The Cloud Competency Centre at National College of Ireland has recently been awarded two important projects which are funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 programme, the biggest EU research and innovation programme yet, with a budget of nearly €80 billion.
Both 4-year projects commenced this month and have a value of more than €3 million.
As integral part of the college’s research and innovation activity, both projects will support NCI’s research in Data Analytics (Big Data) and Cloud Computing, and significantly inform the college’s postgraduate programmes.
Dr Horacio Gonzalez-Velez, Head of the Cloud Competency Centre at NCI, has been appointed vice-chair of the project, High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet).
Part of COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology), the longest-running European framework supporting trans-national cooperation among researchers, engineers and scholars across Europe, this project will support information exchange, synergy, and coordination of Cloud & Parallel Computing, Infrastructure, and Data Analytics activities among leading European research groups and top global partner institutions, and promote European software industry competitiveness.
It involves 39 recognised experts from institutions including the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); the Italian National Research Council; and the Universities of Bremen, Cambridge, Carlos III de Madrid, Edinburgh, George Mason, Krakow, Lille, Lisbon, Luxembourg, Notre Dame, Pisa, Queen's Belfast, and Uppsala as well as National College of Ireland.
The second project is titled Computationally-intensive methods for the robust analysis of non-standard data (CRoNoS). This aims to improve knowledge extraction from non-perfect and non-standard datasets via novel methods and tools in computing, statistics, machine learning, and mathematics. In addition to NCI, participating institutions include NUI Galway, Imperial College London, Queen Mary, University of London, Universidad de Oviedo, EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht, IICT-BAS (Bulgaria), University of Copenhagen, and University of Turku.
To date, widely-known applications of data analytics typically involve marketing, social, and other commercial applications. But “the modelling and simulation of data-intensive scientific applications are inherently complex, so there has been an increasing interest to widely deploy data analytics in science,” says Horacio González-Vélez, Head of the Cloud Competency Centre at National College of Ireland and the main promoter of these two new Horizon 2020 projects.
“In particular, one would like to foster scientific discovery by efficiently using analytics, so one can underpin the scientific method using effective computer modelling and simulation in social, biomedical, and physical science. Academics and practitioners can be better equipped to carry out their evolving research and innovation jobs. These two European endeavours will help us work cooperatively with over 100 experts across the world. It will substantially increase our data analytics know- how at NCI and indeed across Ireland.”
NCI is the leading provider of Level 8 and Level 9 Data Analytics courses in Ireland. These programmes have quickly joined its flagship MSc in Cloud Computing to become a pre-eminent source of well-trained graduates for indigenous and multinational companies in Ireland.
View all computing courses at National College of Ireland.