Tag Archives: Northern Ireland

Crackpot or visionary? Teaching seven-year-olds about intellectual property

It’s been a while since I’ve devoted a posting to intellectual property issues and my focus is usually on science/technology and how intellectual property issues relate to those fields. As a writer, I support a more relaxed approach to copyright and patent law and, in particular, I want to see the continuation of ‘fair use’ as it’s called in the US and ‘fair dealing’ as it’s called in Canada. I support the principle of making money from your work so you can continue to contribute creatively. But, the application of intellectual property law seems to have been turned into a weapon against creativity of all sorts. (At the end of this post you’ll find links to three typical posts from the many I have written on this topic.)

I do take the point being made in the following video (but for seven-year-olds and up!!!) about trademarks/logos and trademark infringement from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office,

Here’s the description from Youtube’s Logo Mania webpage,

Published on Jan 16, 2018

Brian Wheeler’s January 17, 2018 article for BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) online news on UK Politics sheds a bit of light on this ‘campaign’ (Note: A link has been removed),

A campaign to teach children about copyright infringement on the internet, is employing cartoons and puns on pop stars’ names, to get the message across.

Even its makers admit it is a “dry” and “niche” subject for a cartoon aimed at seven-year-olds.

But the Intellectual Property Office adds learning to “respect” copyrights and trademarks is a “key life skill”.

And it is hoping the adventures of Nancy and the Meerkats can finally make intellectual property “fun”.

The series, which began life five years ago on Fun Kids Radio, was re-launched this week with the aim of getting its message into primary schools.

The Intellectual Property Office is leading the government’s efforts to crack down on internet piracy and protect the revenues of Britain’s creative industries.

The government agency is spending £20,000 of its own money on the latest Nancy campaign, which is part-funded by the UK music industry.

Catherine Davies, head of the IPO’s education outreach department, which already produces teaching materials for GCSE students, admitted IP was a “complex subject” for small children and something of a challenge to make accessible and entertaining.

Wheeler’s article is definitely worth reading in its entirety. In fact, I was so intrigued I chased down the government press release (from the www.gov.uk webpage),

Nancy and the Meerkats logo

Nancy and the Meerkats, with the help of Big Joe, present a new radio series to engage pupils with the concept of intellectual property (IP). Aimed at primary education, the resource guides pupils through the process of setting up a band and recording and releasing a song, which is promoted and performed live on tour.

Building on the success of the previous two series, Nancy and the Meerkats consists of a new radio series, short videos, comic book, lesson plans and competition. The supporting teaching resource also includes themed activities and engaging lesson plans. Together, these support and develop pupils’ understanding of copyright, trade marks and the importance of respecting IP.

Curriculum links are provided for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The series will launch on Monday 15th January [2018] at 5pm on Fun Kids Radio

Along with ‘Logo Mania’, you can find such gems as ‘Track Attack’ concerning song lyrics and, presumably, copyright issues, ‘The Hum Bone’ concerning patents, and ‘Pirates on the Internet’ about illegal downloading on the Fun Kids Radio website. Previous seasons have included ‘Are forks just for eating with?’, ‘Is a kaleidoscope useful?’, ‘Rubber Bands’, ‘Cornish Pasties’, and more. It seems Fun Kids Radio has moved from its focus on the types of questions and topics that might interest children to topics of interest for the music industry and the UK’s Intellectual Property Office. At a guess, I’m guessing those groups might be maximalists where copyright is concerned.

By the way, for those interested in teaching resources and more, go to http://crackingideas.com/third_party/Nancy+and+the+Meerkats.

Finally, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. I do know that I’m curious about how they decided to focus on seven to 11-year-olds. Are children in the UK heavily involved in content piracy? Is there a generation of grade school pop stars about to enter the music market? Where is the data and how did they gather it?

Should anyone be inclined to answer those questions, I look forward to reading your reply in the Comments section.

ETA January 19, 2018 (five minutes later) Oops! Here are the links promised earlier,

October 31, 2011: Patents as weapons and obstacles

June 28, 2012: Billions lost to patent trolls; US White House asks for comments on intellectual property (IP) enforcement; and more on IP

March 28, 2013: Intellectual property, innovation, and hindrances

There are many, many more posts. Just click on the category for ‘intellectual property’.

Vector Institute and Canada’s artificial intelligence sector

On the heels of the March 22, 2017 federal budget announcement of $125M for a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, the University of Toronto (U of T) has announced the inception of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in a March 28, 2017 news release by Jennifer Robinson (Note: Links have been removed),

A team of globally renowned researchers at the University of Toronto is driving the planning of a new institute staking Toronto’s and Canada’s claim as the global leader in AI.

