National


In Ireland, a number of government agencies invest in excellent academic researchers and research teams who are most likely to generate new knowledge, leading-edge technologies and competitive enterprises. The Centre has a strong track record in securing Exchequer Funding through Science Foundation Ireland, the Irish Research Council (IRC) and Enterprise Ireland programmes.

Some examples of funded projects include:

Beyond 2022 Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury is a ground-breaking, state-funded, collaborative research programme to reconstruct virtually the Public Record Office of Ireland and its collections destroyed at the Four Courts on June 30th, 1922. Led by TCD, in partnership with the National Archives of Ireland, National Archives UK, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and Irish Manuscripts Commission, Beyond 2022 offers a Digital Reimagining of seven centuries of Ireland’s collective memories and will provide a global showcase for Ireland as a leader in hi-tech innovation and cultural creativity.

Work funded under smaller IRC funded schemes such as the New Foundations grant enabled research for the “Irish Archiving and Digital Storytelling” project overseen by Prof Owen Conlan, as well as funding under the IRC Ulysses 2020 Scheme enabled Dr Teresa Lynn with her research on language tech for under-resourced languages for her project “Killing two birds with one stone: leveraging advanced language technology for under-resourced languages using cross-lingual learning”.  There were also two wins for the prestigious IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowships in the second half of 2020 for: Dr Sheila Castilho for research on “Document-Level Machine Translation Evaluation” and Dr Harshvardhan Pandit for research on “Exploring Privacy Risks of Technologies Using Knowledge Graphs”.

 In 2020, there were successes under the SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme in support of excellent independent researchers for Prof Claire Gillan for her project “Rich, Repeated and Robust: A Smartphone-Based Approach to Computational Psychiatry”; for Dr Aidan Meade for his project “CHEMPREDICT DL – Segregation of breast cancer patients at low and high risk of recurrence with chemical imaging and deep learning”; and for Prof Jennifer Foster for her project “Rolling in the deep: unravelling a neural net’s capacity for language”. A list of the projects funded by SFI can be found HERE

The ADAPT Centre also had a swift and successful response to the SFI COVID-19 2020 related funding calls, including a number of cross-institutional and cross-Centre successes. A list of the projects funded can be found HERE 


  • RObots to Protect Against COVID (ROPAC)
  • ARK Virus: Active Risk Knowledge platform for mindful governance of PPE for Virus infection control and prevention
  • RCES: Rapid Cues Exploratory Search Using Taxonomies For COVID-19
  • Investigating Psychological and Social Effects of Covid-19: A Call for Action
  • PRIVATT – Assessing Irish Attitudes to Privacy in Times of COVID19
  • The COVID-19 Irish Citizens’ Online Forum
  • RoomReader – supporting teachers in interactions with students for online classes in third level