Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) is the major provider of higher education in the South East region of Ireland and one of the largest Institutes of Technology in Ireland. The Institute’s range and scope reflect the changing needs of the southeast as well as the country as a whole. WIT hosts the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG).
The Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) is an internationally recognized centre of excellence for ICT research and innovation, based in WIT. TSSG carries out a wide spectrum of industry-informed research in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), particularly technologies enabling communications and information services. TSSG’s four key prioritised technical research areas include: Mobile Platforms and Services, Data Analytics and Social computing, Next Generation Internet Technologies, Cybersecurity, Privacy and Identity, Adaptive Networks and High Performance Computing. They create economic impact by translating their knowledge base and innovation into leading edge products and services by continuing their engagement with Industry in collaborative R&D, knowledge generation and transfer. Over the past five years, TSSG has delivered innovative solutions to over 110 Irish companies, and has created 11 spin out companies in the South East including the award winning FeedHenry, a ground-breaking mobile cloud platform company, and ZolkC, a leading provider of mobile technology for international visitor attractions.
Since 2015, TSSG began applying its 20 year’s ICT research and innovation expertise into the Agricultural sector. The Agri-tech area focuses on investigating novel paradigms of how technology will transform food production to meet humanity’s demands in future. We are part of a large scale national project VistaMilk, where we are focusing on novel ICT-based paradigms that will derive and relay information about dairy farming to drive a precision agriculture impact.
In Europe, TSSG has won large scale projects such as DEMETER, a project whose aim is to adopt a multi-actor approach across the value chain (demand and supply), with 25 deployment sites, 6,000 farmers and over 38,000 devices and sensors being deployed and participants involved come from different production sectors (dairy, meat, vegetables, fruit and arable crops), production systems (conventional and organic) and different farm sizes and types, optimising the data analysis obtained across multiple farms.