Geoffrey Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus in computer science at U of T and vice-president engineering fellow at Google, will serve as the chief scientific adviser of the newly created Vector Institute based in downtown Toronto.

“The University of Toronto has long been considered a global leader in artificial intelligence research,” said U of T President Meric Gertler. “It’s wonderful to see that expertise act as an anchor to bring together researchers, government and private sector actors through the Vector Institute, enabling them to aim even higher in leading advancements in this fast-growing, critical field.”

As part of the Government of Canada’s Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Vector will share $125 million in federal funding with fellow institutes in Montreal and Edmonton. All three will conduct research and secure talent to cement Canada’s position as a world leader in AI.

In addition, Vector is expected to receive funding from the Province of Ontario and more than 30 top Canadian and global companies eager to tap this pool of talent to grow their businesses. The institute will also work closely with other Ontario universities with AI talent.

(See my March 24, 2017 posting; scroll down about 25% for the science part, including the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy of the budget.)

Not obvious in last week’s coverage of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy is that the much lauded Hinton has been living in the US and working for Google. These latest announcements (Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and Vector Institute) mean that he’s moving back.

A March 28, 2017 article by Kate Allen for TorontoStar.com provides more details about the Vector Institute, Hinton, and the Canadian ‘brain drain’ as it applies to artificial intelligence, (Note:  A link has been removed)

Toronto will host a new institute devoted to artificial intelligence, a major gambit to bolster a field of research pioneered in Canada but consistently drained of talent by major U.S. technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

The Vector Institute, an independent non-profit affiliated with the University of Toronto, will hire about 25 new faculty and research scientists. It will be backed by more than $150 million in public and corporate funding in an unusual hybridization of pure research and business-minded commercial goals.

The province will spend $50 million over five years, while the federal government, which announced a $125-million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in last week’s budget, is providing at least $40 million, backers say. More than two dozen companies have committed millions more over 10 years, including $5 million each from sponsors including Google, Air Canada, Loblaws, and Canada’s five biggest banks [Bank of Montreal (BMO). Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce ({CIBC} President’s Choice Financial},  Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Scotiabank (Tangerine), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Canada Trust)].

The mode of artificial intelligence that the Vector Institute will focus on, deep learning, has seen remarkable results in recent years, particularly in image and speech recognition. Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather” of deep learning for the breakthroughs he made while a professor at U of T, has worked for Google since 2013 in California and Toronto.

Hinton will move back to Canada to lead a research team based at the tech giant’s Toronto offices and act as chief scientific adviser of the new institute.

Researchers trained in Canadian artificial intelligence labs fill the ranks of major technology companies, working on tools like instant language translation, facial recognition, and recommendation services. Academic institutions and startups in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal and Edmonton boast leaders in the field, but other researchers have left for U.S. universities and corporate labs.

The goals of the Vector Institute are to retain, repatriate and attract AI talent, to create more trained experts, and to feed that expertise into existing Canadian companies and startups.

Hospitals are expected to be a major partner, since health care is an intriguing application for AI. Last month, researchers from Stanford University announced they had trained a deep learning algorithm to identify potentially cancerous skin lesions with accuracy comparable to human dermatologists. The Toronto company Deep Genomics is using deep learning to read genomes and identify mutations that may lead to disease, among other things.

Intelligent algorithms can also be applied to tasks that might seem less virtuous, like reading private data to better target advertising. Zemel [Richard Zemel, the institute’s research director and a professor of computer science at U of T] says the centre is creating an ethics working group [emphasis mine] and maintaining ties with organizations that promote fairness and transparency in machine learning. As for privacy concerns, “that’s something we are well aware of. We don’t have a well-formed policy yet but we will fairly soon.”

The institute’s annual funding pales in comparison to the revenues of the American tech giants, which are measured in tens of billions. The risk the institute’s backers are taking is simply creating an even more robust machine learning PhD mill for the U.S.

“They obviously won’t all stay in Canada, but Toronto industry is very keen to get them,” Hinton said. “I think Trump might help there.” Two researchers on Hinton’s new Toronto-based team are Iranian, one of the countries targeted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel bans.

Ethics do seem to be a bit of an afterthought. Presumably the Vector Institute’s ‘ethics working group’ won’t include any regular folks. Is there any thought to what the rest of us think about these developments? As there will also be some collaboration with other proposed AI institutes including ones at the University of Montreal (Université de Montréal) and the University of Alberta (Kate McGillivray’s article coming up shortly mentions them), might the ethics group be centered in either Edmonton or Montreal? Interestingly, two Canadians (Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta and Eric Racine at Université de Montréa) testified at the US Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues Feb. 10 – 11, 2014 meeting, the Brain research, ethics, and nanotechnology. Still speculating here but I imagine Caulfield and/or Racine could be persuaded to extend their expertise in ethics and the human brain to AI and its neural networks.

