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‘To me, it was very European. You know, it was nine o'clock at night, lots of people out walking and jogging by the waterside.’ As well as these high-altitude global partnerships, it is notable that Ubotica has deep roots in computer vision research in Ireland, through university labs and an earlier company called Movidius. Ubotica co-founder, John Bourke, transitioned directly from Movidius to Ubotica. Movidius was acquired by Intel in 2016. ‘That was the genesis for the founding of our company, and we were very fortunate. My co-founder, Aubrey Dunne, also worked in Movidius, but he was a contractor, and Intel had a policy that they did not hire contractors, so Intel's loss was our gain. After completing their tenure with Intel following the acquisition, the other two founders of Movidius – Sean Mitchell, and David Moloney – joined us.' With the Ubotica co-founders, the chairman and CCO (Mitchell) and chief scientist (Moloney) primarily coming from Movidius, along with other employees, the groundwork laid by that company, going back to the mid-2000s, can hardly be overstated. The improvement of machine vision standards by Irish researchers has applications in terrestrial industries of immense value to the republic: intelligent eyes must pick out potential faults in agricultural products (established, in use), in pharmaceutical (emerging, difficult) and in silicon wafers (highly complex). As with the evolution of eyes in living creatures, each advance in computer vision has led to upsurge in adoption, as industry players press to remain competitive. Jonathan Byrne, a scientist who worked at Movidius and is now in charge of automation and Big Data analysis at the Intel fab in Leixlip, added that, ‘Machine vision enables a new level of automatic decision making that was not previously possible – but is now required to stay productive and drive down costs.’ How does Buckley see this technology cluster progressing? With combining AI+computer vision for pharmaceuticals, for example, he sees the barriers as tricky, with the regulations and risks involved in healthcare mean it’s hard to ‘fully trust’ the machine to act. With space tech, the question may be whether it is necessary to source their own hardware at all. ‘We are evolving into being hardware agnostic. So we don't care whether it's our hardware that's on the satellite or someone else's. What we are implementing is the glue that pulls everything together in terms of how you deploy the models, how you train them, because it's a challenge when you're running algorithms on board a satellite that you can't touch.’ To train an AI model, you need images. As new sensors are being refined and developed, how can Ubotica train their AI models to be hardcoded and effective before the satellites fly? This question is perhaps where the venture shows its greatest bite-strength. ‘What we have demonstrated is that we can take an AI model, train it on generic data that's not targeted at a particular sensor, and we can do, say, vessel detection with image data onboard the satellite, take that analysis and get that down to the ground, all within five minutes.’ With their concept proven and SpaceX satellites a-swarm around the earth, the mission for Ubotica, headquartered on the Old Finglas Road in Glasnevin, seems clear: to set up the most attractive stall in this highly specialised niche before someone else does.
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World of gamecraft: Origins From a young fan of gaming and graphics to a major industry player, Steve Collins , PhD (1996), BA (1991), has transformed the video game scene id you know that Sir Clive Sinclair passed away three years ago? Yes, other things might have overshadowed his death at age 81 but readers who specialise in screens and circuits will have sighed to see the name for the first time in so long. Sinclair’s name floats into the reveries of people like Trinity Computer Science department icon Steve Collins. Collins is a child of the 8-bit era whose love of gamecraft goes back deep into a time that smartphone generation kids can scarcely imagine. Into smoking in pubs, the Pope’s visit, probably smoking in church as well, of cartridges and cassettes on carpeted floors, of switching off the Angelus to make way for 3D Monster Maze, wherein a Tyrannosaur of harrowing blockiness slowly bore down on Sinclair users in a corridor. Also, of long ‘loading times’ and endless crashing that gave one a chance to figure out for oneself how these weird machines worked: there was a lot of formative loneliness. When he was twelve, Steve Collins’ father (a lecturer in Regional Technical College, Dundalk) brought home a Sinclair ZX-81, manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, and named for the year of its appearance, a hot update on the foregoing ZX-80. ‘It was a little slab of plastic with a Z80 processor inside it and a screen refresh rate of maybe once per second, so every time you pressed a key or it executed an instruction, the screen would jump.’ The year after the ZX-81 saw the launch of the Commodore 64, another alchemist’s toolkit, but miles ahead of anything else, with dedicated hardware for video and music. It would outsell competitors like Apple for the remainder of the decade. Collins’ adolescence was timed perfectly to the first emergence of the Digital Empire, and driving it all was the promise of better games. ‘I was one of those bedroom coders you hear about, back in the 80s, developing games on the C64.’ Collins found he loved graphics and design. He sold his first game while in his first year at Trinity. At the time, the divisions of labour in technology were different. He aimed to be a ‘systems analyst, wearing glasses and a lab coat sitting beside some huge machine with Winchester tape drives and a green screen.’ He studied with Professor John Byrne, a pioneer in the science and its study in Ireland. But he kept making games. Tellingly, his first milestones in Trinity were graphics- related: BA Computer Science, 1991 (Gold Medal, 1st Place for final year dissertation on Parallel Ray Tracing ); PhD Computer Graphics, 1996 (thesis on Global Illumination Algorithms for Photorealistic Image Generation ). The push for better graphics processing was the forge of the first modern games and, now, the AI boom and much of the industry as a whole. With another PhD student, Hugh Reynolds, Steve set up the first graphics group in the college, the Image Synthesis Group, supported by their mentor, Professor Byrne. ‘We both really were interested in the commercialisation of technology. His [Reynolds’] area of research was in physics and simulation of the real world and mine was in graphics… it's sort of funny to look back. This was the mid-90s. Games were not a thing in serious research at all. You couldn't say ‘games’. Because that wouldn't get funded.’
