need of.

“There’s loads of IP out there but all struggling to find a marketing niche and we prefer to think because of our experience of working with older people and having older parents ourselves we’ve a better understanding of what the market really needs and being able to provide this in the lowest cost and most advantageous way.”

CRANN and Western Digital: Researching and Developing Nanotechnology for Data Storage

Tom Murphy — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:39:46 +0000

Instead of creating a whole new storage system to replace the hard discs that we use in in our computers it would be much more advantageous to fit more information into the same space. However, when the physical size of these data areas start to become measured in nanometers certain technical roadblocks to progress are encountered.

One such roadblock is being able to make the information stored on the magnetic material stable enough for prolonged repeated use while having the smallest possible footprint.

According to John Donegan, Professor of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, “If [data] is not stable on your disc then maybe when you come back to read it in a week or two the information is gone. That’s a disaster.”

For the information to be stable and available for a long period of time the recording material to needs to have a very high Curie Temperature. The Curie Temperature determines the point at which a given material can have its magnetic properties altered. For the hard disc drives we are used to using the desired Curie Temperature would need to be higher than any likely temperature to be found in the operating environment to prevent the magnetic material from losing the stored information.

The research that Professor Donegan and his colleagues and associates at the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN,) the Science Foundation Ireland funded research centre based at Trinity College Dublin, are involved with involves heating a very small area of the disc in a fraction of a second. Information is stored there quickly and then moves on to the next spot on the material.

CRANN recently announced a research arrangement with Western Digital. “What we are doing with Western Digital is looking at how make that spot as on the surface of the material as small as possible.” Using heat assisted magnetic recording as much as 10 times more information can be stored.

Schematic of the EAMR (energy assisted magnetic recording)
The laser light through the NFT (near field transducer) heats the surface
to above the Curie temperature. The magnet write pole then writes 1 and 0
on the surface of the disk.

The recording material is iron platinum but Professor Donnegan’s expertise in optics - the study of how light interacts with materials - is involved in using light in the form of a laser to transmit information to the disc.

He goes on to explain, “People will be familiar with the idea that if you shine light through a lens you can see a small spot of light where it comes to a focus. The spot, when using a normal lens, can be made to the size of one micron and that is one millionth of a metre in size.” But that is still a very large space for information to occupy in comparison to what can be achieved by the technology the CRANN team is developing in conjunction with Wester Digital.

“The idea is a simple one...although the physics is difficult.” Professor Donegan explains further. “We have a small channel that we put at the focus of the light (which would be from a simple lens)...The light will then travel down that small channel and make a spot smaller than what we would get with the lens itself.”

The light is produced and transmitted by a commercially available diode laser operating on or near a wavelength of 830 nanometers - just on the edge of visible infra-red.

The nanoscience comes into play with the construction of the light guide, “The channel is 40 to 50 layers of atoms thick...” Starting with a clean surface individual layers of atoms are laid down, ‘grown,’ to the requisite thickness. Light from the focal spot of the main light is guided down this channel and focused on to the surface of the disc.

In a combination of power and focus the surface of the material can be heated to about 300℃. Professor Donegan explains, “It gets very hot but only for a very short period of time — a tiny fraction of a second. Then the laser spot is moved on.

"The material heats up very quickly but cools very quickly as well. The numbers we are talking about are in nanoseconds which is 10⁻⁹. So, it is really a very short period of time for this to occur.” In 10 nanoseconds the whole operation is over and done with; the spot has been heated, the information has been recorded and the device continues to the next spot.

One big advantage of this approach is that this technique can be adapted and applied to technologies that already exist. This saves on implementation costs and makes it more likely that we will have this technology in our computers sooner rather than later.

Orchestra joins Engine Yard: A Great Opportunity for PHP Developers

Conor Harrington — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:30:31 +0000

Orchestra Co-founder Eamon Leonard describes the Irish Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider’s primary value proposition as saving developers time. PHP script-based Orchestra was founded in February 2011 as a spin out from web consultancy and software development firm Echolibre. A little over six months later, Orchestra, has been acquired by PaaS pioneers Engine Yard. Clearly, time-wasting is not on his agenda.

Having worked with over thirty startups from Ireland to Hong Kong and Australia since 2008, Eamon and his colleagues found that the repetition of certain tasks from project to project was distracting them and their clients from more activities like coding.

“There’s nothing worse for a software developer than to be doing the same thing over and over again. A software developer likes to be challenged, likes to be faced with problems to find interesting solutions to.

“Every time we started a project we’d have to set up a new server from scratch, we’d have to configure it, and then we’d have to put the code onto the server and then we’d have to maintain it.

Eamon recalls situations when servers would go down at the most inconvenient times, “You’d have a scenario when you’re on your iPhone trying to connect to the server to bring it back up and that’s ridiculous."

The then-Echolibre team looked at the different trends happening in the market around them and the subset of cloud computing known as Platforms as a Service was one that Eamon saw as, “Gaining momentum," particularly amongst developers using the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

“We saw that what the Ruby developers had was they could basically deploy their code; with a couple of clicks they could create servers and then they could have it automatically monitored with a whole lot of fail-safes built in in case anything goes wrong. So, those guys could actually go out at the weekend and enjoy it and not have to worry about their servers going down because they were hosted in the cloud.”

PHP developer Eamon wanted to bring the convenience and peace of mind that PaaS brought to the Ruby community to the global PHP development community, which he numbers at between four and five million people worldwide.

“Ultimately, we wanted to never have to spend literally four or five hours setting up and configuring a server every time we that wanted to deploy a project, so we created Orchestra to allow us to do that.

“That’s the immediate value proposition to developers, it saves time. The second value proposition is the fact that it gives you peace of mind, and it gives you the ability to focus more on your code and writing good code, than being a system administrator.

“Most developers, given a choice, would go for writing good code over sysadmin any day, because sysadmin is a different mindset it’s a different kind of problem that you’re solving, and there’s a lot of repetition in it and that doesn’t sit well with developers.”

When Orchestra’s founders were approached by Engine Yard, pioneers of Ruby-based PaaS, Eamon says the decision to approve the acquisition was, “a no-brainer”, as the market is moving away from single-stack PaaS, offering support for only PHP, or only Ruby.

“We saw that there was an opportunity for us to get where we wanted to go faster with a name like Engine Yard behind us, who were pretty much one of the pioneers of PaaS, so when the option presented itself to us, we went for it.”

Engine Yard now owns 100% of Orchestra, and Eamon and his co-founders are now responsible for the PHP stack in Engine Yard. Despite this, Eamon says there are no immediate plans to retire the Orchestra brand or to alter their plans for the future.

“Both Engine Yard and ourselves feel that Orchestra is a strong brand and has a certain degree of recognition in the PHP community so it doesn’t make sense to go and mess with that. Nothing’s changing in the immediate future.

“Up until now we were in a position where part of the team were doing client consultancy work to pay for the development of Orchestra. But now we’ve left that behind and we can be one hundred percent focused on it and it’s a great opportunity for us and it’s a great opportunity for PHP developers.

“We have a long road map of uses we want to add in based on conversations we’ve had with our peers and our customers, and we’re focused now one hundred percent on rolling out those features.”

While Eamon envisages that he will be doing a lot more travelling now, he is adamant that Orchestra will remain based in Ireland, and will be creating jobs here.

“It is a very synergistic meeting of companies and we’re really happy with it. There was never any talk about [leaving Ireland]. We’re not going anywhere.”

Visible Light Communications: A Greener, Broader Spectrum for Data Transfer

Conor Harrington — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:48:31 +0000

“We can thus, without a conducting wire as in electric
telephony, speak from station to station, wherever we can project a
beam of light” — Alexander Graham Bell, 1880.

One hundred and thirty years after Bell invented the photophone, a Professor at the University of Edinburgh is once again proposing using light as a means of data transmission.

With an estimated 5 billion cellular phones currently in existence worldwide, and the proliferation of data-hungry smartphones and tablet devices in recent years, the strain on the wireless networks that carry our data is growing.

As the increasingly-congested radio frequency (RF) spectrum bends under the weight of the data demands of the human race, more and more energy inefficient radio base stations are deployed. There are currently 1.4 million of these masts dotted around the globe, many of them diesel-powered.

Professor Harald Haas is Professor of Mobile Communications, at the Institute for Digital Communications. Based in a building named after Bell at the Edinburgh University, Professor Haas has been studying Visible Light Communication since 2004, in an attempt to solve what he sees as a data “bottleneck”, with a more energy-efficient method of wireless data transmission.

Although the idea of transmitting data via the visible light spectrum is not a new one, the development of the light-emitting diode, or LED light, has allowed Professor Haas to create technology that can transfer vast quantities of information across a spectrum 10,000 times wider than the radio frequency spectrum.

Professor Haas’ spatial modulation and SIM/OFDM (subcarrier-index modulation/orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) technologies allow the LED light to modulate at a rate so fast as to be imperceptible to the human eye but which can be picked up by receivers such as smartphone cameras at speeds of hundreds of megabits per second.

“If you use already-installed lighting equipment as an infrastructure”, explains Professor Haas, “we just piggy-back on the existing illumination functionality, and provide additional data communication. It’s data communication through illumination; two functionalities combined”.

“Our technology even works if you dim down the lights to a level where it appears to be off. You can still transmit data, so even during daylight it can work in buildings, so there’s a big energy-saving advantage.”

Visible Light Communication also has the added advantage that it can be used in areas where RF wireless communications are not permitted, such as in hospitals or in chemical plants or on oil rigs.

“Wireless communications is not available is hospitals. It’s not available in airplanes. However, there are many lights installed in hospitals, and there are many lights installed in an aircraft cabin. And even underwater, where radio frequency communication doesn’t work, light propagates underwater.”

Since radio frequencies penetrate walls, they are easy to intercept. For more secure data transmission, VLC could offer an alternative, whereby the data is only shared with whoever it is directed at.

“People with bad intentions can do all sorts of bad things. Light is harder to penetrate through walls and there is only data where there is light. We can see where we send the data to, because we see the light beam. So it’s much easier to control where the data is sent to, and it’s not lost in all directions. It’s a directed wireless transmission, and it is therefore, more secure.”

This strength is, in another sense, a weakness, as VLC can only operate where light can shine, and lacks the all-pervasiveness of radio frequency WiFi. For this reason, Professor Haas does not see it as a replacement for existing WiFi technology, but rather as an accompaniment.

“It is a complementary solution to the classical WiFi situation. Go in to a hotel at certain times and people are all using the WiFi in the hotel, it is painfully slow, it doesn’t work because there is only limited frequency spectrum.

“If you use light you can relieve some of the over-used spectrum so that in total there’s more data transmitted, so it’s complementing the RF. But we have these additional environments, underwater, intrinsically safe environments, hospitals and so on, where RF doesn’t work or isn’t allowed, but light would be workable there.”

Speeds have been recorded in lab environments of up to 500mb/s but Professor Haas is more concerned with test results garnered in real-life conditions

“If you record a number then you need to say what are the underlying conditions? What is the energy you invested? Is the room dark? Or, does it work in ambient light situations?

“At the moment we can run a practical demonstration in ambient light conditions with 100mb/second.