Getting back to the topic at hand the ‘AI sceneCanada’, Allen’s article is worth reading in its entirety if you have the time.

Kate McGillivray’s March 29, 2017 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online provides more details about the Canadian AI situation and the new strategies,

With artificial intelligence set to transform our world, a new institute is putting Toronto to the front of the line to lead the charge.

The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, made possible by funding from the federal government revealed in the 2017 budget, will move into new digs in the MaRS Discovery District by the end of the year.

Vector’s funding comes partially from a $125 million investment announced in last Wednesday’s federal budget to launch a pan-Canadian artificial intelligence strategy, with similar institutes being established in Montreal and Edmonton.

“[A.I.] cuts across pretty well every sector of the economy,” said Dr. Alan Bernstein, CEO and president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the organization tasked with administering the federal program.

“Silicon Valley and England and other places really jumped on it, so we kind of lost the lead a little bit. I think the Canadian federal government has now realized that,” he said.

Stopping up the brain drain

Critical to the strategy’s success is building a homegrown base of A.I. experts and innovators — a problem in the last decade, despite pioneering work on so-called “Deep Learning” by Canadian scholars such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, a former University of Toronto professor who will now serve as Vector’s chief scientific advisor.

With few university faculty positions in Canada and with many innovative companies headquartered elsewhere, it has been tough to keep the few graduates specializing in A.I. in town.

“We were paying to educate people and shipping them south,” explained Ed Clark, chair of the Vector Institute and business advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

The existence of that “fantastic science” will lean heavily on how much buy-in Vector and Canada’s other two A.I. centres get.

Toronto’s portion of the $125 million is a “great start,” said Bernstein, but taken alone, “it’s not enough money.”

“My estimate of the right amount of money to make a difference is a half a billion or so, and I think we will get there,” he said.

Jessica Murphy’s March 29, 2017 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) news online offers some intriguing detail about the Canadian AI scene,

Canadian researchers have been behind some recent major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Now, the country is betting on becoming a big player in one of the hottest fields in technology, with help from the likes of Google and RBC [Royal Bank of Canada].

In an unassuming building on the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, Geoff Hinton laboured for years on the “lunatic fringe” of academia and artificial intelligence, pursuing research in an area of AI called neural networks.

Also known as “deep learning”, neural networks are computer programs that learn in similar way to human brains. The field showed early promise in the 1980s, but the tech sector turned its attention to other AI methods after that promise seemed slow to develop.

“The approaches that I thought were silly were in the ascendancy and the approach that I thought was the right approach was regarded as silly,” says the British-born [emphasis mine] professor, who splits his time between the university and Google, where he is a vice-president of engineering fellow.

Neural networks are used by the likes of Netflix to recommend what you should binge watch and smartphones with voice assistance tools. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI used them to win against a human in the ancient game of Go in 2016.

Foteini Agrafioti, who heads up the new RBC Research in Machine Learning lab at the University of Toronto, said those recent innovations made AI attractive to researchers and the tech industry.

“Anything that’s powering Google’s engines right now is powered by deep learning,” she says.

Developments in the field helped jumpstart innovation and paved the way for the technology’s commercialisation. They also captured the attention of Google, IBM and Microsoft, and kicked off a hiring race in the field.

The renewed focus on neural networks has boosted the careers of early Canadian AI machine learning pioneers like Hinton, the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio, and University of Alberta’s Richard Sutton.

Money from big tech is coming north, along with investments by domestic corporations like banking multinational RBC and auto parts giant Magna, and millions of dollars in government funding.

Former banking executive Ed Clark will head the institute, and says the goal is to make Toronto, which has the largest concentration of AI-related industries in Canada, one of the top five places in the world for AI innovation and business.

The founders also want it to serve as a magnet and retention tool for top talent aggressively head-hunted by US firms.

Clark says they want to “wake up” Canadian industry to the possibilities of AI, which is expected to have a massive impact on fields like healthcare, banking, manufacturing and transportation.

Google invested C$4.5m (US$3.4m/£2.7m) last November [2016] in the University of Montreal’s Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.

Microsoft is funding a Montreal startup, Element AI. The Seattle-based company also announced it would acquire Montreal-based Maluuba and help fund AI research at the University of Montreal and McGill University.

Thomson Reuters and General Motors both recently moved AI labs to Toronto.

RBC is also investing in the future of AI in Canada, including opening a machine learning lab headed by Agrafioti, co-funding a program to bring global AI talent and entrepreneurs to Toronto, and collaborating with Sutton and the University of Alberta’s Machine Intelligence Institute.

