Athlone Institute of Technology has joined colleagues in NUIG, MTU and MU in formally acceding to ADAPT, a SFI research centre for artificial intelligence driven-digital content technology research, bringing the total number of academic partners to eight.
By doubling its academic base of researchers, ADAPT has significantly expanded its expertise, capacity and geographical reach, enabling it to further push the frontiers of knowledge and create technology solutions to societal and industrial challenges.
Driven by a long-term goal of creating a balanced digital society by 2030, ADAPT researchers are pioneering AI techniques and technologies, including personalisation, natural language processing, data analytics, intelligent machine translation human-computer interaction.
The news came as Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris announced an investment of €42 million to extend ADAPT’s research activities for the next six years.
According to Minister Harris, the significant government investment reflected “Ireland’s position as a world leader in research and innovation” and a need to ensure the country was prepared to address future “global societal and economic challenges.”
“We, in AIT, are delighted to formally join this leading global research ecosystem in AI-driven content technology. The scale and scope of ADAPT enables us to collaborate with international researchers based across the eight partner institutions as well as in Europe, but also to apply our own research expertise in new domains, supporting our regional industry partners through the ADAPT centre.”
“AIT contributes its experience and expertise in Quality of Experience of AR and VR to the ADAPT team, and we look forward to further extending our own research ambitions in terms of human-centric artificial intelligence with such immersive technologies and from a team perspective, grow our ADAPT@AIT group here in Athlone through the support of a globally recognised research centre,” Dr Niall Murray, an SFI-funded investigator with ADAPT, said.
This was a sentiment echoed by Dr Máire Brophy, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at AIT.
“This is a great example of collaborative research and the unique perspective AIT researchers bring to that collaboration. The ADAPT centre is widely recognised as a world-leading research centre in digital content technology, and the formalisation of this partnership signifies an exciting new step for research,” Dr Brophy commented.
Eight academic institutions are now partnered with ADAPT, including TCD, DCU, UCD, TUD, AIT, MU, MTU, and NUIG.