“We have unique technology which we call spatial modulation and SIM/OFDM, with that technology we achieved 600mb/sec theoretically. That’s what we’re developing now and we can even see a data rate of up to 1Gb, under practical, realistic situations, rather than artificial lab conditions”.

Light bulbs are all around us, and Professor Haas believes the essential infrastructure is in place for incorporating VLC, or “LiFi”, as it has been dubbed.

“You take the light bulb, we would integrate our technology which is a chip and a little bit of analog circuitry, very simple analog circuitry as compared to WiFi, because we don’t have an antenna. It’s analog circuitry and a digital chip that needs to be fitted to the light bulb. It’s not a major operation. The infrastructure’s already there.”

Professor Haas has been running a proof of concept project, funded by the Scottish Government for the previous eighteen months, and at the moment is developing a pre-production prototype which he hopes to have ready by the end of the year.

“Hopefully we will find a pilot customer, school, hotel, or private enterprise where we can install our technology in the first half of next year and after the middle of next year we will be able to have the technology available in a larger scale."

Main picture: "Copyright (c) Peter Tuffy, The University of Edinburgh"

MuteButton: Relieving Tinnitus

Conor Harrington — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 07:46:49 +0000

MuteButton from MuteButton on Vimeo.

Tinnitus, often known simply as ringing in the ears is a symptom with a wide array of causes, and its severity can range from a minor irritation to having a devastating effect on the sufferer, interfering with their daily lives and sleep patterns.

Treatments for tinnitus have, in the past, been sporadic in their success, but clinical trials are due to start towards the end of the year on a new treatment which could counter its debilitating effects.

The MuteButton device is based on the theory that subjective tinnitus is caused when the sufferer perceives an illusory sound created by the brain to fill the void left by hearing loss. To compensate for the frequencies the auditory system can no longer process, it creates these illusory sounds which manifest as ringing or hissing sounds.

Through sensory substitution, the missing frequencies can be relayed via a different sensory modality, causing the auditory system to cease the creation of the illusory sound.

The technology has been developed by former NUI Maynooth, Hamilton Institute research fellow Dr. Ross O’ Neill. It is the result of his PhD work which was undertaken alongside Dr. Paul O’ Grady and under the supervision of Professor Barak Pearlmutter. Their research was inspired by the work of the late Professor Paul Bach-y-Rita, whom Ross refers to as, “the grandfather of sensory substitution”.

The MuteButton technology takes audio information and represents it in patterns of touch, explains Ross, so that the brain can differentiate between the same information in real and illusory form.

“Where there’s a deficit in the ear, and the sound falls below a certain threshold, the brain creates this illusory noise to fill the vacuum, but when you take the missing sound and put it on a tactile stimulator on the tongue, it addresses the information deficit and reduces the illusory perception.

“It tends to reduce the symptoms, so what we’re trying to find out now is if it actually does get rid of it completely? We’re ramping up towards big trials that will hopefully give us a better indication of how effective this treatment is.”

Ross describes the device as being, “like an iPod with one extra output," and the relatively non-intrusive process will involve listening to music.

“You’ve got the headphones that go to your ears and the other output is an intra-aural sensor array that you put your tongue against, and while you hear the music in your ears you simultaneously feel these tactile patterns on your tongue similar to a braille pattern. Where braille represents alpha-numeric characters, this represents the component wavelengths of sound.

“You take the device, you listen to it with the array on your tongue, from anywhere to half an hour twice a day, or maybe a couple of hours; that’s something we’ll find out at the trials; and that would be your treatment basically.

“You would use this device on a daily basis to listen to sound and or music and then gradually over time, you’re driving a process called neuro-plasticity to get your brain to re-wire and adjust and filter out the illusory sounds on a more permanent basis.”

The trials, partly funded by €200,000 in funding from Enterprise Ireland, will be conducted in conjunction with Ear, Nose and Throat consultant Mr. Brendan Conlon of St. James’ Hospital, Dublin, and around two hundred patients are already lined up to test the device.

The number of people who have signed up for trials is indicative of the frustration felt by tinnitus sufferers, and Ross is sympathetic to their plight; though it is a common complaint, often its effects are underestimated.

“Tinnitus is quite an unusual problem. It doesn’t meet with a lot of sympathy or empathy from people, because I suppose it’s on the inside, people can’t see it. When you say to somebody, “I’ve got a ringing in my ears”, most people have experienced temporary tinnitus after a night at a nightclub or whatever and they kind of think, “how bad can it be?”

“There aren’t a great deal of effective treatments out there for them, so there are a lot of people who are becoming increasingly desperate and they are basically all on the look out for something.”

With the MuteButton team now ensconced in the NovaUCD incubation centre and actively preparing for trials, many of these eyes will be turned expectantly towards Dublin over the next year.

Additional material supplied by Ina O' Murchu.

Infographics: Making Data Accessible

Conor Harrington — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:35:31 +0000

“We’re drowning in data”, according to Stephen Howell of the Institute of Technology, Tallaght. By visualising that data properly we can not only keep afloat on this sea of information, but use this data, which would otherwise be archived and forgotten, to better understand and navigate the world around us, says the computer science lecturer.

As more and more data is created and stored by companies and civic authorities, it has become increasingly difficult to make any sense out of the sheer weight of information available. When this data is released it is often in rough, unrefined form, or buried in miles of spreadsheets, devoid of context and shorn of meaning to all but the most painstaking of researchers.

Infographics are fast-becoming the medium of choice for a society which thirsts for knowledge yet lacks the time or the patience to sift through raw data or spreadsheets. Visually pleasing, to the point, and increasingly interactive, infographics and their creation look set to become big business, so much so that Stephen teaches modules on the visualisation of data at IT, Tallaght.

“Excel is really good and it’s an amazing tool, but it gives you the data, it doesn’t give you the meaning. So people are beginning to rely on these tools for meaning when they should be relying on it for crunching the data and viewing the data, but not for understanding the data.”

If you can programme, you can do very cool things with processing, 2D, 3D and so on. And that’s what we aim to teach, we have two modules on this, one has non-programmers and programmers together where we teach them [the open-source programming language] Processing.

It is difficult to persuade students, especially students who do not have a programming background, to learn a new programming language, and to try and make it a more interesting experience, Stephen tries to find interesting, real-world datasets from industry for his students to work on.

Examples of the datasets he has received range from traffic information from local authorities to temperature data from cooked meat factories, and often the providers of the data are surprised by the results that can be achieved.

“You show someone data that they don’t think is interesting. You say, “here’s the rush hour times on the M50 motorway”.”

A common response would be that it’s nearly always rush hour on the M50, and that there was little to be learned from such data, but when Stephen created a visualisation of the length of the road, with the rush hour areas expanding like a pulse or a heartbeat as the traffic moved westwards, the interest of the local authority which provided the original raw data was piqued.

“They got very excited and said, “we’re having a launch demo next week, can we put that on display for a week?” To me this was just a simple visualisation of data, to them it was showing the data in a way that they had never seen before.”

Often, the greatest challenge in creating infographics or data visualisation is the sifting through raw data in the first place. One of the tools which Stephen recommends is Google Refine, a tool for searching through raw, unrefined data.

“An accountant once told me that he was able to do the books for a company and figure out how many cars they had hidden in the books, because he could find a hole the size of a car and that car was been driven by somebody, but it wasn’t legally listed anywhere.

"Accountants can do this, but it takes painstaking analysis of the data. What if we could develop middleware that takes all the data, sucks it in, sticks it into an engine, and says now, give queries on it?

“Google are building these systems now. They’ve given us a fantastic tool for analysing data, Google Refine. Google Refine looks ugly, it doesn’t look user-friendly, but if you give it any data source, it will analyse it and say, OK, you’ve numbers, you have text, there you go.”

Stephen sees two main schools of infographic creation, one being the visually “amazing” infographics that can be created with programmes like Adobe Illustrator without any great programming experience, “The New York Times infographics approach."

The other approach, and the type he favours himself, is the creation of interactive data visualisations, which although more difficult to create, will be important in tracing a variety of trends in the world around us.

The challenge for now, as Stephen sees it, is in trying to maintain the flow of data and not simply to hide it in the cloud, creating a 21st century, “detective hunt."

“We can do it because we have the data, but how many of us keep the data? That’s the classic data problem. Everybody wants to know where their ancestors are from, but unfortunately their ancestors didn’t write it down for them, but the data may exist somewhere, so it’s become a detective-hunt. Companies shouldn’t make their data a detective hunt.”

Additional material from Tom Murphy

John Dennehy from Zartis: The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud

Conor Harrington — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:33:57 +0000

Having already had a string of successful tech startups in the early years of the last decade, including web development company Zartis, and game developer Upstart Games, John Dennehy is well placed to chart the challenges and opportunities ten years of technological advances have made to creating a startup business, as he builds his latest venture, Assembly Point Ltd.

Assembly Point’s two products, human resources application HR Locker, and a recruitment application also called Zartis, are sold as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, and John sees the global market as being far more accessible than it was in a decade ago.

“The primary difference between now and then is that people are now willing to spend money on online services. Previously there was a lot of hype around Internet services, there was a lot of hype around companies who were bringing out new products in that space, but ultimately two things weren’t happening.

“Firstly, everybody wasn’t using it and consuming those services, especially from a business point of view, and secondly, now there’s an acceptance that you pay for those services online so there’s a whole industry that’s evolving at a massive rate. It’s a massively fast rate in Software as a Service, and it’s companies developing products locally and selling them globally.”

Assembly Point’s first product is HR Locker, a human resources application that allows small to medium enterprises to manage information like annual leave, timesheets, employee records and compliance-based documents, and even to publish a staff handbook and have staff sign it online. “It keeps all the data in one safe, secure place and they pay a low cost annual fee for it”, explains John.

Zartis.com is John’s recruitment application. “We want to help companies hire great people without going to recruitment agencies. The cost of our service works out a €600 per year, the cost of the average hire through a recruitment agency is €6,000. So you could hire one person through a recruitment agency, or use our service for ten years, and that’s a comparison I want people to think of.”

For both products, John has deliberately made the signup process as quick as possible; with the sheer wealth of information on the web, he is aware that people’s attention spans are limited.

“Sixty percent, typically of the people who land on the front page of your website will leave and they never actually go any further than that, and that’s across the sector.

“Visitors are very transient, it’s a very ephemeral attention span people on the web have, so you have to catch their attention immediately and you have to try and have a compelling call to action and convert them into a customer as quick as you possibly can. Every single time barrier and obstacle that you put in their way, you will see a fall off.”

As a participant in Microsoft’s Bizspark programme for startups, both the Zartis and HR Locker applications are hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, and John believes that moving to the cloud has allowed him to focus on the important elements of his business.

“Essentially what cloud computing does, is it removes the platform layer as a distraction from us so we can focus on building our application, working our marketing message and managing our customers.

“We no longer have to worry about scalability, we don’t have to put NTR architecture in place with multiple web servers and multiple databases and hardware accelerators, you know? Nobody should ever have to worry about that.

“There’s probably about five companies in the world who will take care of that in ten years time. It’s probably going to be the Microsoft’s, the Google’s, the Amazon’s, and the IBM’s, and that’s what they’re very good at, providing that platform. We want to build our application on their platform.”