Canadian tech also sees the travel uncertainty created by the Trump administration in the US as making Canada more attractive to foreign talent. (One of Clark’s the selling points is that Toronto as an “open and diverse” city).

This may reverse the ‘brain drain’ but it appears Canada’s role as a ‘branch plant economy’ for foreign (usually US) companies could become an important discussion once more. From the ‘Foreign ownership of companies of Canada’ Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Historically, foreign ownership was a political issue in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was believed by some that U.S. investment had reached new heights (though its levels had actually remained stable for decades), and then in the 1980s, during debates over the Free Trade Agreement.

But the situation has changed, since in the interim period Canada itself became a major investor and owner of foreign corporations. Since the 1980s, Canada’s levels of investment and ownership in foreign companies have been larger than foreign investment and ownership in Canada. In some smaller countries, such as Montenegro, Canadian investment is sizable enough to make up a major portion of the economy. In Northern Ireland, for example, Canada is the largest foreign investor. By becoming foreign owners themselves, Canadians have become far less politically concerned about investment within Canada.

Of note is that Canada’s largest companies by value, and largest employers, tend to be foreign-owned in a way that is more typical of a developing nation than a G8 member. The best example is the automotive sector, one of Canada’s most important industries. It is dominated by American, German, and Japanese giants. Although this situation is not unique to Canada in the global context, it is unique among G-8 nations, and many other relatively small nations also have national automotive companies.

It’s interesting to note that sometimes Canadian companies are the big investors but that doesn’t change our basic position. And, as I’ve noted in other postings (including the March 24, 2017 posting), these government investments in science and technology won’t necessarily lead to a move away from our ‘branch plant economy’ towards an innovative Canada.

You can find out more about the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence here.

BTW, I noted that reference to Hinton as ‘British-born’ in the BBC article. He was educated in the UK and subsidized by UK taxpayers (from his Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

Hinton was educated at King’s College, Cambridge graduating in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology.[1] He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1977 for research supervised by H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.[3][12]

It seems Canadians are not the only ones to experience  ‘brain drains’.

Finally, I wrote at length about a recent initiative taking place between the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington), the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative in a Feb. 28, 2017 posting noting that the initiative is being funded by Microsoft to the tune $1M and is part of a larger cooperative effort between the province of British Columbia and the state of Washington. Artificial intelligence is not the only area where US technology companies are hedging their bets (against Trump’s administration which seems determined to terrify people from crossing US borders) by investing in Canada.

For anyone interested in a little more information about AI in the US and China, there’s today’s (March 31, 2017)earlier posting: China, US, and the race for artificial intelligence research domination.

Nanotech business news from Turkey and from Northern Ireland

I have two nanotech business news bits, one from Turkey and one from Northern Ireland.

Turkey

A Turkish company has sold one of its microscopes to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), according to a Jan. 20, 2017 news item on dailysabah.com,

Turkish nanotechnology company Nanomanyetik has begun selling a powerful microscope to the U.S. space agency NASA, the company’s general director told Anadolu Agency on Thursday [Jan. 19, 2017].

Dr. Ahmet Oral, who also teaches physics at Middle East Technical University, said Nanomanyetik developed a microscope that is able to map surfaces on the nanometric and atomic levels, or extremely small particles.

Nanomanyetik’s foreign customers are drawn to the microscope because of its higher quality yet cheaper price compared to its competitors.

“There are almost 30 firms doing this work,” according to Oral. “Ten of them are active and we are among these active firms. Our aim is to be in the top three,” he said, adding that Nanomanyetik jumps to the head of the line because of its after-sell service.

In addition to sales to NASA, the Ankara-based firm exports the microscope to Brazil, Chile, France, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Korea and Spain.

Electronics giant Samsung is also a customer.

“Where does Samsung use this product? There are pixels in the smartphones’ displays. These pixels are getting smaller each year. Now the smallest pixel is 15X10 microns,” he said. Human hair is between 10 and 100 microns in diameter.

“They are figuring inner sides of pixels so that these pixels can operate much better. These patterns are on the nanometer level. They are using these microscopes to see the results of their works,” Oral said.

Nanomanyetik’s microscopes produces good quality, high resolution images and can even display an object’s atoms and individual DNA fibers, according to Oral.

You can find the English language version of the Nanomanyetik (NanoMagnetics Instruments) website here . For those with the language skills there is the Turkish language version, here.

Northern Ireland

A Jan. 22, 2017 news article by Dominic Coyle for The Irish Times (Note: Links have been removed) shares this business news and mention of a world first,

MOF Technologies has raised £1.5 million (€1.73 million) from London-based venture capital group Excelsa Ventures and Queen’s University Belfast’s Qubis research commercialisation group.

MOF Technologies chief executive Paschal McCloskey welcomed the Excelsa investment.

