Research Programme Overview

To address the challenges of the sensor web, CLARITY’s technology Programme has been designed around a series of research and demonstrator Programmes. The former reflect the fundamental research streams that underpin the sensor web whilst the latter provide an application focus that brings together key technologies from across the research streams (RSs) in the service of a well-defined application need.

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CLARITY Demonstrators

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 two areas for demonstrators:

  • Personalized Health - addresses the fact that people are becoming increasingly conscious of their personal health and that the population in general is aging.
  • The Adaptive Environment - addresses an increasing legislative and political framework compelling the use of increased monitoring of the environment in order to ensure regulatory compliance.

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 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. 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.

Research Commercialisation

CLARITY combines world-class research with a vibrant culture of commercialisation. It has a very strong track record of successful partnerships with industry and spinning out technology into new companies. Recent success stories for CLARITY are the spin-out companies: Heystaks, Metalabs, and Changing Worlds, and the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Prize won with Fairview Analytics.

We are actively seeking opportunities to work with national and international companies and individuals to develop knowledge exchange partnerships and to explore IP licencing.

We have presented below a brief description of our 4 major research streams and a small selection of the technologies that we have available for co-development and/or licensing.

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    Web-Scale Sensing

    A suite of technologies in the service of serendipitous content discovery,whereby the needs, preferences, activities and context of individuals can help to drive the high-precision recommendation of relevant content to individual stakeholders and communities.

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    Contextual Content Analysis

    Fundamental techniques to analyse and understand only relevant content as carried by the sensed data, taking cognizance of the manner in which the required semantic information will eventually be used

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    Sensor Web Platforms

    Research that ensures the instantiation of more sophisticated sensors, modes/motes, system software support and the production of assemblies of devices that will feed into prototype deployments.

Smart Meter Environmental Monitoring

Overview

Climate change has propelled environmental issues to the very front of political decision making, with consequent increasing focus on the impact of the quality of the environment on society, both locally, and globally.

In CLARITY we have developed environmental sensors to capture raw data (e.g. sensors to measure water + air quality). We have semantically enriched this raw environmental data through processes such as the detection of electrical appliances being switched on (in domestic electricity usage data). We then manage, personalise, present and transform these vast quantities of data into meaningful information. This has provided an opportunity for up-and-coming Irish companies to draw upon our expertise, e.g. Irish SME EpiSensor Ltd.

At all times we focus the output of our work on the "sensor data portal". Raw data collected across various homes, rivers, and landfill sites is automagically uploaded to this website (see next section).

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