Security is a frequently voiced concern when a move to the cloud is mooted, but as John points out, the platform provider has access to a far greater level of security resources than a small software developer does, and this again allows the SME to focus on their product and their customer.

“Security is a key issue for us, we have a very sensitive data so we went with the Windows Azure platform, largely because of the security around that. Microsoft has spend over $20 billion rolling out their data centre; they look after the firewalls and the software upgrades.

“They can provide attention to detail and security resources that no medium size company could put in place. So security is absolutely essential, it’s a very important thing, and in choosing which provider to go with you have to rely on a partnership with them to provide that world-class security.”

Although the cloud has made things easier in one sense, John is acutely aware that in a global marketplace, although there is abundant opportunity, there is also fierce competition.

“Your competitors are not local guys. People always look over their shoulder to see who’s their local competitor; that’s no longer relevant.

“To compete effectively on the Internet, you have to be absolutely top of your game, because if you’re not giving the best service, somebody else will, so that’s a pretty profound change.”

Additional material by Tom Murphy

Dyslexie: Typeface for Dyslexics

Conor Harrington — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:21:19 +0000

In 2008, during his final year at Utrecht School of the Arts, graphic design student Christian Boer came up with the idea for creating a typeface that was easier for people with dyslexia to read.

A dyslectic himself, Christian had read about the ways in which dyslectics perceive written letters, as three-dimensional characters where letters can rotate and interchange with one another, causing difficulty in distinguishing between characters like “b”, “q”, and “p”, or “v” and “w”.

“It was intended to help only myself at first”, recalls Christian. “I read about how dyslectics turn and exchange letters and I thought, “Yeah, I can change the form and I want to have a look to see if it works."

Christian’s typeface, Dyslexie, alters the shape of the twenty-six letters of the western alphabet, making the bottom of the letter bolder, effectively anchoring them to the ground, or increasing openings or indentations to emphasise the difference between characters, even if rotated or interchanged.

He found that the new typeface worked, “very well” for him, but he also knew that dyslexia affects people differently and he was unsure whether it would help others. With this in mind he sought out some people to test the typeface on.

“I searched for eight different dyslectic people with heavier and lighter dyslexia, and I sent them the text without saying that it was the Dyslexie font and they all came back to me right away and said, “Yeah, I like the font, I want the font”, so I knew that it not only worked for me, but for all dyslectics.”

Although Christian admits that he wanted to keep Dyslexie for himself and the eight dyslectic people that he used for testing it on, he found that, “there was too much attention on it to keep it for myself!” He was approached by Renske de Leeuw, of the University of Twente, who asked if she could do some research into his creation.

Her study, completed in December 2010, found that there was a decrease in reading errors among dyslectics while using Christian’s typeface.

Following on from that research, Dyslexie is now commercially available in Holland, and Christian is currently in negotiations to have an English version available for the English market for September of this year, with the American market, “hopefully” to follow.

Christian acknowledges that people can be, “quite sceptical about it," and insists that the best way is, “always if the dyslectic reads it by themselves; “ They notice what the difference is, and that’s the best result you’ll ever get."

The Irish Naval Service: In the Fight Against Ireland's No.1 Enemy — The Deficit

Conor Harrington — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:38:06 +0000

The difficult times that Ireland has found itself in as a result of the recession have required a great deal of belt-tightening, with every citizen required to do his or her part towards reviving the ailing economy.

As well as protecting Ireland’s interests on the seas, the Irish Naval service is aiming to add to its public service by turning itself into a “knowledge institution” and engaging in maritime research through the MERC³ initiative, which will research ways in which Ireland can harness the huge potential offered by its marine resources.

The Marine and Energy Research Campus and Commercial Cluster, a joint venture between the Naval Service, University College Cork, and Cork Institute of Technology, is a new campus for research into the marine and ocean energy sectors, located in Ringaskiddy, adjacent to the National Maritime College of Ireland and the Irish Naval Service headquarters.

The initiative came about when Commodore Mark Mellett, now Flag Officer in Command of the Naval Service, the head of the Irish Naval Service, alongside partners in UCC and CIT, began looking at, “a number of niche areas that were important in the context the national interest; technology in the maritime domain, the whole opportunity in terms of renewable energy, and issues such as maritime security, shipping and transport."

They came to the conclusion that there were, “quite a few strands of potentially important research areas that the state wasn’t quite pursuing in a coherent manner," according to Commodore Mellett.

After, “joining all the dots together,” the concept of a creation, initially of a campus and then of a cluster was born, and MERC³ was launched in March 2011.

In joining up with the two academic institutions, the Naval Service brings a wealth of experience as the largest professional maritime institution in the State to the consortium.

“I could see clearly that I would never be able to compete in the context of large aircraft carriers or large submarines or Tomahawk missile deploying ships, but what I could compete with was the common resource which is most critical to every organisation and every navy and that’s people.

"We could actually transform the people of the navy in terms of their smartness and the key to that is education and training.

“By pursuing this concept we are first of all satisfying the agenda of developing the navy into a knowledge institution, but also we have the added benefit in terms of relevance to society, of serving as a stimulant for the maritime economy."

Part of the work done in the MERC³ campus is the provision of resources to small and medium enterprises in the maritime sector. Among the companies collaborating with the Naval Service are SEFtec, who deal in maritime safety and firefighting safety, and Cathx Ocean, who develop specialist underwater lighting.

A major focus point for the MERC³ campus will be renewable energies like wave and tidal power and also offshore wind power. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland has predicted that up to 52,000 jobs could be created in Ireland in the area of wave power by 2030, and Cdre. Mellett is quick to stress the role that could be played by the Naval Service in achieving this target.

“Ireland sits just approximate to the richest source of wave energy in the world, and already we have six of the top renewable energy device companies [such as Wavebob.] Their prototypes are most likely to drive the first generation of productive wave energy devices.

“The whole knowledge in the domain in terms of the anchoring arrangements, the siting, the marine spatial planning, the governance aspects, the legal aspects, the security aspects, they’re all areas in which the navy has competence and expertise.

“By working with the companies who are actually going to be involved in the placement of these wave farms, there is a huge opportunity for the navy to act as a public good in terms of future
renewable energy infrastructure.”

Although the Irish Naval Service will never lay claim to the largest warships or the greatest arsenal, Cdre. Mellett is determined that in developing it as a “knowledge institution”, the Irish
Navy will use its human capital to provide the greatest benefit to Ireland’s people through aiding its economy.

“The national recovery plan has put an onus on us all to actually be innovative and smart in terms of how we use resources that are becoming difficult to fund. In the navy, we’ve clearly
identified the centre of gravity of the enemy is the economic deficit. So any way we can attack the economic deficit, and one way to attack that is to create jobs.

“I’m confident that in the very near future the first foreign direct investment client will be announcing jobs as part of the MERC³ initiative, and that’s proof that the concept is right because that will actually start creating real jobs from a concept that is being driven by education and public sector institutions.

“The navy’s ultimate vision is to be the smartest, most innovative and responsive naval service provider in the world. We don’t want to be the second smartest or the third smartest, and
it goes back to the original point, the key piece of the navy in terms of it’s future is its people, so if we can have smart people who are actually doing smart things with technology, we can do a lot
more with less.”

Philanthrokidz: Real World Results from Online Play

Aoife Connelly — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:53:35 +0000

The Rift is a new website for pre-teens, the brain child of Tina Venema, a mother of two with a background in software development, whose interests in innovation, technology and a budding interest in philanthropy led her to explore the idea of creating a virtual world for children where they can socialise and, by playing online, contribute to community projects.

While her own children were avid users of technology, their one complaint was that for all the time they spent playing games online, nothing would happen. Her children would tell her they could decorate a room or feed an animal online and while this was fun for them, nothing else would happen — there were no visible consequences to their online presence.

Tina came to the conclusion that children in the tween demographic, between the ages of nine and thirteen, are equally involved in their online lives as they are in their real world lives, “Tweens live with one leg in the real world and one in the virtual world; virtual experience is very real for them but they are still in school every day in really concrete situations."

“A theory I came up with is that there is no bridge between their real world experience and their virtual experience and how cool would it be to empower kids to do things virtually that they have currency in and the ability to play online and to transform that into something that they could be proud of creating in the real world.”

Thus The Rift was born.

It is Tina’s company, Philanthrokidz’, current project and is what Tina hopes will become, “the coolest place online for kids." It differs from other tween sites such as Webkinz or Club Penguin in that by playing and taking part in activities online, kids can generate currency for themselves called Rifts which they can use to contribute to virtual community projects.

“Our special sauce is we have to have all the things a virtual world needs that keep kids coming back; which is fun and games and allowing them to be part of masterminding it. I think the one benefit we have which we haven’t seen in other places is the ability for them to turn their virtual currency and power into the real world things happening.

“Currently our users are building a virtual kids’ park in the Dominican Republic. What the kids are doing is all virtual and our corporate partners match with real currency in the real world what our kids are doing with virtual currency in the virtual world.”

On the website the Rift kids will find a toggle button where they can watch the real park as it’s being built and there they can see what is happening and how their real project is coming along be able to compare it with their virtual park on the website.

The benefit for investors is that they’re able to build their own customised space on The Rift where kids can go and sample their product, help them with development or design new packaging, and all of this information goes directly from the users on The Rift right back to the company.

The name for the site comes from a legend Tina and her team created for added intrigue and that added a spark of folklore to the idea of these children coming together to create their own world where play equals power.

The fictitious tale of The Rift goes that at one point in time an island existed out in the middle of the Atlantic which was governed by five guilds; entrepreneurs, builders, artists, intuit and scientists. The island was seen as the place that other people could go to seek help.

Then the rift happened and while no one knows how exactly this happened, the different tribes or guilds that had taken up residence on the island fled back to their countries of origin. The island turned in on itself and sank beneath the ocean.

Fast forward thousands of years: Five kids spread across the globe get together online via a blog that one of the girls starts; unknownst to themselves they are all descendants of the five guilds.

“So the idea is that The Rift is being rebuilt and at the same time we’re saving the world, kids are invited to become part of that endeavour through all the activities they do and by earning their virtual currency. This currency gives them virtual spending power and also status, so we’re encouraging healthy competition among kids to earn more but also to give more.”

As they play online, pre-teens can earn a virtual currency which they can use to build their kids’ park in the Dominican Republic. They purchase the land which then has to be sodded and grassed and as that happens in the virtual world it’s also happening in the real world, funded by real currency.

The beauty of this scheme is that children are being enforced with the idea from an early age that earning money and working towards a goal can be extremely rewarding. The Rift is gives them the experience of seeing their goals come to fruition through vicarious education.

“While we don’t want to be an educational site for kids we do think there are some important things that can be learned though this project around financial literacy, global issues, geography and languages.”

Another major part of Philanthrokidz and The Rift project for Tina is a desire to develop user generated content, “We’re seeking out feedback from our users to help us build the world in the way they want it to be, we really want it to be a world for kids, built by kids."

IBM's Smarter Cities: A Synergistic View of the Modern City

Conor Harrington — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:48:48 +0000

Smarter Cities is IBM’s initiative to utilise the wide array of data and instrumentation available pertaining to city life to enable cities to become smarter in their integration and delivery of services and planning.

