GII Engagement Call
As part of the Belfast Region City Deal (BRCD), the £55M Global Innovation Institute (GII) programme at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) aims to transform NI’s digital economy by substantially increasing both the volume and range of digital innovation taking place within the region.
Submit an Expression of InterestGII will build on QUB’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) core discipline expertise across cyber security, advanced wireless technologies, data science/analytics and scalable computing (secure – connected – intelligence) and will provide a novel multi-disciplinary environment, by combining these areas of strength with internationally-recognised excellence in food security/sustainability and health and life sciences (Digital Health/One Health). These unique combinations of skills, combined with a ground-breaking partnership approach to delivering scalable computing solutions, in an exciting new physical co-creation environment, will make GII a game changer for the region.
In partnership with industry, academia and government, GII will deliver a distinctive programme of research and innovation, harnessing common technical foundations for economic and societal impact.
One of the areas in which GII will play a major role is in the area of preserving and enhancing our digital health – driving a holistic and data-centric approach to 'One Health', encompassing, for example, the health of soil and environment, of animals and livestock, and of individual humans and populations. While Digital Health/One Health will be an important initial focus area of GII, other sectors will also be considered e.g. advanced manufacturing and financial services, ensuring we are meeting the needs of the wider economy.
The opportunity provided by GII will offer a significant boost to ensure true cross-faculty, cross-university multi-disciplinary research.
In doing this, we will be bringing together for the first time, world-class researchers in multi-disciplinary domains on a scale and critical mass that is internationally standard-setting. GII is also central to exciting plans for Innovation City Belfast, which include creation of an Innovation District within the Belfast Harbour site with the aim of delivering a thriving ecosystem of 20,000 jobs, and 500 companies by 2035, in the focus areas of Health/Life Sciences and Fintech. As ECIT enters this new phase in its development, we wish to further our engagement with the Queen’s academic community to help us grow both our core and multi-disciplinary research areas, which will underpin GII plans and ambition going forward.
We are actively seeking ambitious and driven researchers from across the University who wish to collaborate with us to augment our core research areas as well as our multidisciplinary research.
We are interested in hearing from anyone who can contribute directly to our centres, and we are also keen to attract experts who develop or use digital technologies to achieve breakthroughs in engineering, the health and life sciences or the social sciences. We have a growing portfolio of multidisciplinary projects and as part of our ECIT Interdisciplinary Research Strategy we developed the following multidisciplinary research themes: Health Analytics and Protection of Public Health Data, Smart Cities and Secure Connected Intelligent IoT, AI-Security for Finance & Insurance, Agri-Tech and Environmental Sustainability.