Professor Alan Smeaton:

The CRTs probably provide the best bang for buck in terms of funding from the funding agency.

There are 600 or 700 PhD students. It is not a one-to-one mentorship system. Those students have to complete between 60 and 90 credits where they attended modules on commercialisation, IP management and presentation skills. They also have to spend three months working in an industry. Some of them spend more than three months; they go back a second time. For example, one of my students worked for a small start-up in the UCD innovation centre. His task was to go in and take some legacy code which had been written in Fortran and turn it into Python. He reduced the compute time for protein scanning by a hundredfold in that company. They loved him. It was not directly related to his PhD topic but he got that hands-on industry experience. Practically every one of the CRT students would have a similar experience. Some of them worked in large multinationals. Others worked in start-ups. In terms of there being a reaction to the speed of change of AI, I would hate to be doing a PhD in AI right now because it becomes dated so quickly. However, they have to be open and agile. That is why they go to conferences and workshops.