Earlier this year, IBM launched their Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin, which will eventually employ up to 200 people, across a wide variety of disciplines. Pól Mac Aonghusa is a Senior Manager at the Dublin Smarter Cities centre, and describes IBM’s approach to building smarter cities as, “a very synergistic view of how a city needs to work as a total organism”.

“We’ve noticed that the world in general has become increasingly instrumented. Devices are telling us about the world, and so there’s a huge amount of instrumentation out there. That’s interesting, but in another way it’s an enormous challenge, because actually what you want to be able to do is interconnect all of those things so that you can get data from rich and diverse sources.

“Ultimately, what you want to generate is the ability to create insights from all sorts of rich data sources so that we can make our cities smarter. And if you think back to IBM’s business model, we are about very, very large system integration. We are about enabling through our technology.”

With half of the world’s population now domiciled in cities, Pól says that IBM views the city as the, “emerging model of economic development, of human concentration, and therefore as a future marketplace for IBM”.

In setting up the Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin, IBM has entered into a non-commercial, research-based collaboration with the city’s local authorities, who have made much of their data available for research, which can be scaled and applied internationally.

Pól believes that, in Ireland “public thinking is quite enlightened in this general area”, and that for this reason Dublin presents an interesting research base, being as it is, “a well known city which is not so big that it’s unmanageable, yet it’s not so small that it’s not significant, where we have a very good open relationship with the city through their interest in research”.

This project represents something of a departure for IBM, not least in terms of recruitment, a process which is ongoing for the Dublin centre. As well as scientists and technologists, “all the kinds of people that you would imagine IBM would want to hire”, the project will involve people with specific expertise in the domains of water, traffic, energy, and other areas less commonly associated with technology.

“The idea of sharing research is also one that is new for IBM, “we realise that, even for a company the size of IBM, a city is a huge proposition, and so we’re creating a model of research which is based on collaboration”.

“If you’d come to an organisation like IBM several years ago, a lot of the research would have been behind closed doors; very much proprietary. But particularly when we started to talk about cities and how we can make them smarter, we realised that we needed a different model of research, so we are very actively seeking the right kind of collaboration with industrial partners, with interesting small and medium enterprises, and also with academic and public sector partners.”

Much of the work in Dublin is centred on trying to understand, to research and to figure out what might be the next generation of computer technology that can exploit both the data made available by cities themselves and also created by mobile devices, and that can then utilise that data in a “smart” way.

“If you think about water, for example, that’s everything from raindrops, to recycling, from flushing toilets to drainage, to flood management and flood prediction. So, for example, the kind of questions there are, “how can we help a city optimise distribution and production of drinking water?”

“The kind of insights that our scientists can provide help do things like predicting where are the smartest places to install various pieces of equipment on the network like pressure reduction valves and so on, that can influence how water is distributed around the network.

“If we had readings from smart meters in peoples’ homes, we could create feedback for these people that could help them alter their behaviour in terms of water consumption, and maybe help reduce the overall consumption of water in smart way.”

An example of a current research project at the Dublin Smarter Cities centre is a study of how analysis of social media feeds could potentially help determine the actual social usage of the city, which could then be utilised to inform certain planning decisions, like the location of amenities or different types of business.

“We’re not there to criticise the decisions that might have been made; I’d hesitate in any sense to do that, that’s not really our remit; but what we can help to do, perhaps, is present data and views of data in ways that will help decision-making, whether that’s faster decision-making or more informed decision-making.”

Pól sees the future, and true utility, of data as being bi-directional, where for example, in addition to providing data about its inhabitants, the city will receive data from them, much like the analysis of social media feeds being investigated in the Smarter Cities centre.

"If you say to me, 'Is it going to fix process A, or is it going to improve process B in some way?' That’s more than I can answer because there are obviously political considerations and the IMF and everybody else. What I can say is we believe that we can help people make better decisions, we believe that we can help people make more efficient and maybe faster decisions. How quickly those filter into practice? That’s beyond my pay grade!"

Bio-Inspired: Electronic Chips Emulate Workings of Neuron

Tom Murphy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:52:02 +0000

Inspired by the operation and structure of the brain, engineers at NUI Galway and the University of Ulster are developing bio-inspired integrated circuit technology which mimics the neuron structure and operation of the brain. Dr. Fearghal Morgan, Dr. Jim Harkin and Dr. Liam McDaid have used the natural architecture of the brain to create an electronic system that emulates some of the workings of a neuron.

Dr. Fearghal Morgan who is Director of the Bio-Inspired Electronics and Reconfigurable Computing (BIRC) research group, at NUI Galway says, “What we are trying to do is replicate a small brain-like structure in electronics. It is bio-inspired and is modelled on the structure of the behaviour of the brain.

“We are trying to replicate the structure of the brain in silicon. But only as a small device which will only be a fraction of the size of the brain.”

The device which was developed under the EMBRACE (EMulating Biologically-inspiRed ArChitectures in hardwarE) project operates in a similar way to the signal traffic of the neurons in the brain and how they are connected. According to Fearghal, the aim is that, "we will have a way of processing data that is different from the the typical micro-processor.”

Normally this would consist of reading instructions and taking data from several sources, some of them from the input to the device. It then manipulates that data and sends instructions to the output of the device: “It is instruction based processing and mostly sequential.” (In many systems processors can be replicated and layered into a multi-core system so there is an element of concurrence.)

“The nature of our device is that it is inherently concurrent. Hopefully, [we’ll have] thousands of neurons eventually with tens of thousands of connections which will give us a brain-like function.

“It will not be anywhere like as powerful as the brain but hopefully it will be low power compared to other computer systems.”

Electronic neurons, implemented using silicon integrated circuit technology, cannot replicate the complexity of the human brain which has 100 billion neurons and 1,000 trillion neuron connections. But the advantage of a bio-inspired processor is in the promise of much reduced power consumption in comparison to a traditional processing device. This allows for more opportunities to embed processors in a variety of locations.

“If you could open up this particular chip you would see electronic components that are connected together but physically they don’t look like neurons and the connections don’t look like synaptic connections between brain cells but the architecture is similar. I wouldn’t compare the structure of the electronics to a physical brain.”

At present the embrace chip is able to control a robot, “It can read signals from the environment. It has ultra-sonic sensors and it moves through a particular environment as quickly as possible without crashing.”

Another way that the bio-inspired processor differs from other conventional devices is that It is capable of learning: “It starts off as a bunch of neurons and we place it in a robotic environment and we allow the robot to move and it feels.” There are particular neuron configurations, “Each neuron has a connection to another neuron. Those connections may be weighted and when little pulses or spikes are passed from one neuron to another the neuron fires. They affect what is called the neuro-potential of the neuron they are connected to. Eventually when enough spikes come into a particular neuron and it reaches a threshold specific to that neuron that neuron will in turn fire.”

“So you have all these little neurons firing at different times depending on the pulses that are coming in that represent the world they are looking at.” The output of all this activity then goes to transducers which in turn control the robot.

To train a brain involves, “many thousands of attempts at possible configurations... and eventually you evolve the next generation of solutions. Slowly but surely, over hours and hours, you train a particular neuron connectivity between certain neurons and the threshold at which each of these neurons spike.”

Like a human baby this brain is constantly developing abilities, “and some of it is by trial and some of it is by error.

“There is so much more within the brain that we electronic engineers don’t understand. We need to work with neuro-physicists to understand the multiple layers of complexity.

“Self-awareness in robots is not something that we are anything close to. We are trying to put very specific functions that we would want to put into a neuron-like piece of silica. Hopefully we are moving toward more powerful neuron based systems."

Taoiseach Launches Engineering Building: 'A Brilliant Opportunity for the Next Generation of Engineering Students'

Conor Harrington — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:09:19 +0000

Speaking at the opening of the National University of Ireland, Galway’s new engineering building, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny today said that the Irish government has, “a philosophy of opening doors to creativity, to initiative, to ambition and to potential”, and that with the completion of the new, €40 million engineering building, “the foundation has been laid for a new future, just as the foundation was laid in the 1850’s for a century and a half of excellence coming out of Galway."

Before unveiling the plaque commemorating the launch of what will be the largest engineering building in the country, Mr. Kenny said that the world as we know it was, “changing before our eyes, with nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, biotechnology and the Internet”, and commended NUI, Galway on being, “recognised internationally as a research-led university."

Mr. Kenny professed to being amazed at some of the research he had seen while being shown around the University by NUI, Galway President Dr. Jim Browne, and said that with the completion of the new engineering building, there was, “a brilliant opportunity for the next generation of engineering students in Ireland to make their mark not just here nationally, but internationally."

He referred to the announcement by wind turbine producer C&F Wind Energy that they were to create 145 jobs in Athenry, Co. Galway, as, “the conclusion, in part, of what this building is about”.

The €40 million development was co-funded by the Irish government, the University itself, and by private philanthropy. The Taoiseach said that while he didn’t want to dwell on the cost of the building, he was confident that it would prove to be money well-spent.

“It’s what walks out the door, in the next twenty years, in the next fifty years, that will make this building what I know it can achieve.”

The striking, angular, 14,000 square metre, four-storey building will house the University’s School of Engineering and Informatics, continuing a strong tradition in Galway of engineering, which has been taught at the University since it opened under the guise of Queen’s College Galway in 1849. The University can also lay claim to the world’s first ever female engineering graduate, Alice Perry, who graduated in Galway in 1906.

The building itself has been designed to serve as a “living laboratory”, with live data from sensors will measuring the behaviour of the structure and its energy consumption, to be used as a teaching tool for structural engineering and building performance concepts. Students will also be able to view sections of the foundation, structure, and service pipes, which have been deliberately made visible, so that the anatomy of the building can be studied.

After the unveiling, the Taoiseach warned, however, that large infrastructure expense would have to be curtailed in the future, saying that there, “isn’t any money for many of these projects now”, but reiterated his government’s commitment to, “turn around the fortunes of the country and of the people."

Nines Photovoltaics: Irish Company Making Solar Energy More Sustainable

Conor Harrington — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:07:04 +0000

Nines Photovoltaics is an Irish company, founded in 2010, which aims to improve the manufacturing process for solar cells with a new sustainable and scalable dry etching technology. The Dublin-based firm recently received a European Commission Framework Programme 7 funding award of €1.2 million to continue its development of this technology, which requires significantly smaller quantities of water than prevailing production methods for solar cells.

Nines Photvoltaics was founded in 2010 as an offshoot of semiconductor manufacturer Nines Engineering. Nines’ founder and CEO Edward Duffy explains that the overlap in technology between semiconductor and solar cell production, combined with a “very attractive” growing market for solar energy led him down the photovoltaic route.

“I always wanted to do something in the solar space, particularly because of the convergence between the semiconductor manufacturing and the solar sell manufacturing processes.

“I felt that there was an opportunity to look at the manufacturing technologies and maybe try and add value in that space because a lot of the processing technologies that are used are quite mature and not really specifically designed for solar cell manufacturing, but just adopted from semiconductor manufacturing.”