Established in part by Qubis in 2012 in partnership with inventor Prof Stuart James, MOF Technologies began life in a lab at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen’s.

Its metal organic framework (MOF) technology is seen as having significant potential in areas including gas storage, carbon capture, transport, drug delivery and heat transformation. Though still in its infancy, the market is forecast to grow to £2.2 billion by 2022, the company says.

MOF Technologies last year became the first company worldwide to successfully commercialise MOFs when it agreed a deal with US fruit and vegetable storage provider Decco Worldwide to commercialise MOFs for use in a food application.

TruPick, designed by Decco and using MOF Technologies’ environmentally friendly technology, enables nanomaterials control the effects of ethylene on fruit produce so it maintains freshness in storage or transport.

MOFs are crystalline, sponge-like materials composed of two components – metal ions and organic molecules known as linkers.

“We very quickly recognised the market potential of MOFs in terms of their unmatched ability for gas storage,” said Moritz Bolle from Excelsa Ventures. “This technology will revolutionise traditional applications and open countless new opportunities for industry. We are confident MOF Technologies is the company that will lead this seismic shift in materials science.

You can find MOF Technologies here.

Two Irelands-US research initiative: UNITE

Happy St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, 2015! Researchers, building on an earlier collaborative effort (FOCUS), have announced a new US-Ireland initiative, from a March 9, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

A three-year US-Ireland collaborative scientific project aims to reduce power consumption and increase battery life in mobile devices. Researchers will explore new semiconducting materials in the miniaturisation of transistors which are essential to all portable devices.

Leading researchers from the Republic of Ireland (Tyndall National Institute & Dublin City University), Northern Ireland (Queens University Belfast) and the US (University of Texas at Dallas) – each funded by their respective government agencies – are collaborating to develop ultra-efficient electronic materials through the UNITE project: Understanding the Nature of Interfaces in Two-Dimensional Electronic Devices.

A March 9, 2015 (?) Tyndall National Institute press release, which originated the news item, details the project, the researchers, and the hoped for applications,

UNITE will create and test the properties of atomically-thin, 2-dimensional layers of semiconductors called, Transition Metal Dichalcogenides or TMD’s for short. These layers are 100,000 times smaller than the smallest thing the human eye can see. The properties these materials have displayed to date suggest that they could facilitate extremely efficient power usage and high performance computing.

Tyndall’s lead researcher Dr. Paul Hurley explains that, “materials that we are currently reliant on, such as silicon, are soon expected to reach the limit of their performance. If we want to continue to increase performance, while maintaining or even reducing power consumption, it is important to explore these new TMD materials.”

The application of these materials in transistors could prolong the battery charge life of portable devices and phones, as well as having applications in larger more power intensive operations like data storage and server centres. This will have obvious environmental benefits through the reduction of electrical energy consumed by information and communication technologies as well as benefitting consumers.

UNITE builds on a previous highly successful US-Ireland collaborative project between these academic research partners called FOCUS. The success of this project played a role in demonstrating why funders should back the new project, including training for five graduate students in the USA and Ireland, as well as student exchanges between the Institutes, which will provide a broader scientific and cultural experience for the graduates involved.

The press release goes on to describe FOCUS, the researchers’ prior collaborative project,

UNITE builds on a previous highly successful US-Ireland collaborative project between these academic research partners called FOCUS. The success of this project played a role in demonstrating why funders should back the new project, including training for five graduate students in the USA and Ireland, as well as student exchanges between the Institutes, which will provide a broader scientific and cultural experience for the graduates involved.

A March 13, 2015 (?) Tyndall National Institute press release describes both an event to celebrate the success enjoyed by FOCUS and gives specifics about the achievements,

FOCUS, a US-Ireland collaborative project will be presented as a research success highlight to An Taoiseach Enda Kenny on St. Patrick’s Day along with industry and academic leaders, at a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) event in Washington DC. The event is to celebrate the SFI St. Patrick’s Day Science Medal Award and is an important occasion on the St. Patrick’s Day schedule in the USA.

Funded under the US-Ireland R&D Partnership Programme, FOCUS (Future Oxides and Channel Materials for Ultimate Scaling) linked researchers in Tyndall National Institute (Dr Paul Hurley), Dublin City University (Prof. Greg Hughes), Queen’s University Belfast (Dr David McNeill) and the University of Texas at Dallas (Prof. Robert Wallace).

Billions of silicon-based transistors are crammed onto a single chip and used in billions of electronic devices around the world such as computers, laptops and mobile phones. The FOCUS project group investigated if it was possible to use alternative materials to silicon in the active channels of transistors to improve their energy efficiency and battery life.

