Professor James Gleeson:

On Professor Nolan's points, flexibility is very important for researchers. That comes back to an earlier point about climate. We found that our investigators within the CRT, while they are engaged in developing fundamentals of data science, the actual areas of application and interest have very much pivoted towards climate over the past few years, in particular, ecology. We have seen many people work in the area of the data science of ecology. The flexibility of a large cohort-based programme such as this will enable investigators to look at directions as they emerge and as the debate on artificial intelligence heats up fast. To be able to switch quickly into those areas is important.

On the specific question regarding placements, I am from UL. I am proud to work there. The CRT is jointly run with UCD and Maynooth University. It is not specific to UL. The UL co-op programme is very successful for undergraduates. On how we run our graduate placements, again, these are essentially organised through the CRT. We have a programme manager who engages with our industry partners. We have a group of industry partners called the enterprise alliance.

Each of them is willing to take a student as part of the membership of the programme. There is an arrangement where the students and the enterprise partners meet on a regular basis and network. We run a matchmaking algorithm, namely, the Gale-Shapley algorithm, if the Senator is interested, to ensure that the matching between students and industries is optimal. That is how it is organised. It is essentially done for the students; the students do not have to find their own placement.