Nines’ dry etching technology can process silicon wafers at atmospheric pressure with no requirement for the vacuum chambers which are typically used in semiconductor manufacturing for dry etching.

“It’s much cheaper technology to purchase, in the first place, and to run. It will deliver much higher throughput so it’s specifically designed for solar cell manufacturing where you will need to be running wafers at 4,000 or 5,000 wafers per hour as opposed to a semiconductor plant which can get away with maybe 10 or 15 wafers per hour.”

Nines have collaborated with the Fraunhofer ISE institute, “probably the best known and the leaders in their field”, for the purposes of trialling their technology in their pilot production plant in Freiburg, Germany.

Together with the Fraunhofer Institute and, “a consortium together of other SME’s that have kind of bolt-ons or add-ons to machines that are used in this space”, Nines made its successful application for the FP7 funding for a pilot programme which will commence in the Autumn.

“What it will allow us to do, is it will allow us to put our first prototype machine or pilot production machine into a working pilot production plant and actually produce solar cells, so that’s really very important for us.”

Despite the likelihood of peak oil supply having been reached, and the massive potential of solar energy, it accounts for only a tiny proportion of energy supply internationally, but with there being, “six or seven hundred times more [energy] than we’re ever going to need there”, Edward is confident that solar cell production is a growth area, and the sustainability offered by Nines’ manufacturing process will place it at the forefront of the photovoltaics space.

“One of the big things that has been identified when we talk to our customers is the consumption of water is a major part of it [the manufacturing process], and it’s not just the cost, it’s the amount of water and the facilities that need to be built and implemented in terms of infrastructure in a factory to bring the water to the machines and to the solar cells.

“Really, it’s a gate to the way these factories can scale, and be sustainable in the future, so it’s not just the cost, per se, of one technology versus the other, it’s also the sustainability and being able to scale production.

“To make a proper penetration into the energy market, you really need to look at innovation in the manufacturing space, so at the moment we estimate that our technology is going to be a little bit cheaper than the current technology, but when it comes to scale, it has much more potential for scale, and as you scale of course, you will be able to get much further cost reductions.”

Nines Photovoltaics is currently engaged in a private fundraising round, seeking a further €2 million, which, Edward hopes, will allow it “to execute on this FP7 programme”.

Stephen Howell: Using Scratch with Kinect for Education

Ina O Murchu — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:11:29 +0000

Scratch is a programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The aim is to have children (and, of course, adults) be able to develop games and create animations, art and music using software. In doing so the hope is to increase the reasoning and creative ability of the user.

Stephen Howell, a computer science lecturer, has combined the accessibility of Scratch with the widespread availability of the Microsoft Kinect to allow children to physically interact with a software program without having to touch the screen, the keyboard or a mouse.

The aim is to make learning mathematics and other subjects fun and accessible. Users can interact with the educational software simply by moving part or all of their bodies.

According to Stephen, "The really good thing is the kids can program the games themselves. They don't have to know anything about the hardware or the maths behind it. All they have to know is that the head is here, the hands are here and the feet are here. Now what do you want to do with that?

"I created this because I wanted schools to interact with the Kinect which is an amazing piece of kit. It has a 3D camera, microphone and sound recognition...But what would be really great is getting the kids to program it. There's no point me being able to program it. I'll just make some boring program.

"But a kid can think, 'Wow, I can make a racing car program. If I jump left and right it can dodge something.' We won't think of that but a kid will.

"We do need more evangelism for Scratch. We do need more people saying this is a fantastic tool to teach and learn programming."

Wilbour Craddock of Microsoft Ireland on the Making of an Architect Evangelist

Ina O Murchu — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 14:46:21 +0000

On a recent visit to Microsoft Ireland at their headquarters in Sandyford, Dublin we made a series of interviews with Josh Holmes, Enda Flynn and Wilbour Craddock. While speaking to Wilbour for a few moments between demonstrations I asked him how he managed to get such an interesting job at Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist.

What does an Architect Evangelist do?

My job as an architect evangelist is to go out and talk to people about the possibilities technology provides to solve problems, whether those problems are business problems or consumer problems or not necessarily problems but looking to become more efficient.

Resolve how people interact, that’s what my job is, its just to have those conversations and really make people think about the possibility that technology provides. And then based on that, it’s not a product it’s a concept, and then from that we build off a solution, and the solution is what we’re trying to achieve.

How did you get your job?

I sought out this job. Five years ago, I made a choice to become an evangelist, and I’ve worked for the past five years to find a path that would get me to that role. This is what I wanted to do. The job is made up of consumption, you consume as much technology as you can, ours and competitive technologies, to see where people are using technology, what new pieces are coming into the market, and then how those two can be melded together to build solutions.

Then it’s disseminate; go out and talk to as many people as possible about that potential, and try to excite people into creating these new solutions that are utilising all these great technologies to keep things advancing.

What excites you about the work you do?

What doesn’t excite me?! To be honest, I live in a pretty digital world. Everything that’s evolving that we see in today’s world is stuff that we are excited by, whether it’s social media, whether it’s the prevalence of online services, hardware technology, the next evolution, the next wave, the convergence of technology where you start to see the cellular space, and the smartphone space, and the tablet space, and the laptop and the desktop being converged into single devices; that excites me.

It’s the potential that it provides, that’s what really excites me. How can these things radically change the way that my kids interact? Why do my kids’ book bags have to weigh 50 pounds when they drag them to school every day? Technology avails of us a way of solving that problem. Those are the things that excite me.

What skills do you need to be an Architect Evangelist?

You figure out what it is that is important about this job. The big parts of this job are, being able to stand up on a stage and expel a story, so a commanding presence, so you have to be good at that component. Parts of it are going to be digesting that information, and also having vision; you have to be able to take in all of these components and see the wider picture and say, “well here’s the potential and here’s the opportunity”, so you’re doing a lot of market research type stuff, you’re consuming as much information as you can on a daily basis.

People are amazed by my inbox on a daily basis is probably between 1600 and 2400 pieces of information whether it’s rss feeds whether it’s internal emails, or whether it’s internal product discussions about specific technologies or next generation technologies. So, that’s a lot of information that you’re digesting on a daily basis. That’s what’s going to get you to be able to go out and have those conversations because you are able to speak with a fairly authoritative answer on how the industry is evolving, and how technology is evolving and how people are consuming that.

Can you describe the path you took to get where you are now?

So, the more conversations you have with people, the better, and then as I look at the path that I went through to get here, it started by doing a lot of community involvement, getting out and speaking in my community, getting out and working with user groups, talking to as many people who are using technology as possible, which then led to what Microsoft call an MVP or Most Valued Professional, which is a programme to foster people globally, there’s about 5,000 of them, who are product experts in any given area, and build out a community of people that are having these conversations with people, and from that then, it’s a path.

You get yourself recognised by Microsoft, you work with Microsoft and then you start to look at how you can get in.

From a research perspective, Guy Kawasaki was the first evangelist in the industry. Today he is a social media vanguard in terms of how he uses Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media services to share information, and he’s sought after, he’s got ten books in the market, he speaks on a regular basis.

You follow the guys that are vanguards in the role and see the successes and the failures and do what you can to succeed. It’s like any other job, I mean if you want to be something, you research it and search it out and you set a plan in action to do it.

Mcor Technologies Scaling up with Investment from Wilde Angels Fund

Tom Murphy — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 09:43:04 +0000

Mcor Technologies has recently received a $1 million investment from the Wilde Angels investment fund. They are an angel investment fund headed up by John Hartnett, President of the Irish Technology Leadership Group and includes investors from Cisco, Apple and Intel amongst others.

Conor MacCormack is one of the founders of Mcor Technologies which is based in Ardee, County Louth which is just a short drive north of Dublin. Conor, along with his brother Fintan, had always wanted to create something.

“We were always going to make something. A physical object was going to come out of it. We always had this idea that we wanted to make a change. If people could walk in off the street and have their object printed up that would be brilliant.

Traditional 3D printing is very expensive. “We not only wanted to make a machine, we wanted to make a difference.”

The key to making 3D printing accessible to the general public is in the use of A4 sheets of paper layered upon each other and sculpted by the machine.

“We thought that getting a 3D printer to work with A4 sheets of paper would be a brilliant idea.”
That decision presented its own challenges as they had to be able to glue the layers together without blistering the paper. As additional advantage to this process is that the glue used is non-toxic and completely safe to both use and to dispose.

“We are expanding and getting bigger and bigger and this [Wilde Angels] investment will enable us to really scale up and to grow to the potential that we think this market can grow to. We’ve had a global demand for our product for a long time but we couldn’t really service that."

Software is a crucial aspect to Mcor’s work but with a machine that has over 1,800 parts the evident downside to manufacturing is that it takes time.

“What kept us going is that when we came out with the concept of the machine in 2008 was having that big hit on our website.” When they released some information on their ongoing work on to the internet they had over 2 million hits in ten days and had to switch to a bigger web hosting service.

“Up until that point it had all been in our own heads but until you test the market you don’t really know. But after that we realised a lot of people share in what we believe and that is what drove us on to get this machine working. People are going to want to use it.

“The fact that we are selling all over the place already and we are just a small organisation means that we really are global right out of the block.”

Professor William Gallagher: Making his Mark in the Fight Against Cancer

Conor Harrington — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:09:08 +0000

Professor William Gallagher

Professor William Gallagher is a cancer researcher at University College Dublin, and also the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of OncoMark, a Dublin based company which
specialises in the development and application of biomarker panels to support the development of cancer drugs.

Professor Gallagher this week received the NovaUCD 2011 Innovation Award from UCD President, Dr. Hugh Brady.

Referring to the award, Professor Gallagher said, “it’s very important because I suppose it is recognition within academia of the translation of research findings into something that’s of economic or societal benefit”.

“If you look at the way research within academia is sometimes criticised, I suppose we’re a bit like an ivory tower in that we just work on things just for our own interest. I’ve never been like that, I always have had an end goal in mind. It has to solve a problem. It has to solve either a commercial problem or a clinical endpoint; it has to be of some use to people.”

Professor Gallagher admits that commercialisation of research has in the past been frowned upon within academia, but thankfully it has, “become more important”, and it is the formation of a company to commercialise the results of his research which he lists as his, “proudest achievement so far”.

That company, OncoMark, currently employs twelve people, a figure which Professor Gallagher hopes to see double in the next year.

The work of OncoMark is in trying to understand and curtail or more accurately treat the spread of tumours in the body.

“What kills 90% of cancer patients is the spreading of this cancer around different parts of the body; for example, the bone, the brain or the lungs; and then damaging those tissues. And so what we’ve been doing for the last 15 years is trying to understand what are the biological factors involved in contributing to that spreading event.

“What we try to do is translate that information into new diagnostic products that can maybe predict this event in patients, and probably more pressingly, can we do something about it, can we actually predict what are the appropriate drugs to give that patient?

“For example, we know that for the average cancer patient it costs about half a million euro to treat a person from start to finish. A lot of times the drugs that they get are pretty ineffective and we just don’t know currently how to put people in different sub-groups so we can give them the most appropriate treatment. So what we try and do is find markers in the actual cancer tissue that we can predict up front what will be the most appropriate kind of treatment or can we predict the outcome of the patient.”