The consortium explored using Germanium and Indium-Gallium-Arsenide in combination with high dielectric constant oxides as a viable alternative to silicon. Their research was able to improve the electronic properties of these alternative semiconductor/oxide interfaces to the level needed for practical device applications and the outcomes of their research have now moved to industry for practical application.

The key achievements from the project include:

  • Strong collaboration with Intel USA and Intel Ireland resulting in Paul Hurley receiving the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award in 2012
  • Presentation of the project findings at the annual Intel European Research and Innovation Conference
  • 3 Postdocs trained and 5 PhDs awarded in areas of strong interest to semiconductor manufacturers
  • 35 journal papers published
  • 2011 article on InGaAs surface treatment optimisation listed as one of the top 10 most cited articles in the Journal of Applied Physics in 2012
  • 10 invited presentations at key scientific conferences
  • University research partnership established between Tyndall National Institute and University of Texas at Dallas
  • Project highlighted in Irish press, The Times of India and The Irish Voice
  • Visit by the Consul General of Ireland to University of Texas at Dallas
  • Numerous students and staff exchanges between all partner institutions

Good luck to the UNITE project!

Agriculture and nano in Ireland and at Stanford University (California)

I have two news items one of which concerns the countries of  Ireland and Northern Ireland and a recent workshop on agriculture and nanotechnology held in Belfast, Northern Ireland . The papers presented at the workshop have now been made available for downloading according to a Jan. 25, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

On January 9, 2014, safefood, the Institute for Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast, and Teagasc Food Research Centre organized a workshop Nanotechnology in the agri-food industry: Applications, opportunities and challenges. The presentations from this event are now availabled as downloadable pdf files …

According to its hompage, Teagasc “is the agriculture and food development authority in Ireland. Its mission is to support science-based innovation in the agri-food sector and the broader bioeconomy that will underpin profitability, competitiveness and sustainability.”

The full list of presentations and access to them can be found on Nanowerk or on this Teagasc publications page,

Presentations

My next item is also focused on agriculture although not wholly. From a Jan. 26, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

University researchers from two continents have engineered an efficient and environmentally friendly catalyst for the production of molecular hydrogen (H2), a compound used extensively in modern industry to manufacture fertilizer and refine crude oil into gasoline.

The Stanford University School of Engineering news release (dated Jan. 27, 2014) by Tom Abate, which originated the news item, (Note: Links have been removed) describes the work,

Although hydrogen is an abundant element, it is generally not found as the pure gas H2 but is generally bound to oxygen in water (H2O) or to carbon in methane (CH4), the primary component in natural gas. At present, industrial hydrogen is produced from natural gas using a process that consumes a great deal of energy while also releasing carbon into the atmosphere, thus contributing to global carbon emissions.

In an article published today in Nature Chemistry, nanotechnology experts from Stanford Engineering and from Denmark’s Aarhus University explain how to liberate hydrogen from water on an industrial scale by using electrolysis.

In electrolysis, electrical current flows through a metallic electrode immersed in water. This electron flow induces a chemical reaction that breaks the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The electrode serves as a catalyst, a material that can spur one reaction after another without ever being used up. Platinum is the best catalyst for electrolysis. If cost were no object, platinum might be used to produce hydrogen from water today.

But money matters. The world consumes about 55 billion kilograms of hydrogen a year. It now costs about $1 to $2 per kilogram to produce hydrogen from methane. So any competing process, even if it’s greener, must hit that production cost, which rules out electrolysis based on platinum.

In their Nature Chemistry paper, the researchers describe how they re-engineered the atomic structure of a cheap and common industrial material to make it nearly as efficient at electrolysis as platinum – a finding that has the potential to revolutionize industrial hydrogen production.

The project was conceived by Jakob Kibsgaard, a post-doctoral researcher with Thomas Jaramillo, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. Kibsgaard started this project while working with Flemming Besenbacher, a professor at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) at Aarhus.

There’s more about about the history of electrolysis and hydrogen production and about how the scientists developed their technique in the news release but this time I want to focus on the issue of scalability,. From the news release,

But in chemical engineering, success in a beaker is only the beginning.

The larger questions were: could this technology scale to the 55 billion kilograms per year global demand for hydrogen, and at what finished cost per kilogram?

Last year, Jaramillo and a dozen co-authors studied four factory-scale production schemes in an article for The Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal of Energy and Environmental Science.

They concluded that it could be feasible to produce hydrogen in factory-scale electrolysis facilities at costs ranging from $1.60 to $10.40 per kilogram – competitive at the low end with current practices based on methane – though some of their assumptions were based on new plant designs and materials.

