Tralee IT establishes data research centre with MIT

THE WIRELESS and mobility group at the Institute of Technology Tralee has scored a mini-coup by establishing a new research centre in association with the Forum for Supply Chain Innovation at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

The Centre for Innovation in Distributed Systems (Cids), which will be located on the Tralee campus, will be formally launched next week with a symposium titled "Is Connecting Bits to Atoms Sufficient?".

"There are an increasing number of sensors and other digital devices in the world generating lots of data but you have to turn that data into information if it is going to be useful," explains Dr Pat Doody, executive director of Cids.

The initial event will focus on RFID, a radio-based technology which uses tags to track items such as goods in transit, but co-founder Dr Shoumen Datta. of the MIT Forum, stresses Cids will have a much broader remit, covering not just information technology but bio-medical sciences and energy.

"Anything can be distributed - this telephone conversation we are having is a distributed system," says Dr Datta. "It's very simple - we want to be able to make better decisions, we don't just want to gather terrabyte or petabytes of data."

Next week's event will highlight how capturing of data is less valuable if held in systems that are incompatible to share data or uncover its value as useful information.

Dr Datta gives the real-world examples of a convicted drunk driver being able to obtain a driving licence in another jurisdiction or a patient being treated with penicillin in an emergency even though a file somewhere else indicates they are allergic to antibiotics.

Speakers at the event include Dr Datta and Dr Doody as well as representatives of industry, academia and the private sector such as Prof Jane Grimson, from the Health Information & Quality Authority, Robbert Kuppens, chief information officer of Cisco, and Mike Fitzgerald, chief executive of Altobridge.