OncoMark has developed, “a variety of different technologies”, but its most recent development is IHC-MARK, a computer vision product.

“We take a standard piece of tissue that a pathologist would look at down a microscope slide and we digitise that using a scanning system and then we’ve developed computational tools and image analysis tools that can automatically analyse that tissue and determine the levels of an particular marker of interest so that can predict an appropriate drug response.”

OncoMark is in the “latter stages of licensing the technology”, which was developed within UCD, and Professor Gallagher is confident that he and his team have, “created something that will hopefully be a commercial success over time”, and can join the ranks of previous winners of the NovaUCD Innovation award who, he says, have been, “key innovators within the university”.

“They’ve spun out technology, they’ve grown companies to a large size, and created employment for individuals, so I suppose within this kind of context I’m happy that I’ve been recognised as being part of that group of individuals.”

Enerit: Systematic Energy Management

Conor Harrington — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:18:29 +0000

Mike Brogan and Paul Monaghan

Enerit is a Galway-based firm that specialises in energy management software to help companies implement the new international standard for energy management, ISO50001.

The new international standard, which will establish an international framework for industrial plants or entire companies to manage all aspects of energy is, “basically a systematic energy management approach”, according to Paul Monaghan, the co-founder and CEO of Enerit.

“What it does is it links three things together. It takes the traditional technical things that always would have happened in energy management but it brings two other aspects. One is organisational change and improvement and setting up the organisation for energy management.

“The other thing is the influence on human behaviour and people’s individual commitment to energy. So basically, this new standard brings in the hard, technical, side but it also brings in organisational and people issues as the two other parts. So what we’re doing with our software is linking all of that together right across the organisation.”

In a large industrial complex, the level of planning and management required to maintain a standard of energy management can be huge, running to, “maybe hundreds of little actions”.

“The heart of what we do," continues Paul, is providing software for, “the planning and action side of systematic energy management."

“One of the first things that you need to do when you take a systematic energy approach is, with the limited resources that every organisation has, prioritise the important things to be working at. One of the important first steps is you’ve got to make an energy map of your whole industrial site, for example.

“So what you’re trying to figure out is, “where are all the big energy users on my site?”, what we mean by that is what are the big energy-using processes or energy using equipment? You go about that in a systematic way. You basically start from there and you make estimates of how much energy that equipment uses and you map that out for your whole site.

“The next thing that you do is you take the most significant energy users and then you go through a process of trying to identify different ideas or suggestions to figure out what are the possible opportunities to save energy, and then you move from that to make strategic decisions about these opportunities based on return of investment, the time to do it and the risks involved in making those changes, and then you convert that into an energy action plan. You then manage those activities right through to conclusion.”

Paul believes that this planning and action side of energy management is, “the really interesting side which really pushes down energy consumption."

“Our software will do all of these things”

Enerit’s target market is large multinationals whose industrial sites can have huge energy costs. With some of these sites having annual energy costs of up to €2 million, the benefits of implementing the ISO50001 standard are clear.

The software is currently under trial at ten such multinationals throughout the UK and Ireland, with a full launch planned for the end of this month.

Enerit operates a software as a service model, with no up-front setup expense, but rather a fixed monthly fee.

Paul acknowledges that clean-tech is a good space to be in at the moment as the potential for a global energy crisis, paired with a desire to cut costs, has left energy management high on many companies’ list of priorities. He himself is no newcomer to this field, though; as early as 1975, Paul was conducting research into computer simulation of solar energy systems.

“From the mid-nineties onwards energy has just started to get a little bit more fashionable again, and now I think people can perceive that we have probably reached peak oil and that the reserves are going to decline, in oil, at least. So there’s a couple of reasons why energy’s a good space to be in right now.”

Although no other firm provides the same service, Paul is aware that others may follow Enerit’s lead, but with the ISO50001 only a couple of weeks old, and a full launch only a couple of weeks away, Enerit is well-positioned to benefit from the current interest in energy management.

“You can never say there will never be any competition, because if an area is hot, people will enter it, but so far there is no-one with a comprehensive solution for ISO50001. So far, so good.”

BoxPAY: Mobile micropayments for any business

Lisa Jackson — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:39:50 +0000

Brothers Gavin and Iain McConnon established BoxPAY in Dublin this year to take advantage of the increasing need for simple global micropayment mechanisms, particularly for merchants who want to monetize social media services and casual gaming.

BoxPAY allows merchants to collect small payments, typically less that $15 or €10, from customers through their mobile devices via SMS. It is particularly attractive to smaller companies as it offers quick and easy self-integration with no minimum volume requirements.

The brothers gained experience in the mobile billing industry through their other company, Global Billing Solutions, that was set up 10 years ago to promote, deliver and bill mobile services. Global Billing Solutions provided an ideal springboard for boxPAY as the new offering could take advantage of Global Billing Solutions’ offices in Dublin, Sydney and Johannesburg and its connections with mobile phone carriers around the world.

Gavin and Iain adapted the technology already created by Global Billing Solutions to allow third-party merchants to use its billing platforms. This process took 6 months and during this time boxPAY also expanded from the 20 countries Global Billing Solutions operated in to 55 markets.

“We wanted to target markets where people usually don’t have access to credit cards so we got connections in Africa, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Latin and South America,” says Gavin.

Iain believes this global reach of boxPAY gives it an edge over its competitors: “We see the opportunity in allowing customers to build their users in places that they’ve never dreamed of
charging in before like in Africa or Latin America where they have customers but are not monetising them. For US merchants at the moment they may be monetising their customers in the US but not for these other regions.”

BoxPAY’s clients are mainly social and casual games from Facebook games and apps to music and video download services. Gavin says that for these sites, users don’t want to go through a lengthy credit card payment procedure for smaller amounts of money:

“For a very small transaction of €2 or €3 or $2 or $3 you don’t want to go through that process. We provide a really quick computer interface for mobile phones where we send a pin code by SMS and a customer enters the pin code on the website and it’s as quick as that for the user experience.”

Gavin also believes that boxPAY has the “competitive edge” on credit cards in terms of security as using your credit card on the internet presents a security concern for customers. By comparison, boxPAY only needs a customers’ mobile phone number and no other personal details to take a payment for an online service.

BoxPAY’s mobile micropayment competitors include Boku and Fortumo but Iain believes boxPAY differentiates itself by offering to companies of all sizes, including smaller merchants.

“Some of our competitors only talk to the big fish so if you’re a small Irish merchant for instance and you want to bill customers only in Ireland, they’re not going to respond. With our self-serve platform, if you’re a website in Cork and you want to bill customers in Cork you can sign up in 15 minutes to bill those customers.”

While boxPAY was initially self-funded, Gavin hopes it will raise external funding either in Ireland or the US. The company has also set its sights on opening an office in the US in the near future.

“We’d like to have a presence in the US because a lot of our target customers are going to be based there and it would be good for them to have at a minimum a sales, marketing and support presence there,” says Gavin.

For merchants, boxPAY’s self-serve platform means it can be quickly integrated into their site to start charging users for services. To incorporate the boxPAY billing platform into their own website, they just add in a few lines of JavaScript code. There’s even an online tutorial to show how it is done.

“It can take less than 15 minutes to get the code and put it on your own website and literally start billing your customers all over the world with that small bit of Java code,” says Gavin.

Gavin and Iain are no strangers to startups having also established an online DVD rental service moviestar.ie in 2006. The company was sold to screenclick.com.

Despite the tough climate, Gavin believes this is the “perfect time to start a business in Ireland as costs are as low as they have been in a long time.” He advises other companies that now is the time to “make a go of it."

Microsoft Kinect: Bespoke Fashion in Your Living Room

Ina O Murchu — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:09:45 +0000

We spoke to Josh Holmes, an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft based in Dublin, about the future applications of the Microsoft Kinect. One subject we discussed was the possibility of using Kinect in the home to allow women short on time be able to create bespoke fashion.

Open Data Challenge on July 4th and 5th

Conor Harrington — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:39:54 +0000

Ireland’s first ever 18-hour Open Data Challenge is being held at the National Digital Research Centre in Dublin this July 4th and 5th. During this free event, which is open to the public, participants will work in groups to try and develop creative and useful business ideas based around open data. The Open Data Challenge is being organised by the NDRC’s Inventorium programme in partnership with Dublin City Council, Finglas Council, the Irish Internet Association, and Microsoft.

Inventorium is one of the NDRC’s three programmes, the other two being the LaunchPad and Catalyser programmes, and it is a three year, European-funded, project that is taking place across Ireland and Wales. Inventorium’s primary focus is “on idea generation, and pre-incubation digital innovation”, according to Dr. Teresa Dillon, who is the programme’s senior content development manager.

The organisers at Inventorium see great potential in Open Data as a basis for creative new business opportunities.

“I think open data is hugely important at the moment. I guess it got a lot of momentum from the Obama election in 2009, but the EU, for example, has had policies in place since 2003 looking at how the governments can make the data they collect on our behalf available to us in an easy to digest format.

“If you’re moving into an area, and you’re wondering, for example, where your nearest bank or your nearest refuse collection is, or is there a safe beach? What are the primary schools like? What’s the level of crime? All these types things are the type of data that the government collects on our behalf.

“I think what we find interesting as well is that this data can also be used to develop new products and services and businesses, because how you actually engage with that data and how you actually might use it is another layer upon just providing it. So the governments and councils are now providing it, but it’s actually how do you use the data after that.”

A number of initiatives at local government level have meant that there is now ample opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs to put this data to good use.

“From the NDRC perspective and the Inventorium perspective it’s about stimulating economic activity”, says Teresa.

“We’re always entitled to see it, and we’re always entitled to ask for it, but it’s actually now being provided. So, Fingal council, for example, have seventy such datasets available now. And Dublin City Council, via their initiative, Dublinked, are also now encouraging all of the four local authorities to make the data that they collect public as well.”

“How can you use this data to develop new businesses and new creative businesses in this space? It’s not just about apps or online web services, it’s also about data visualisation.

“Imagine you’re walking down the street and you actually know how much water is being consumed by every house on your street. And maybe five years down the road your street needs to know how much water it’s using and needs to regulate it. Data visualisation techniques can actually start to expose some of that based on open data sets, and then you start to get into a whole different level of thinking about community and common good and sharing resources and really an awareness of what we’re actually using within our society.”

NUI Galway Acknowledges the Importance of Innovation in Engineering

Tom Murphy — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:45:45 +0000

The National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) launched its Engineering Innovation (Electronic) today. The location was the brand new Engineering Building which stands alongside the River Corrib. A new course, a new building, and some new thinking as well.

In his opening remarks, Professor Gerry Lyons, Dean of Engineering at NUIG, made it very clear why the word 'innovation' was in the title of the course, "The graduates of the future of this University will be graduates that will create the economy of the future... We can create the future of Ireland if we put our minds to it."

The opportunity this course has been created to respond to is the need for engineering graduates to be more innovative.

China and India have been producing engineers by the hundreds of thousands yet still the home for breakthrough technology is Silicon Valley. But as Professor Lyons points out, Ireland is not that far behind, "The little piece that is missing is entrepreneurship."

