This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688900
NUI Galway is a research-led University emphasising inter-disciplinary research programmes and collaborations with industry partners in areas of strategic importance. The university is ranked in the top 2% of universities in the world for the quality of its research and teaching. Annual direct research income was €55m in 2014. The University has been highly successful in attracting significant research funding from EU programmes: income from FP7 stands at almost €50m and NUI Galway is the most successful Irish university in the first round of H2020 funding, winning approx. €25m to support almost 50 projects. Research at NUI Galway is concentrated around five major research themes: Biomedical Science and Engineering;
Informatics, Physical and Computational Science; Applied Social Sciences and Public Policy; Environment, Marine and Energy; Humanities in Context.
The College of Engineering and Informatics is particularly strong in the themes of Informatics, Physical and Computational Sciences, and Biomedical Science and Engineering, receiving significant research funding in these areas that are of direct relevance to this proposal. Within these themes, the Signal Processing & Communications Research Laboratory in the College of Engineering & Informatics is currently pursuing research in several applications of signal and image processing, including: driver assistance, driver comfort and wireless communications for the automotive environment; development of intelligent signal processing algorithms for monitoring of vital signs for use in ambulatory monitoring and computer aided diagnostics.
The laboratory focuses on the development of intelligent, robust and efficient signal processing algorithms.
Staff and Facilities: NUI Galway has 2,290 staff (44% male, 56% female) and 17,282 students (2014) including 2,675 international students from 110 countries, and 3,569 graduate students. The university is in the final stages of a €400 million capital investment programme.
Commercialisation of research: Technologies developed, and taken up by industry, span areas such as medical devices, ICT, animal health, biopharma, tissue engineering, bio-refining and bio-energy. In 2013/14, 5 new NUI Galway start-up companies were formed, 11 technologies were licensed to new or existing companies, 67 new invention disclosures were filed, and 40 new collaborative R&D projects with industry partners were started.