Prof Luiz DaSilva of CONNECT. Image via Photocall Ireland
Based in Trinity College Dublin’s (TCD) CONNECT centre, a joint Irish-Brazilian experimental telecoms research partnership is to be created after receiving €3m in funding from Brazil and the European Union (EU).
The Irish-Brazilian project led by CONNECT will create the partnership to be called FUTEBOL (Federated Union of Telecommunications Research Facilities for an EU-Brazil Open Laboratory), which managed to beat off competition from five other projects looking for the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding.
To be led and coordinated by CONNECT’s Professor Luiz DaSilva, the research team said FUTEBOL will allow researchers to run experiments on a telecommunications network distributed across Europe and Brazil.
The partnership between Brazil and the EU will see a largely Brazil-led developmental project, in that of the 13 partners signed up to FUTEBOL, eight of them will be based in the South American country.
Ireland an attractive international partner
Intel has been named as one of the partners to be involved in the research project as well as including a mix of academic institutions, research centres and industry.
Speaking of the importance of this field in telecommunications network, Prof DaSilva has said that with the ever-growing involvement with the internet of things (IoT) in everyday life, the type of work they need to do is crucial to facilitate it.
Speaking specifically of the FUTEBOL partnership, DaSilva said: “This success demonstrates Ireland’s attractiveness as an international research partner. It represents a strong return on recent efforts to encourage collaboration between research communities and industry partners in Ireland and Brazil.
“With support from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), we are building strong relationships between the two countries and initiatives such as the International Strategic Cooperation Awards (ISCA) and Brazil-Ireland Science Week, organised by Research Brazil Ireland, have helped develop strong links among researchers and industry partners.”