It is expected that this new thinking followed by this new approach to educating engineering graduates at NUIG may provide the missing link. "Innovation is going to come from a new type of engineer... We at NUIG are well-positioned to create the engineer of the future. An engineer who is confident and creative enough to expand out beyond narrow confines... and actually think about the possibility of doing things in new ways, creating new products and new services.

"I have no doubt that through the innovation of engineers that we will see very significant growth and expansion in this country in the near future."

These thoughts were echoed by Mike Conroy who came to officially launch the new course. Mike as well as being General Manager of Cisco’s Global Product Research and Development in Galway is also an alumnus of the University.

He said, "There was nothing to stop the prosperous expansion of the ICT sector in Ireland.

“An innovation culture is an imperative for building new start-ups and attracting... inward investment into Ireland. Innovation is driven by the intersection of talented engineers and visibility to key business problems and opportunities. Cross-disciplinary education in technology and innovation, like in this NUI Galway programme, is a great example of this as innovation needs to be at the heart of everything we do at all levels of education."

The four-year course will produce graduate engineers with business and innovation skills alongside traditional engineering capabilities.

Graduates from this course will not only be qualified for regular engineering posts but will have the option to be able to make use of their integrated business skills to either start their own enterprise or be better prepared to take on more strategic roles in already established businesses.

NUI Galway’s John Breslin is the course director (and also the publisher of New Tech Post), and he says, “Industry feedback has told us that a multi-disciplinary approach to engineering education can provide a massive boost to job prospects.

"The Higher Education Authority also says that there is a need for greater emphasis on critical thinking, capacity for analysis and entrepreneurial perspectives in Irish engineering courses.

“The figures regarding employment in the technology sector are very encouraging for current
and future students. 5000 jobs have been created in this sector since 2010, according to the
director general of Engineers Ireland, and the director of ICT Ireland recently stated that there are about 3500 open jobs within the information and communications technology sector at present.

"The School of Business is right next to the Engineering Building and it is a great opportunity for creating this close-knit collaboration between engineering and the business skills that are needed for this course."

Wiccle: Next Generation Content Management Systems

Ina O Murchu — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:25:12 +0000

From an early age, Keith Killilea realised that he wanted to build software and create games as a creator instead of an end user. He began his career in tech with a Commodore 64 at the age of 12. Since then he has worked on more than 30 different gaming projects and setup his own game company called Star Cave Studios.

Established in June 2004, Star Cave Studios created “Camelot Galway – City Of The Tribes” which was published online by GarageGames Inc. in 2006. The company employed 14 in-house development staff of high-skilled experienced and non-experienced staff from Ireland, plus 12 external staff located in the US, Australia, Brazil and China. Star Cave Studios also held the first Galway Games Conference in 2004.

It was while taking a break from the gaming industry that Keith saw emerging opportunities on the Web that seemed to be following a similar pattern to what he had seen previously in the gaming industry. He observed that content management systems (CMS) had evolved to a similar point that games engines had reached in their own evolution.

Like games, CMS was beginning to have a wider appeal beyond just the aficionados - not only to end users but also to developers and graphic designers. This was largely because a lot of the principles of CMS had become established. Technically, there was no longer any need to reinvent the wheel at every iteration and prices were dropping as the market was expanding.

Wiccle takes the middle-ground approach to using CMS. It takes advantage of the ease of use that CMSs like Wordpress have and combines it with the sort of robust code found in Drupal and Joomla.

Answering the question as to what makes Wiccle so unique Keith says, "Whether you're just looking at posting blogs, sharing photos on your website, or developing a full-featured eCommerce portal, a flexible social network, or a rich media content portal, the Wiccle CMS differs by packing in dozen of modules by default.

"Whereas other CMSs on the market utilise only the core part of their system, Wiccle’s modules represent an independent software that you can literally create any kind of website from."

Wiccle also differs from other CMS systems in that it come fully integrated as opposed to being modularised with various plug-ins. Keith says that, "This way it can properly utilise the core of the system better. Wiccle has an SEO engine under the hood across the entire core platform and the major advantage of this is to correctly do search engine optimisation of everything that is inputted by the end user with regards to their text.

"The very first line of code in the Wiccle CMS has SEO focus in mind and in this way it is built up from the creation of its framework, its core, its modules and its CMS all working in sync together.

"The administration panel is split up into two parts where a typical admin panel has been built and also where a builder panel is found. The builder is where any user of any level of skill can reshape their entire website around drag and drop through clicking and selecting for ease of use."

Also, Wiccle has the capacity to build social networks. These can range from small social networks with forms to a massive social network with proper profiles, wall, status updates and forms and chat.

By building the CMS in this way, Wiccle has in effect created a playground for all its end users. They can shape anything and everything they want in order to create a unique bespoke website.

As downloads in the United States have exceeded expectations, Wiccle has decided open up an office in the Irish Innovation Center in San Jose, California. Keith is hoping to extend Wiccle's reach further into the North American market.

Since Wiccle has had over 15,000 downloads in over 100 different countries globally, there are plans to introduce a software as a service version. It will be a version where users can quickly create any sort of website in a few minutes using a cloud-based platform.

ICANN Announces new TLD Names [VIDEO]

Ina O Murchu — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:44:21 +0000

ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the body that manages, amongst other things, the assignment of top-level domain (TLD) names.

Yesterday in Singapore it announced the expansion of generic names space such as .com, .net, .org to include numerous new suffixes.

Details are not finalised yet but by 2012 TLDs will be made available in any language or script. Additional categories such as geography and industry may also be introduced.

Most of the present range of TLDS have been in existence for the last 26 years and this opening up of the naming suffixes will create a plethora of new site names.

Malcolm Crompton: Can Privacy and Socio-economic Gain Co-exist?

Conor Harrington — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:01:10 +0000

As we place ever more of ourselves online, the market for our data has grown into a massive industry. Our personal data, our age, gender, location, and preferences are like a new currency which can be traded by those to whom we submit these details, like Facebook, for example, to retailers eager to reach their target markets in a way which would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

As the implications of this sharing of ourselves online begin to become apparent, fears have been raised over the potential misuse of online data.

According to privacy expert, and Managing Director of Information Integrity Solutions and former Privacy Commissioner of Australia Malcolm Crompton, the debate on Internet privacy is only beginning, and the key to its resolution is transparency, awareness and accountability.

“Privacy is not about keeping secrets. Privacy is about sharing with those with whom we want to share.

“I think we’ve still got a way to go, both in terms of Facebook telling us what they’re doing with the personal information, and us understanding and being able to act on what we’re told. Facebook does keep on changing the rules, all of the time, and this latest one which is suddenly beginning to apply face recognition technology without telling us in advance they’re changing the rules like that, is something where Facebook can clearly do better.

“On the other hand, even if we’d been given all this information; and Facebook, to give them their considerable due, gives you more controls at a very fine-grained level than any social networking site has ever done before; the issue is not just about, “are the controls there?”, or, “are we informed?”, but it is, “do we understand, and do we have the time to act on it?”.”

Malcolm uses the analogy of motor safety to describe the duality of responsibility needed when dealing with online data; a safe car on a safe road can still be crashed if driven irresponsibly.

“It’s the same thing with the Internet. We expect to be informed about what’s going on, and have people looking after our interests, but in the end, a lot of the responsibility still comes back to us as individuals. The companies can’t say it’s solely the responsibility of the individual, and the individuals can’t say it’s solely the responsibility of the companies.

Many companies which have access to our data are, Malcolm acknowledges, “trying to do something about it”.

“Apple is trying to give people some more controls on the use of its geo-location data. The various advertising network initiatives about trying to give people more information and more control over behavioural targeting in advertising, is an admission by those companies that they could do better. And the current debate is whether the initiatives are sufficient, or whether they still need to do even better.

“The real issue at the moment with these initiatives by business is whether they’ve got any form of governance arrangements in place, in other words a company that makes a promise to abide by these rules is actually abiding by these rules, and how well they allow for an individual who thinks that things have gone wrong, for whatever reason, to get something done about it. And so there’s still a lot of work to be done at that level.”

The debate over whether search engines should reveal that they filter search results, and what algorithms they use, as claimed by Eli Pariser in his book, “The Filter Bubble” is, Malcolm believes, “again, something that we are going to see evolve with time”.

“The first thing is to become aware of the fact that the Internet and search engines are not impartial. They may once have been but also, they were very difficult to use, because they were so dumb. Essentially, intelligence has been built into the search process, but along with intelligence, has come this filtering. So we’re looking at a phenomenon that is only a few years old.

“But guess what? People in Britain who read The Telegraph, get a completely different story from people who read The Times, which is a completely different story from the people who read The News of the World, or The Independent. So people getting the information that they want to receive, spelt out in a particular way that they understand and are interested in, is not new, and in a fact that was part of Eli Pariser’s message; this is not new.

“What he was saying was be aware that it is also happening on the Internet; we need to think about that. How far do we go? Is there such a thing as too far? If you go to the USA, there would be people that would argue that at least some of the television networks have gone too far in filtering news and current affairs.

“We’re at the very beginning of understanding what’s happening with, if you like, the Internet filter bubble, of understanding the existence of a filter bubble, let alone what is the socially appropriate outcome for letting business do business, presenting to people the kinds of things that they’re interested in without giving them rubbish, but not going so far that it becomes censorship or segmentation that’s unacceptable. It’s just at its very beginning.”

Of course, some people are happy to share their information, and care little who views it, but what is important, says Malcolm, is that the consequences of this are made clear to them, regardless of whether this would change their actions or not.

“In order to get a fair deal, you’ve got to know and understand what’s going on. People are not quite being told yet what is going on and certainly, not yet understanding what they’ve been told. So, there’s more to do.

“People may want to actively tell a website or tell others where they are, for example. but they’re not always being told the full story in a way that they understand, the implications of having given away that information. Statements like, “we will only share this information, your location data, with partners that we know you will enjoy receiving further information from that you will value”, what does that mean? It’s basically code for saying, “we’re going to sell this data as many times as we can to as many people as we can”. So why don’t they put it in a language that is blunt and clear and comprehensible?”

One thing that is certain, is that now that the debate is open, companies and users alike are becoming more aware of the privacy issue, and this is critical to any solution which might be reached.

“There’s no question that the current debates over geo-location, the current debates over Google street view, have raised awareness in a way that was not possible before. So, we’re still learning, but I think that the awareness is increasing, and I do think that we’re already seeing individuals being more selective than they were before, and I think it will continue.”

Many of the images used in this article are taken from this presentation of Malcolm's.

Sindice: New Approach to Online Data Management

Conor Harrington — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:58:43 +0000

Sindice is a semantic web index, which allows you to access and leverage the “web of data”, which is the rapidly expanding number of websites which are semantically marked up, that is tagged with RDF, RDFa, Microformats or Microdata, tags which can be used to identify online content as belonging to different categories.

This week Sindice, in partnership with Hepp Research and Openlink Software, launched Sindice Ltd, a new startup which will manage Sindice’s intellectual property, and oversee the commercial drive of its products.

Giovanni Tummarello is the CEO of Sindice, which originated at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. He explains how the web of data will revolutionise online data management, and how it is, “set to explode”, in the coming months. Once it does, he enthuses, the web of data, “all becomes a big graph which one can join with a single query”.

