CeADAR Technology Portfolio Available for Free Licence to Support COVID-19 R&D Activities

CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, today announced that its portfolio of technology demonstrator projects will now be freely available to license by companies and industry for potential use in their COVID-19 research and development (R&D) activities.

CeADAR, an Enterprise Ireland and IDA-funded Technology Centre is a partnership between University College Dublin (UCD) and TU Dublin and is based at NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre.

CeADAR will work with NovaUCD and TU Dublin Hothouse, the knowledge transfer centres in UCD and TU Dublin respectively, to license relevant technology demonstrator projects using Knowledge Transfer Ireland’s (KTI) recently announced dedicated COVID-19 Non-Exclusive Royalty-Free (NERF) Licence.

The available technology demonstrator projects, which are in the broad areas of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and machine learning, have been developed by CeADAR researchers at UCD and TU Dublin over the last several years.

They are based on proposals received from industry members and are all at the proof-of-concept stage, which demonstrates the potential of the particular technical approach to the challenges set by members.

Dr Edward McDonnell, CeADAR, Director, said, “At CeADAR we want to play our part in helping companies and industry who are engaged in R&D activities to address challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. As such we are delighted to make our portfolio of technology demonstrator projects available under a NERF licence to interested parties.”

“These demonstrator projects were not developed with COVID-19 in mind and will need to be reworked once use cases have been identified by industry and we can also support the industry in this regard with our technical expertise and knowledge.”

The aim of the two-page KTI COVID-19 NERF licence is to speed up the dissemination of critical COVID-19 related intellectual property (IP) from Irish universities and Institutes of Technology to companies.

The KTI COVID-19 NERF will remain in place until such time as the World Health Organization (WHO) declares the current COVID-19 pandemic to have ended.

Tom Flanagan, Director of Enterprise and Commercialisation, NovaUCD, said, “We strongly support and welcome today’s announcement by CeADAR that it intends to use the new COVID-19 NERF licence to help accelerate the dissemination of its technology demonstrator projects.

Our knowledge transfer team at NovaUCD will work with CeADAR to help companies and industry parties to quickly access the relevant IP.”

Dr Paul Maguire, Head of Innovation and Enterprise, TU Dublin Hothouse, said, “Hothouse and TU Dublin CeADAR researchers are delighted to support any company wishing to evaluate CeADAR demonstrator in light to helping the global fight against COVID-19.

We are ready, willing and able to play our part to help overcome the effects of this virus, and get life back to normal as soon as possible”.

The CeADAR portfolio of technology demonstrator projects is available via https://www.ceadar.ie/our-work/technology-demonstrators/.

If you are interested in any of these projects, please contact Dr Edward McDonnell via e: edward.mcdonnell@ucd.ie or e: cv19@ceadar.ie to discuss further.