The E3: Creating Opportunity for Ireland
The coalition of expertise outlined earlier - and enriched by strong links to the Schools of Computer Science and Statistics, Business, and Physics, as well as our active networks of international collaborations - will ensure that the E3 sets radical agendas at the place where technology and nature meet. Insights into the evolutionary role of engineering and human action will lead to new designs, technologies and policies that mediate the interactions of humankind with our environments. These will be optimized with respect to the constrained resources they depend upon. The E3 will be an inspiring and groundbreaking presence in the Irish innovation and enterprise landscape, and will educate a new kind of graduate thinker, equipped to understand and to lead in the technology-enhanced ecosystems of the 21st century.
The E3 will be an important actor within the College’s forthcoming Innovation and Entrepreneurship Strategy, and is strongly aligned to many of the priority areas of the Government’s National Research Prioritization Exercise (NRPE), notably areas A to E, and K to M. As such, the institute will confer an important advantage on the College and on the country in competing for major funding streams within the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme (2014-20). Its central idea of a nature-technology symbiosis will set the strategic research and innovation agendas in Europe for many years to come. The E3 will participate within themes such as assisted living, biologically-inspired communication networks, advanced manufacturing, smart city infrastructures, sustainable and renewable exploitation of environmental resources, ecosystem goods and services, new and optimized technologies for energy harvesting, and the creation of virtual environments. These agendas will be advanced through the cooperation of engineering scientists, natural scientists and environmental policy experts cooperating within the E3.
The unified vision of the E3 is a radical one. It differentiates us from institutes in both the technology and environment space in existence at this time. The E3 - with its radical and pioneering agenda focussed on technology interventions for and by evolution - will support our enterprise economy at home and further afield, enhancing the welfare and well-being of all.
In Ireland, the E3 will be an important contributor to the enterprise-led national economic recovery. The sustainable and innovative knowledge and designs that will emerge from the E3 will support Irish industry and contribute to job creation in areas such as (i) wind, wave and solar energy conversion technologies, (ii) medical device technologies, (iii) the microelectronics design industry, (iv) technologies and policy for agriculture, aquaculture and forestry, (v) telecommunications, (vi) digital gaming and virtual environments, (vii) national projects for substandard building remediation and mitigation of flooding threats, (viii) environmental management, and (ix) infrastructures and analytics for big data.