“There are many pieces of the puzzle still needed to make this work and much effort ahead to realize them,” Jaramillo said. “However, we can get huge returns by moving from carbon-intensive resources to renewable, sustainable technologies to produce the chemicals we need for food and energy.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the researchers’ paper,

Building an appropriate active-site motif into a hydrogen-evolution catalyst with thiomolybdate [Mo3S13]2− clusters by Jakob Kibsgaard, Thomas F. Jaramillo, & Flemming Besenbacher. Nature Chemistry (2014) doi:10.1038/nchem.1853 Published online 26 January 2014

This article is behind a paywall.

Queen’s University (Belfast) and ionic liquid chemistry voted the most important British innovation of the 21st Century

Given all the excitement about graphene these days, one might expect that it would be voted the ‘most important British innovation of the 21st Century’. In a surprise move, ionic liquid chemistry has achieved that title according to a Mar. 27, 2013 news item on Azonano,

The work of staff in the Queen’s University Ionic Liquid Laboratories (QUILL) Research Centre has been named as the innovation that will have the greatest impact in the coming Century.

QUILL fought off stiff competition from 11 other innovations from across the United Kingdom to win the vote which was part of the Science Museum’s Initiative on Great British past and future Innovations. This initiative was also sponsored, amongst others, by: Engineering UK, The Royal Society, British Science Association, Royal Academy of Engineering and Department for Business Innovation & Skills

A team of nearly 100 scientists are exploring the potential of ionic liquids at Queen’s. Known as ‘super solvents’, they are salts that remain liquid at room temperature and do not form vapours. They can be used as non-polluting alternatives to conventional solvents and are revolutionising chemical processes by offering a much more environmentally friendly solution than traditional methods.

The Queen’s University Mar. 26?, 2013 news release provides more information,

Professor Ken Seddon is Co-Director of QUILL. His seminal paper started the world-wide surge of interest in ionic liquids and it has now reached over 1000 citations. Speaking about their latest achievement, he said: “We are delighted to win as this shines a very public spotlight on how a team of chemists can dramatically improve the quality of the environment for everyone. Being named the most important British innovation of the 21st Century is recognition of the high calibre of research being undertaken at QUILL and throughout the University.”

Professor Jim Swindall, Co-Director of QUILL at Queen’s, said: “This is fantastic news for QUILL and for the University. This vote confirms that Queen’s work on ionic liquid chemistry will eventually have a bearing on most of our lives. The liquids dissolve almost everything, from elements such as sulfur and phosphorus (that traditionally require nasty solvents) to polymers, including biomass. They can even remove bacterial biofilms such as MRSA. They are already being used in a process to remove mercury from natural gas by Petronas in Malaysia. Others can be used as heat pumps, compression fluids, or lubricants – the list is limitless.”

Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster said: “I congratulate Queen’s University on winning this most prestigious of accolades. It is a great achievement for Professors Ken Sedden and Jim Swindall and the entire team at QUILL and it is a great day for Northern Ireland science. This recognition underlines the strength of research being undertaken by Queen’s and the impact this research has on the chemical and environmental industry around the world.”

Robin Swann, Chairman of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Committee for Employment and Learning said: “The result of this public vote is terrific news for Northern Ireland as it demonstrates the importance of the research being undertaken at Queen’s. The fact that global energy giant Petronas is already using the technology in its plants demonstrates the value and global impact of the research at the University and I congratulate Queen’s on this significant achievement.”

Set up in 1999, QUILL is an industry/university cooperative research centre and is now a world leader in the creation of ionic liquids. Key industry partners include BASF, Chevron, Invista, Merck, Petronas, Proctor & Gamble and Shell.

Congratulations to the folks at QUILL!

Ireland’s nanotechnology strategy

Since September (2010) there’s been a bit more news about Ireland’s nanotechnology efforts than usual as I noted in my Sept, 21, 2910 posting about a visit that Alberta’s Minister of Advanced Education, and Minister Liaison to the Canadian Forces, Doug Horner made to a city in the other country that shares that island, Northern Ireland’s Ulster, to see its Nanotechnology Centre.

On the Ireland front, Forfás, Ireland’s policy advisory board for enterprise and science, released, August 31, 2010, its Nanotechnology Commercialisation Framework 2010 -2014 with these comments (from the news release),

A substantial investment by the Irish Government in nanotechnology in recent years has made Ireland home to a world-class infrastructural base which will serve as a strong foundation to produce high quality nanotechnology research, push commercialisation and ensure Ireland’s international competitiveness in this space, according to a new report published today by Forfás, Ireland’s policy advisory board for enterprise and science. Ireland’s Nanotechnology Commercialisation Framework 2010-2014 presents a national framework to position Ireland as a knowledge and innovation centre for certain niche areas of nanotechnology.

