As part of its role in a major consortium the University of Ulster has attracted £148K of funding from the highly competitive and prestigious UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) to establish the first-ever India-UK Postgraduate Research School between both countries. The funding comes as part of the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) of Excellence in Next Generation Networks which has BT Group as its lead industrial partner together with world-leading academic and industrial collaborators. The IU-ATC will conduct breakthrough research into fixed-wireless networks, fault-tolerant communications infrastructures and networked ICT Systems and applications between both countries.
The award offers funding for Science & Technology projects jointly funded by Department of Science and Technology (DST) Government of India and the British government under UKIERI in key subject areas, one of which includes Next Generation Networks in Telecommunications.
Professor Gerard Parr from the Faculty of Computing and Engineering said:
“As part of this UKIERI-DST project, the IU-ATC has already attracted and committed over £1.5million to create opportunities for twenty three PhD scholarships and sixteen industrial internship positions at BT, InfoSys, Sasken and Wipro between the consortium partners in both countries over the next 4 years. The UKIERI funding will be available to support PhD research training projects and exchange of consortium postgraduate and post-doctorate research scientists in areas of strategic relevance to the IU-ATC agenda, including resilient communications infrastructures, embedded energy-aware devices, pervasive sensors, real-time network data analytics for fixed-wireless broadband, end-to-end network security protocols, cross layer protocols for real-time interoperability and smart antenna design for NG mobile communications."
The IU-ATC Virtual Graduate Research School will provide a step-change in research and education cooperation between the UK and India, and given the internationally leading expertise within the consortium it will provide creative opportunities for high quality, innovative competitive research and academic excellence that will also have an economic and social impact.
Dr Nader Azarmi, Chief Technologist within the world-renowned BT Research Laboratories at Adastral Park in the UK stated: "This is a very exciting time for our consortium and BT is delighted to be working as the Industrial Lead partner. This new funding provides an endorsement of our initiative from both governments and provides us with a mandate to take forward our plans at the larger scale over the next five years”.
The launch of the IU-ATC Virtual Graduate Research School was announced by BT at The World Economic Forum - India Economic Summit 2007 in New Delhi in December which is organised in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CM), where over 600 industry leaders and policymakers will convene this year under the theme “India: Building Centres of Excellence”.
Professor Parr also received an invitation from the Department of Telecommunications of the Indian government to participate in a high-level Roundtable discussion during India Telecom 2007 in December where he shared his vision and strategies for the IU-ATC with colleagues from government, industry and other international academic institutions including Stanford, Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology.
Notes to editors
The UK academic and industrial partners are:
The Indian academic and industrial partners are:
India Telecom 2007
http://www.indiatelecom.org/
World Economic Forum- India Summit
http://www.weforum.org/en/events/IndiaEconomicSummit2007/index.htm
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Professor Gerard Parr
