The University of Glasgow is opening a new computer science innovation lab to boost collaboration between academia and industry.
The idea behind GLACSIL is to leverage already established productive partnerships with companies from a wide range of sectors. The hope is that they will generate new research collaborations, benefit from joint funding opportunities and develop new commercial products.
“Universities are unique spaces where researchers have the freedom to explore ideas they find interesting and drive new technological developments. GLACSIL partners will have the inside information to learn about those advances,” said GLACSIL co-director Jill Dykes.
“Glasgow School of Computer Science innovates across a wide range of domains: from artificial intelligence, computer vision, social robotics and health technologies, to algorithm development, cyber security, systems and communications and programming languages.
“Within GLACSIL, we will work with our partners in those areas in response to real-world problems, business needs and commercial applications.”
GLACSIL has partnered with six companies so far (Bell Nokia Labs, BT Research, Thales, Moodagent, International Data Flows and DotPhoton) and revealed that they have already formed close collaborative ties with researchers at the school through jointly funded research.
One of the first projects will be to open the research opportunities of the Faculty of Computer Sciences to member companies. Members will be able to participate in research seminars, workshops, networking events and other activities to debate, discuss and resolve key research questions for academia and industry.
“Businesses can benefit from partnering with universities to leverage our expertise, scale up their own research and development work and fund scholarships that can create graduates tailored to their needs,” Dykes said.
“GLACSIL will work to bring all that activity under one umbrella for the partners with whom we have already established quality relationships.”
An example of this collaboration in practice is a project by the University and Thales to produce a range of multi-sensor solutions for security applications, using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to support users and prevent cognitive overload.
“The specialist technical skills and knowledge our business requires are highly synergistic with the expertise of researchers at the University of Glasgow's School of Computer Science,” said Nicholas Wood, chief electro-optics technologist at Thales.
In the long term, the partnership aims to develop technologies to improve the performance of decision makers in complex environments.
Professor Phil Trinder, academic director and co-director of GLACSIL, said projects at the center will start relatively small, with companies that already have a close relationship with the university.
“Ultimately, the goal is to make GLACSIL accessible to companies of all sizes that could benefit from working closely with our academics,” he said. “We look forward to developing GLACSIL as an important part of Scotland’s thriving research and innovation culture over the coming years.”
Glasgow is rapidly becoming a major technology hub. Late last year, for example, FinTech Scotland, the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde unveiled the Financial Regulation Innovation Laboratory (FRIL) to work with the financial services industry to examine regulatory-based products and services. in technology.
In January, Glasgow City Council and the Smart Things Accelerator Center (STAC) launched a new innovation center for drone, robotics, artificial intelligence, IoT, nanotechnology and cleantech research.
The city has three innovation districts: Glasgow City Innovation District (GCID), Glasgow Riverside Innovation District (GRID) and Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District (AMIDS), which provide businesses and startups technology companies access to a variety of acceleration programs.