“Semantic mark-up is basically a markup that you put on the page to express what you have on the page, so if you have the name of a movie, because you are discussing that movie in a blog article for example, you might want to tag the title of the movie, the director of the movie, whatever data makes that page recognisable to a search engine for exactly what it is, which is a page which talks specifically about that movie.

“In a regular search engine, it’s just the keywords that are being searched, so you’re looking for the title of the movie, which could be, “The Blue Tomato”, but there are all sorts of pages which can contain these two words, for all sorts of reasons. On the other hand, if you put a mark up saying that it is a movie, you will be stating that you are talking about a movie.”

As Giovanni points out, Sindice acts like a search engine of all the 270 million or so sites which currently have semantic markup, but its real utility is greater than that, “OK, you can put in a keyword and search it, it’s fine, but that’s not really the point”.

“Sindice is basically a search engine which is not just a search engine. Really it’s an infrastructure for leveraging all the web data out there. We have 270 million pages or so at the moment; they are not normal web pages, they are only web pages which have semantic markup on them. What Sindice does is it has a very powerful engine that can correlate information from one website to another.

“You can basically use the entire web as if it is your playground by merging information here and there. You can get the name of a movie from a page which is marked up, and the name of the movie can be looked up on Wikipedia, where you can see what the director is, and then go on Rotten Tomatoes and get the rating, and all together it can be queried with a single query which goes all over the web and returns the information all ready to be consumed to enhance websites, anywhere where you want content aggregated from multiple sources on the web.

“Sindice provides these services where you can make these queries and combine content coming from all of the web of marked up data.”

The formation of the company is a sign that Sindice are ready to commercialise their technology. Sindice Ltd solidifies the “very important” partnerships with Hepp Research and Openlink Software, and also manages the intellectual property the partners now share, keeping it, “nice and tidy”, so that Sindice can seek further investment.

“There are two main markets we are pursuing, the first one is customised cloud hosted data spaces”, continues Giovanni.

“We’re going to be allowing people to have their own data spaces, we call them, and that comes for a price of course, it’s kind of data as a service.

“You want to have the data that comes from the web of data but you also want to have your own data, you also want to have your own correlation of the data. So you want subsets of Sindice data that need to be live and fresh, that need to be combined in way that you want, to solve your problems.”

The second main service, which Giovanni describes as, “much more concrete and immediate” is something called Sindice site services.

Not yet available, this is, he says, “something that will basically appeal to anybody that has a website that they want to enhance with information coming from multiple websites at the same time. This is good for everybody, because the websites which are providing the information, they get traffic and they get links so it becomes a syndication network. That obviously has a value in terms of the possibility of sharing revenue and advertisement”.

Giovanni is confident that following the common approach taken by the three major search engines to create what they call, “a shared markup vocabulary”, the time is right for Sindice to capitalise on the expected flurry of markup activity in the near future.

“It’s exploding as we speak. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are telling everybody at the same time to do this! In search engine optimisation circles they are raving about this stuff, and everybody’s implementing it so there’s no alternative.

This means that there will be a lot of people who want to do services on top of this, so if there’s a market, it’s right now.”

Populis: Making Money from Online Content

Tom Murphy — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:45:23 +0000

Populis is an international online media group headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. By using algorithms developed in-house, Populis aggregates trending topics on the web and combines them with its own database of subjects and keywords to produce a list of story ideas, that when posted as blogs or articles are readily monetizable.

The story ideas are circulated amongst Populis’s freelance contributors who then select the subjects they feel most interested and competent to write about. These articles and posts can then be submitted to any relevant website out of the 550 that Populis own. They in turn produce the sales of which 90% are generated in the European market.

Almost uniquely amongst online content publishers, Populis is highly profitable. John Slyne, Managing Director and Group CFO, states that, “We had revenues last year of €58 million and over the last four years this represents growth of 43% year on year. In 2007 we were €20 million in revenues and now we are just under €58 million in revenues.

“We are currently producing 35,000 pieces of content per month in eight languages. We have over a million pieces of content online. And we have just under 26 million unique visitors a month to our websites.”

The company was called GoAdv up until its rebranding as Populis last year. It was founded in Rome in 2005 by Luca Ascani and Salvatore Esposito. The office there has 55 people working in it. In addition there is another office in Milan which has 25 employees as a result of the purchase of Blogosfere last year and Blogo in January this year.

The Dublin office has 60 people working in it from 13 different nationalities. As John explains, “The Irish office is very focused on traffic acquisition. It is focused on the editorial and content side. We manage all the editorial and content work for Northern European locations from here. Basically, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.

“We look for mother tongues...We’ve tried using people who were fluent in German and fluent in Italian but it is just not the same.

“Dublin is one location that we can scale any language that we want. There’s competition for talent as you have Google, Facebook, Linkedin, and Zynga but...if people want to improve their English and want to work in this area then it is only Dublin or London for them to come to.”

Populis are producing 35,000 pieces of content a month now and the aim is to get to 100,000 pieces of content per month by the end of next year. They are looking to produce content on that scale across all eight languages.

According to John, “The market is for people who want to go to Barcelona at the weekend and they have fifteen minutes at lunchtime and don’t have time to buy the travel guide anymore. So they are reading short articles that tell them what to do.

“So, if it is a rugby blog speaking about the Heineken Cup and at the top of it Google has an ad for flights to the match then people literally read the content and say, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting. I wonder how much it will cost?’ and click on the advertising and that’s our model.

“We’re producing more content and we are spreading our niche model into more verticals. It’s about getting good product out there, the expertise in getting traffic onto our websites and having better quality websites.

“Google data suggests that people are becoming more involved in niche sites as their expertise on the internet is becoming higher — 77% of time online is spent on niche sites. Their engagement is much higher. People go on to niche sites looking to book a hotel are more likely to follow through and book the hotel.

“Having Google as a partner on the advertising side means that they are analyzing the content to see what we are talking about and then the advertising is linked to what they are seeing in the content.

“Right now we are bidding on 22 million key words across the languages. By the hour we can change our strategy. We have internal technology that gives us a return on investment on our spend and in terms of our adwords spend. We are not only using it to generate traffic and revenue but we are also using it to generate data. We use that data in terms of our algorithm as well.

“There is a gap there between what people are looking for in terms of the demographics and what is available on line. Populis produces multi-lingual content for a multi-lingual global population. We produce content in English as well but our focus is very much on the other European markets.”

The algorithm was written in-house. It is basically taking the topics and the data that have been built up over seven years of keyword analysis.

“A lot of people create content for the sake of creating content. We create content that we can monetize.

“We have external feeds. We have our own databases. We use aggregation algorithm analysis. That essentially brings up topic creation. We send out the topic assignments to the content producers.

“Our idea is to build in technology towards the platform that looks at traffic, that looks at SEO results and the monetization value of the article and grades our writers. Obviously if we’ve got someone who’s a really strong writer we’d want to pay them more and retain them within the group.

John says that Populis has been in profit since day one. “The company started on €10,000 and it is growing in value every year. Our profitability has been strong every year as well. We’re producing content that has a useful life and has a monetization value.”

HeyStaks: Socially Customized Search

Conor Harrington — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:57:02 +0000

HeyStaks is a social search engine, which aims to allow users to use their social graph to make their Internet searches more accurate and more relevant. The Dublin-based startup was founded by Peter Briggs and Maurice Coyle, who completed a PhD together, and Professor Barry Smyth, who was their PhD supervisor in University College Dublin.

HeyStaks, currently available for the Firefox and Chrome browsers, and for the iPhone, with Android, Internet Explorer and dedicated iPad versions in development, brings together their research in the area of social research and recommendation to fill the gap between current recommendation technology and web searching.

“There’s a missing link there between web search and these recommender social systems," says Dublin native Peter Briggs.

“We think that it’s quite an obvious thing that your social graph can have a very positive influence on your search results, and so we wanted to delve into that and bring that down into a product which we could get people using to improve web search results.

“The first thing to realise is that we’re not actually a standalone search engine. What we do is we plug into existing search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!, so you still search using the same search engine that you’re used to using.”

HeyStaks’ founders did initially consider the idea of setting up their own search engine, but Peter acknowledges that, “people just want to keep on using what they’ve always used, they always go back to Google, at the end of the day. We realised that, rather then fight the uphill battle of creating an entirely new destination site, we were better to work with existing search engines. There’s no reason why we can’t just integrate with what’s there already and let people search as they want to."

Peter believes that there is considerable scope for improving the search experience, whether the user is using Google, Bing, or any other search engine, “we think that everybody wants better search results."

“What we find is that there’s actually a lot of failed results with people when they’re using Google. Up to 50% of the time when people search on Google they don’t click any results. And people have sort of adapted to that; they change their query a bit, add some terms, remove some terms, and they do find what they’re looking for because Google will get them there in the end. But the point is we think there is a lot of room for improvement there.

“When you’re looking for a recommendation for a restaurant to go to or for a movie to see you often end up asking people you trust or people with similar taste to you, and ideally you’d be able to ask a few people to get a kind of a majority view on the best place to go to get a certain type of food, and so that’s what we bring to web search.”

HeyStaks works by organising search results or topics into what they call staks. “You can create a stak on any topic that you like or you can join existing ones”, offers Peter. If you have joined a stak on places to eat in Dublin, a search in your web search engine will reveal the standard results, and also the results from that stak. By including your social graph through inviting Facebook or Twitter friends, you can ensure the results are more reflective of your peer group.

“The difference between these HeyStaks results and the standard Google results are that the HeyStaks ones have already been verified by real people, these are results that people like, and have found to be useful in the past, and so you have piece of mind there that it’s not just pages that have been heavily search engine optimised or paid listings.”

Peter points to Google’s +1 and Bing’s incorporation of Facebook “likes” into its search engine as examples of major search players going down a similar road to HeyStaks, but is confident that the socially-customised element of HeyStaks sets it apart from the crowd.

“The difference between what we do and what they do is we allow you to segregate, to partition your social graph based on your interests and the interests of your friends or co-workers. So, for example, you might not trust everybody that you know to provide you with movie recommendations, but you might have a few trusted friends where you know your interests overlap quite a lot, so you can decide to share a movie stak with them or join one that they’ve created and you’ll only get recommendations from those trusted people.”

For now, the priorities for HeyStaks include the completion of the versions for Internet Explorer, and Android, as well as a dedicated iPad app, but the main focus is on user adoption, “getting HeyStaks out there to as many people as possible," according to Peter.

When adoption has reached a certain level, “maybe year two or thereabouts," the process of monetising the business will commence, and Peter believes Heystaks has an advertising model which will, “provide an unprecedented level of engagement between advertisers and their users," and will, “give them a much better engagement with users, far beyond their own destination site."

Until that advertising model can be implemented, the HeyStaks team are happy to take advantage of the facilities offered them by their current Dublin base on the NovaUCD programme. “It’s just an excellent centre in terms of the potential for mixing with other people who have really great ideas."

“There’s a really good atmosphere in terms of mingling with other people with entrepreneurial interests, but it also provides a really good range of services for an early stage company. Basically, we have far better facilities here than we would be able to get anywhere else around Dublin. They’ve just provided a great space for a startup company.”