IBM is involved in these two new Science Foundation Ireland ( SFI) Strategic Research Clusters (SRC)
1. SRC Name: Clique
Research Title: Graph & Network Analysis Cluster
Lead PI: Pádraig Cunningham, Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering
Award: €3.56 million Lead Institution: University College Dublin
Industry Partners: IBM, Idiro Technologies, Norkom Technologies
Summary of research: This research programme is concerned with networks of data about entities and the relationships between them. The most prominent source of such data is social networking sites such as bebo, facebook or myspace but credit-card transactions, mobile phone calls or email exchanges are also readily described as networks. The availability of this data in electronic format presents some interesting challenges and opportunities for data analysis. Does credit-card fraud have a characteristic pattern of transactions? Can we identify bad behaviour such as spamming or bullying based on the analysis of communications patterns? Can we gain insights into how information disseminates in networks? We can be cautiously optimistic about the answers to these questions but the research challenges are considerable. The volume of data to be analysed is huge and sometimes the patterns are subtle. This research offers new insights into how people interact and opens up interesting commercial opportunities.
3.SRC Name: FAME (Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services)
Lead PI: Dr. Willie Donnelly
Award: €5.86 million Lead Institution: Waterford Institute of Technology
Industry Partners: Cisco Systems, Galway, LM Ericsson Limited, Dublin, IBM Ireland Product Limited, Dublin, Telefónica I+D, Madrid, Spain, Hewlett Packard, New Jersey, USA
Summary of research: A key challenge for the telecommunications industry is to deliver and manage end-to-end communications services over an interconnected, but heterogeneous, networking infrastructure. The Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end communication services (FAME) Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) will develop autonomic management solutions incorporating new semantic analysis techniques, that can be applied to build federated network and service management systems that understand changes in the environment and coordinate their actions to reconfigure network resources and services to effectively deliver services on an end-to-end basis. FAME brings together academics and industry specialists in the management of communications networks and services. This project is pushing the barriers of what is technically possible in terms of allowing forms of self-management, allowing some parts of a network, and some services that run on these networks, to “work out for themselves” what is needed to operate efficiently.
Intellectual Property (IP) and technical know-how generated by FAME will enable the creation and growth of an Irish-based international communications service management cluster that will grow the considerable investment already made in this sector by multinational companies, such as the cluster partners Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM, and Telefónica I+D, as well as indigenous communications management companies. Together this cluster will help position Ireland as a global leader in communications management related research, product development and professional services.