University of Limerick starts to flex its software R&D muscles

Plassey House, a serene 19th-century wealthy merchant's home, gazes down quietly on broad lawns and forests that slope towards a gentle bend in the Shannon.

As morning sunlight filters in, University of Limerick (UL) faculty members gather for coffee and a read of the papers in graceful rooms lined with the precious early Irish landscape paintings and portraits.

The building - now the heart of UL's administration, with space for small conferences, a faculty room, and parts of the university's extensive art collections - was once the entire university, back when it was a National Institute for Higher Education.

UL has come a long way since, transformed into one of the more vibrant and beautiful Irish universities. Certainly, it is the most contemporary and forward-looking in design terms, with fresh, lively architecture complementing an enviable location on the Shannon. And it has expanded from its original engineering focus to take in a spread of courses across science and the humanities.

But science and technology remain an intrinsic part of the university's identity, though Prof Vincent Cunnane, vice-president of research, acknowledges a recent decline in the numbers of science students, common - and worrying - to all Irish institutions.

"But it would be very foolish of us to say it's not our problem," he says, gazing out of his office windows. "So we go out to the schools." Physics, chemistry and computing lecturers visit children to give them a greater sense of how science can be their future career, he says. UL also has a programme that helps to train tomorrow's science teachers.

And the university has an ambitious plan to beef up its research programmes and increase their national - and international - visibility. New Government funding, dispersed through Science Foundation Ireland, is pumping blood back into once anaemic Irish science research, says Prof Kevin Ryan, UL's registrar and vice-president of academic affairs.

"We have two to three areas we'd really like to push forward, including telecommunications research and software," he says. He's putting together a cross-university bid for SFI funds to establish a national centre for software engineering that will include UL, Dublin City University and the University of Maynooth.

The Republic has many software-dependent industries that don't produce software themselves but need highly reliable software for their operations, he says - sectors such as financial services, medical devices, and automotive systems.

Such a software centre would help enhance the business environment for those companies and develop the State's own research and development capabilities, a priority for the IDA.

The university's successful wooing of highly-regarded US software engineering researcher Dr Davis Parnas, who is in the process of setting up a software design programme at UL with 12 researchers, is seen as a cornerstone for expertise in the area.

While he waits for the hiring process to get under way for those researchers, Dr Parnas has settled into an enormous UL office and has conducted a series of lectures on some of his ideas behind good software design, delivered to both academics and industry (UL is right next to the National Technological Park, home to Dell Computer and many other tech firms).

Other programs within the university fold in relationships with technology companies located nearby or elsewhere within the state. Researchers say they can do work which the companies themselves would find too costly or involved. Such projects provide valuable experience for research students and are an income source for the university.

An increasing number of such projects - as well as general research without ties to industry - is done collaboratively with other institutions around the state, says Prof Cunnane.

That's an important development for the often claustrophobic and overly protective world of Irish research of the past, when funding was miniscule and State support almost non-existent.

Relationships already exist with Media Lab Europe in Dublin, NUI Galway, and University College Cork, among others. UL is actively looking outward these days, say researchers; including beyond the Republic's shores. They are talking to China about a technology exchange programme, for example, explains UL president Prof Roger Downer. He wants UL to have an international profile.

"There is no such thing any more as peripherality," says Prof Cunnane.