About the TSSG

By: Margaret Grene

Recent figures from ICT Ireland, the organisation representing the Information and Communications Technology sector, show that the sector employs almost 100,000 people in 980 companies in the country. Ireland is still the largest exporter of software in the world and seven of the world's leading software companies have a base in Ireland. Total exports of ICT products and services amounted to almost EUR30 billion in 2002 representing 34% of all exports. On top of this, the indigenous software sector currently employs 18,000 people, compared with 3,000 people in 1992.

With these achievements, of course, comes the threat of losing them and complacency now could lead to very significant gaps in the fabric of our economy in the near future.
Research and Development offers a safeguard against this by ensuring that Ireland stays at the forefront of the ICT sector and as our traditional IT companies move their activities to lower cost locations, we have the technology and the expertise to produce the new breed of converged applications and platforms, argues Dr. Willie Donnelly, Director of the TSSG and newly appointed Head of Research and Innovation at Waterford Institute of Technology, this is our mandate.

Owing its existence to Donnelly and his colleagues Eamonn De Leastar and Mícheál Ó Foghlú at the Institute the TSSG was established after an initial proposal for European Commission funding was accepted in 1997. Six years later the group can claim a turnover of over nine million euros; successful transition from the Commission's fifth to sixth framework research funding streams with news about successes in the second tranche of the sixth framework already coming in; and forty-five full-time staff working on the campus. But this is really only telling half the story.

Research, it seems, is by its very nature a collaborative process. And almost all of the research carried out at the TSSG, whether it is funded by Enterprise Ireland, by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) or by the European Commission is done in virtual collaboration with industrial partners and with other research organisations at home or abroad. So the research results are really the work of approximately two hundred researchers, all of which are linked via the TSSG.
These collaborations are best illustrated by describing the process itself.

From a very simplistic viewpoint, the research concepts are devised based on inputs and suggestions from industry and from society in general. These requirements are then used to build and test systems and the results are fed back to standards bodies and to industry.

It is an understanding of the detail of this process that has formed the cornerstone of the group. The technology brings the dynamic to the organisation and the process is our constant, says Donnelly.
This coalition of constant with change has paid dividends. Now, one of the largest research groups in the country, the TSSG is in a position not only to attract substantial funding but also to attract some of the best of breed in senior researchers and research fellows.

Happy Christmas to the Munster Express readers from all the staff at the TSSG.