Shortly after the framework was released an Irish delegation visited Russia to participate in a forum with RUSNANO (from the news item on Azonano),

On the 8th of September [2010] the one-day Russian-Ireland Forum of Nanotechnology was held in the head office of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Russia). As the leading Russian manufacturer of equipment for nanoscience NT-MDT Co. participated in the Forum.

The Forum was organized by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (RUSNANO).

SFI is the statutory agency in Ireland responsible for disbursing funds for basic science research with a strategic focus. SFI plays a leading role in the implementation of the National Development Plan of Ireland 2007-2013. Under its remit, SFI invests in new knowledge projects in the area of information and energy-efficient technologies, nano- and biotechnologies, academic researchers.

RUSNANO is Russian state owned corporation established in 2007 to enable Government policy in the field of Nanotechnology. The corporation is aimed at commercializing developments in nanotechnology. RUSNANO co-invests in nanotechnology industry projects that have high commercial potential or social benefit.

President of Ireland Mary McAleese and RUSNANO CEO and Chairman of the Executive Broad Anatoly Chubais opened the Forum. In the welcoming remark, President of Ireland stressed the importance of the Forum and scientific cooperation between Russia and Ireland.

I see that NT-MDT is more intimately tied to Russian enterprise than I had realized. (I have previously posted about NT-MDT and the education market in this October 25, 2010 posting.)

Getting back to the framework, an October 18, 2010 posting on Intellibriefs notes this,

After investing heavily in infrastructure dedicated to nanotechnology, Ireland gets a real strategy and a coordination group involving industrialists, academics and officials from government agencies.

In August 2010 the Irish agency “PACKAGE” (Ireland’s policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation [aka Forfás]), issued a report recommending to target three key technology areas: advanced materials, electronics technology for Information and communication, and nanobiotechnology. This is to encourage the development of new products in the areas of electronics, medical devices and diagnostics, environmental applications and improved industrial processes.

This appears to be a translation of a French language news item from bulletins-electroniques.com,

Après avoir investi massivement dans les infrastructures dédiées aux nanotechnologies, l’Irlande se dote d’une véritable stratégie et d’un groupe de coordination associant des industriels, des universitaires et des responsables d’agences gouvernementales.

En août 2010 l’agence irlandaise “FORFAS” (Ireland’s policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation), a publié un rapport préconisant de cibler 3 domaines technologiques-clé : les matériaux avancés, l’électronique pour les technologies de l’information et la communication et les nanobiotechnologies. Il s’agit de favoriser le développement de produits nouveaux dans les secteurs de l’électronique, des dispositifs médicaux et outils de diagnostic, des applications environnementales et de l’amélioration des procédés industriels.

All of this puts me in mind of how Ireland established itself economically in the 1990s by focusing on science and technology. It appears they are about to take another gamble using a similar strategy but focusing on new sciences and technologies such as nanotechnology in a fashion designed to mobilize as much of the population as possible, i.e., a national strategy communicated as widely as possible.

Alberta’s Minister of Advanced Education visits Ulster’s Nanotechnology Centre

The Sept. 20, 2010 University of Ulster news release caught my eye since it concerns Alberta’s Deputy Premier, Minister of Advanced Education, and Minister Liaison to the Canadian Forces, Doug Horner. (The province of Alberta hosts Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology and also supports and promotes nanotechnology through one of five Alberta Innovates agencies, the Alberta Innovates Technology Futures [formerly nanoAlberta] and other initiatives.) From the news release,

The visit came as part of a four-day fact finding visit to Northern Ireland by Mr Horner, who is Deputy Premier of Alberta, Minister for Advanced Education and Minister Liaison to the Canadian Forces.

During his visit to the Jordanstown campus, he met Professor James McLaughlin, Director of the Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials Research Institute and Director of Innovation Tim Brundle for a breakfast briefing on the University’s work.

Mr Brundle said: “We’re very excited by the opportunities partnership with Alberta can offer. There are a lot of similarities between the economic focus of Alberta and the interests of Northern Ireland and we hope to move forward quickly to build on these opportunities.”

Professor McLaughlin concurred: “The University already has links with several leading Canadian universities , especially in nanotechnology. Our aim is to try to develop funded links between Ulster and colleagues in Canada, focusing on the way that healthcare sensor technology innovation can be underpinned and enabled by increased nanotechnology research.

“Connected health is a growing focus in Canada as well as here in Northern Ireland: they also have an interest in clean technology – also a focus here at Ulster. “

I find this interesting not only for the Canadian connection but because there’s been a fair amount of news floating about nanotechnology initiatives in Ireland, especially some recent joint initiatives with RUSNANO (Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies). Note: I recently posted about a Canada-RUSNANO venture capital initiative, Sept. 14, 2010 posting.