Dr. Ciarán Seoighe:

I will start and my colleague Professor Smeaton may wish to join in. In the first instance, not all the research will necessarily be specifically in AI because AI has a broad base, including data analytics and privacy security, and ethics compliance. There is a wide range of things around those too. A lot of people will have been reading about the centres for research training, CRTs, which were established about seven or eight years ago based on a recognition that data analytics was something that was evolving. Our lead times as a funding agency are quite long. If we want to be producing hundreds of PhD graduates in a certain area, we need to be thinking well ahead because between launching a call, recruiting students and training them for four years, we need to be looking six years ahead. That is what the CRTs are about. They engage directly with industry and PhD students are trained in an area so that they are ready to hit the ground running and move at pace.

The €400 million in funding ranges across everything starting from that very individual bottom-up blue-skies early-stage research where people are just thinking about what is coming next. It might not be directly applicable to industry today but it is the thing we need a basis for because ultimately that becomes the future of ideas.