Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

SFI Strategic Research Cluster award for FAME project

Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan T.D, has on Wednesday, February 25th 2009, announced the establishment of 5 new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) representing a €23.9 million investment in ground-breaking, collaborative research activities involving seven academic institutions and 22 companies. One of these is led by the TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology: FAME (Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services), with funding of €5.9 Million over 5 years 2009-2013.

About FAME Lead PI (Name and Title): William Donnelly, Dr.
Lead Institution: Waterford Institute of Technology
Co-PIs (Names, Titles, Institution):

• Declan O’Sullivan, Dr., TCD
• Liam Murphy, Prof., UCD
• Douglas Leith, Prof., NUIM
• John Strassner, WIT

Academic Partner Institutions:

• Trinity College Dublin, TCD
• University College Dublin, UCD
• National University Ireland Maynooth, NUIM
• University College Cork, UCC

Industry Partners:

• Alcatel-Lucent, Dublin
• Cisco Systems, Galway
• LM Ericsson Limited, Dublin
• IBM Ireland Product Limited, Dublin
• Telefónica I+D, Madrid, Spain
• Hewlett Packard, New Jersey, USA

A key challenge for the telecommunications industry is to deliver and manage end-to-end communications services over an interconnected, but heterogeneous, networking infrastructure. The SFI-funded Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end communication services (FAME) Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) will develop autonomic management solutions incorporating new semantic analysis techniques, that can be applied to build federated network and service management systems that understand changes in the environment and coordinate their actions to reconfigure network resources and services to effectively deliver services on an end-to-end basis. FAME brings together academics and industry specialists in the management of communications networks and services. This project is pushing the barriers of what is technically possible in terms of allowing forms of self-management, allowing some parts of a network, and some services that run on these networks, to “work out for themselves” what is needed to operate efficiently. Intellectual Property and technical know-how generated by FAME will enable the creation and growth of an Irish-based international communications service management cluster that will grow the considerable investment already made in this sector by multinational companies, such as the cluster partners Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM, and Telefónica I+D, as well as indigenous communications management companies. Together this cluster will help position Ireland as a global leader in communications management related research, product development and professional services.

In the photograph:

Front Row:

Brian O'Donnovan (IBM), Declan O'Sullivan (TCD), Willie Donnelly (WIT), Frank Gannon (Director, SFI), Mary Coughlan (Tánaiste, Minister DETE), Dave Lewis (TCD), Jimmy Devins (Minister STI), Seán Murphy (UCD), Mícheál Ó Foghlú (WIT), Philip Perry (UCD), Liam Murphy (UCD).

Back Row:

David Malone (NUIM), John Keeney (TCD), Simon Foley (UCC), Brendan Jennings (WIT), Aidan Boran (Alcatel-Lucent/Bell-Labs), Sven van der Meer (WIT), Martin Serrano (WIT), Rob Brennan (TCD), Doug Leith (NUIM), Owen Conlon (TCD), Sasi Balasubramaniam (WIT), Dmitri Botvich (WIT), Liam Fallon (Ericsson). Tweet Posted by mofoghlu at February 25, 2009 10:53 PM | TrackBack