Centre Mission
CLARITY is a research centre that will focus on the intersection between two important research areas —Adaptive Sensing and Information Discovery—to develop innovative new technologies of critical importance to Ireland’s future industry base and contribute to improving the quality of life of people in areas such as personal health, digital media and management of our environment. The overarching theme of CLARITY’s research programme —bringing information to life— refers to the harvesting and harnessing of large volumes of sensed information, from both the physical world in which we live, and the digital world of modern communications & computing.
The technology developed by CLARITY will help to empower the citizen by taming the information overload problem currently facing individuals, helping to ensure that everyone has access to the right information at the right time. By successfully bridging the physical-digital divide CLARITY will produce a new generation of smarter, more proactive, information services. These will include, for example, new ways to monitor the impact of exercise on health, technologies to support our aging population, innovative social and interactive media services to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the digital media sector, and technology that can automatically monitor the quality of our environment. Such applications reflect key themes within CLARITY’s innovative demonstrator projects and are enabled through the combination of adaptive sensing and information discovery technologies that form the core of CLARITY’s far-reaching research programme.
Research Themes
The CLARITY research programme is comprised of a set of six Research Programmes (RPs) which in combination underpin a number of exemplar demonstrators described in Section 6 of this proposal. The research programmes address core basic research themes and each is sub-divided into a number of constituent work packages, as shown in the figure below. The individual CLARITY research programmes are closely inter-related and can almost be considered as stack-like in their form and construction. Primarily RPs propagate their results to adjacent RPs reflecting the bi-direction flow of information from sensor to application through the various layers and back (see figure below). This is complemented by a series of cross RP interactions captured in the body of the RP descriptions below.
Role of Demonstrators in CLARITY
A key differentiator of CLARITY’s vision is the coherent integration of research programmes in an end-to-end application scenario. To this end, we have carefully chosen three areas for demonstrators, Personalized Health, Interacting with Media and The Adaptive Environment, to meet the following
objectives:
- They integrate outputs from the basic research programmes, ensuring that basic research is informed by real-world needs;
- They are focused on applications that will have a positive impact on ‘Quality of Life’;
- They bring bring together researchers from the various constituent research teams to meet joint research objectives;
- The direction and focus is aligned with the strategic objectives of our industry, agency and
social partners.
Demonstrators will be realized by using the outputs of multiple basic research work packages and through resources provided by our industry partners, for example, through funded or embedded researchers. To facilitate integration, demonstrator ‘hand-over’ is specifically resourced in the early/late stages of each year of each research programme, ensuring phased delivery of outputs as they mature. The commercial and societal relevance of our selected application areas afford the potential to take individual demonstrator projects forward to commercial prototypes. One conduit identified to achieve this is through CLARITY’s strong engagement with the National Digital Research Centre. We are particularly aware of the exciting opportunities that will arise at the inter-sections of the demonstrators. For example, building personalized profiles and customising delivery for peoples preferences for interacting with media, resonates very strongly with similar requirements in the personal health and adaptive environment demonstrator projects (see pictures). Likewise, technologies we employ for exercise monitoring in sports studies can also be used to monitor progress in rehabilitation in the home environment or in caring for the aged. These opportunities are only accessible through an initiative with the breadth of fundamental knowledge, and mix of academic/industry/agency/social partners that we will assemble through the establishment of CLARITY.
