CTVR: Partners

CTVR is a 'virtual' centre made up from participating researchers from many different Irish universities and research institutes working in conjunction with their industrial partners, coordinated by the centre's management team. The research agenda of CTVR is guided by an external advisory board, whilst the strategic development of the centre is overseen by the CTVR strategic board.

Academic Institutions

The centre involves researchers from the following Irish academic institutions:

Industrial Partners

The centre's principal industrial partner is Bell Labs, headquartered at Murray Hill New Jersey and their Irish subsidiary, Bell Labs Ireland. They have played a leading role in defining the concept of the centre and the director of Bell Labs Ireland acts as co-director of the centre ensuring that the work-programmes of the academic team and their industrial partners are aligned.

The centre will forge new partnerships with other companies in telecommunications and other relevant industries to bring in new ideas and funding and to maximise the impact of the centre's work.

Management Team

Donal O?Mahony Centre Director: Prof. Donal O’Mahony, Trinity College Dublin

Donal O’Mahony graduated with 1st class honours in Engineering from Trinity College in 1982. After a brief career in industry at the Sord Computer Systems (a Japanese microcomputer startup company) in Tokyo where he worked as a researcher on new microcomputer operating systems and at IBM in Dublin, he re-joined Trinity College as a lecturer in Computer Science in 1984, completing his Ph.D. in the area of software reusability in 1990. At Trinity, he built-up a successful research group in Networks and Telecommunications. This group has ongoing projects in a wide range of areas including electronic commerce, network security and mobile communications technology and has been very influential in developing the concept of 4th Generation mobile systems. He spent the year of 1999 as a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University, California, before returning to his present position as professor in computer science at Trinity College. Prof. O’Mahony is a fellow of Trinity College. He is author of two books, both of which were best-selling titles including his most recent work on Electronic Payment systems, which is in 2nd edition and is widely regarded as the leading text in this field. Prof. O’Mahony has been a founder and CEO of two technology startup companies and has acted as as an independent consultant to government and industry organizations across Europe and to the United Nations on a wide variety of projects involving strategic networking issues. In July, 2004 he led a team to establish CTVR, a major multi-university research centre established in association with Bell Labs. He is now full-time director of this centre.

Chief Technology Officer: Dr. Lawrence Cowsar, Bell Labs

Lawrence Cowsar is the Executive Director of Bell Labs Ireland, Lucent Technologies. He earned his Ph.D in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University, Houston, Texas for work on the analysis of domain decomposition techniques for partial differential equations. He has been responsible for the Scientific Computing Research and Computing Systems Research Departments at Bell Labs. Since he joined Bell Labs in 1994, his work has ranged from subsurface flow simulation to optical fiber design, from the design and analysis of finite elements to simulation platforms for optical line system control. He brings to the center extensive experience in telecommunication network equipment design and product realization. He has over 15 publications and one US patent.

Network Architectures Strand Leader: Dr. Linda Doyle, Trinity College Dublin

Linda Doyle graduated in Electrical Engineering from University College Cork in 1989 after which she took up a position with Siemens AG, Germany. She returned to academia and was awarded an M.Sc. in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1996, both from Trinity College Dublin. Her Ph.D. made novel advances in the area of radiowave propagation in the 2 GHz band in urban environments. She was appointed lecturer in the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering in Trinity College, Dublin in 1997. Her research has focused on the design of future generation communication systems with a particular emphasis on mobile wireless networks. She has a large research group consisting at present of 12 Ph.D. postgraduate students and has been highly successful in raising research funds to support this large group. The research group is interdisciplinary in nature and draws students from a wide range of backgrounds from electronics, to computer science to the humanities. Dr. Doyle has done pioneering work on the development of software radio on general-purpose processors and this has led the development of the IRIS software radio platform an advanced toolkit for implementing software radio on the Intel Pentium processor. This work has been internationally recognised and she is frequently asked to speak on this and related topics. Dr. Doyle is involved in a wide range of collaborative work and has published over 30 papers across her various diverse areas of interest.

Frank Peters Photonics Strand Leader: Dr. Frank H. Peters, Tyndall, Cork

Frank H. Peters is a member of the Tyndall National Institute and a Lecturer in the Physics Department at the University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. Frank is interested in the research associated with the development and integration of photonics devices. He completed a Ph.D. from McMaster University, Canada where he studied the optical properties of telecom semiconductor diode lasers. In 1991, he worked as a Research Engineering in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the U.S. working on Vertical Cavity Lasers and Modulators. From 1993 until 2001 he worked as a research scientist at Optical Concepts, W. L. Gore and Associates and Agilent Technologies developing and integrating photonic devices into datacom and telecom applications. From 2001-2005 Frank worked at Infinera in Sunnyvale California, U.S.A. in the development of high speed photonic integrated circuits. He has authored more than 40 papers and holds 12 patents all concerned with thermal, optical, electrical and systems issues relating to the design and use of photonic devices.

Wireless RF Strand Leader: Dr. Ronan Farrell, NUI Maynooth

Ronan Farrell received his BE (Electronic Engineering) degree from University College Dublin in 1993 following which, he was employed as a control systems engineer by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals in England and the U.S.A. In 1995, Ronan Farrell returned to University College Dublin to work on a Ph.D. in the field of sigma-delta modulators for data converters in collaboration with Analog Devices, graduating in 1998. Upon graduation, Ronan joined Parthus Technologies in Dublin, a then recently founded integrated-circuit design company specialising in providing intellectual property in the mixed signal and wireless communications space. The projects Parthus undertook pushed the boundaries of the available technologies, requiring an emphasis on strong modelling skills, architectural analysis and circuit design. In August 2000, Ronan left Parthus and joined NUI Maynooth in their newly founded Electronic Engineering Department where he has built up a Mixed Signal/RF systems research group, concentrating on Design and Test issues in the mixed signal and RF space.

Test & Reliability Strand Leader: Dr. Jeff Punch, University of Limerick

Jeff Punch is currently Director of the Micro-Mechanical Engineering Group at the Stokes Institute, University of Limerick (UL), collaborating with the Institute's partners and clients on a range of research programmes. He has wide-ranging research interests in the analysis of micro-scale mechanical engineering phenomena within the application arenas of electronic and micro-electromechanical systems - with particular emphasis on thermal management and reliability physics. He has a strong track-record in governmental and industrial research programmes, and is currently supervising five doctoral students and mentoring three postdoctoral researchers. He has authored or co-authored over 40 refereed publications and five patents, and has presented more than 50 invited talks on aspects of the thermal management and reliability of electronic systems at venues in Europe, USA, the Middle East, India and Asia-Pacific.

Optimisation & Managment Strand Leader: Dr Ken Brown , University College Cork

Ken Brown is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork, and a member of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre. He has a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow, an MSc in Logic and Computation from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in Engineering from the University of Bristol. He has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and at Carnegie Mellon University. He was appointed as Lecturer in Computer Science at University of Aberdeen in 1995, and joined UCC in 2003. His research is focused on intelligent decision support and optimisation, applied to resource allocation, scheduling, supply chains, networks and design and manufacturing, with a particular interest in uncertain, distributed and competitive domains. He has published over 40 refereed papers, and has collaborated extensively with industry, including LandRover, Digital/Compaq and Microsoft Research.