One of the major centres that SFI funds is the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C), based in UCC. 4C investigates the area of constraint technology. Constraint technology is a branch of computer science that is interested in looking at problems where you’re trying to find the optimal allocation of scarce resources, where there are certain rules (constraints) governing how those resources can be deployed.

A typical example is that of timetabling. Imagine you have a school with a certain number of teachers, pupils, classrooms and classes to be taught. You have to figure out how to allocate classes to class-rooms and teachers to classes. You will have obvious constraints such as no pupil or teacher can be present in two different classes at the same time, or two classes cannot use the same classroom at the same time. You will have constraints on the courses that the students take, such as all students must take at least three hours of Maths and English per week. You might have a number of additional constraints on the use of rooms such as Science can only be taught in the science lab, Art in the art studio. You get the idea.

Constraint technologies are techniques aimed at figuring out how to model these problems, and then how to arrive at a solution that (i) satisfies all the rules and (ii) optimises some function, such as minimising the number of teacher hours spent.

One of the 4C researchers, Helmut Simonis has recently started a blog describing various industrial applications of constraint technologies that he has developed during his career in the area. The blog provides a fascinating insight into how constraint and scheduling problems in areas such as manufacturing, oil refining, airport stand allocation and poultry transportation planning are tackled and solved.

The descriptions themselves are written very much for the layman, rather than the constraint technology expert, but do include references to the original academic material for those looking for more technical depth.

Highly recommended: http://hsimonis.wordpress.com/.

The Irish Times is reporting the outcome of the PRTLI 5 funding round. There doesn’t appear to be anything yet on the PRTLI site itself (presumably pending the official launch and announcement). As the heading of the Times article states, UCD and TCD have been the big winners, winning the two largest grants (€50m and €75m respectively) and participating in a good number of the smaller ones.

As an aside, back in January 2009 I mentioned that the PRTLI 5 process had been announced, with the comment that it had been a “long time coming”. Look’s like we’re finally there.

I recently came across an interesting site called “The Google College Rankings”. The premise of the site is to use Google search results to determine the “top” (for some definition of top") universities in a country. This approach is much less methodical than the better known Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

Here’s the page for Irish Universities/Colleges.

Google Scholar is one of the mainstay tools that my colleagues and I use in our day-to-day jobs. I use it for everything from helping me identify potential reviewers, check conflicts of interest and determining the academic standing of an author (through their h-index, for example).

For all its excellence, GS doesn’t get as much attention or new features as many of the better known Google properties. Not least of which is the lack of a Google Data API to the service, which would be immensely useful.

Earlier this week, Google launched the Google Scholar Blog. Hopefully, this heralds a resurgence in development of new features for GS.

Over at the NY Times, Paul Krugman is having another pop at Ireland’s “fiscal austerity”.

The comments both in support of and contradicting his argument are interesting.

Ireland’s current EU Commissioner is Ms. Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is the Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.

She has issued an open invitation for an online debate, to be held on June 17, on how to make Europe into an Innovation Union.

The Institute for Web Science, a £30m initiative sponsored by Gordon Brown and announced only last March, has been scrapped by the incoming UK Government.

As reported in the Guardian, the founders of the Institute, Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt are putting a brave face on it.

In my notes from WWW2010 I wrote that the issue of making government data open and available was one of the key themes for the conference. The UK and US Governments are leading the way here, with the data.gov.uk and data.gov efforts respectively.

DavePress writes about GovCamp, a BarCamp-style concept of getting those interested in government data involved in the process. He’s event provided a handy 10 point plan for how to run such an event.

Having attended WordCamp Ireland earlier this year, I’m a big fan of the format, and believe that it could be the ticket for getting the debate started here.

I spent last weekend attending the Dublin Startup Weekend event, hosted by the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC). Startup Weekend is a movement, based in Seattle, but with events world-wide, which is aimed at putting technologists, designer and business people together to come up with an idea that might have the potential to be a startup business. To quote the Startup Weekend site:

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

As this quote suggests, the idea is not just to develop a piece or software, or a website – although that is often the end point. Rather, it’s about developing a business idea, which might be realised through a web service.

The basic idea is that those with ideas for startups pitch their ideas on Friday night, the best pitches get chosen, and a number of teams form around those leading the chosen pitches. Those teams then spend Saturday and Sunday developing and implementing their ideas, ultimately leading to a presentation on Sunday evening. All in all, a fairly frenetic but hugely exciting and inspiring event.

I joined a team led by John Healy (@johnghealy), called CauseHere.org. John’s proposition was based around the idea of cause marketing. In particular, CauseHere.org was setup to provide tools to empower local communities to organise and manage local causes. While large charities are well placed to manage their causes over the long term, many of the local community causes are run by private individuals with little structural support.

CauseHere.org is a social network (yes, I know, another one), designed to allow local cause promoters to create and manage their cause, and for supporters of those causes to find them and lend their support, be it through donations, contributions of material and volunteering. In addition to John, our team was made up by Peter, Niamh, Art, Luke, Jethro and Jude.

By 7pm on Sunday evening, at demo time, there were six teams left standing. We were up first, and did a reasonably good job of presenting the pitch and the system that we had developed.

Next up was geoDealio.com. geoDealio was led by John Fitzpatrick, a post-doctoral researcher in UCD. John’s idea was to allow Cafe’s, Restaurants and Bars to advertise their special offers through twitter, and to allow would-be customers to find those deals through a location-aware mobile phone app. The geoDealio team presented a very nice business idea, with a significant amount of development effort behind it – delivering a web application, iPhone app and (almost working) integration between them.

The third team to present was LendURStuff.com. The idea behind LendURStuff was to provide a web service that allows people to lend their property (camera, lawn mower, whatever) to anybody for a fee. The idea was pretty similar to usemystuff.com, from what I could see.

The next presentation was from the bragbet.com team. Bragbet is a social network that allows small groups of friends (the example was a local football team) to organise a small sports betting circle between themselves, along the lines of group investing. This pitch undoubtedly caught the imagination of the judging panel best. Although the implementation of the idea was (completely) lacking, the judges really liked the novelty of the idea, and said that they wanted to use it when it became available.

HitTheRoad (aka Commutable) was next. The problem that this web site was trying to address was that of allowing the user to figure out how to get from point A to point B in Dublin using all available modes of transportation (including Dublin Bus, Luas, DART, and on foot). At present, there’s no single point where all of the available routes and timetables are available.

The last team to present was Classometer.com. Classometer is a web service designed to support people who run classes (yoga, pottery, karate, and so forth). It allows them to track their attendees, fees and profits for each class that they run, and also to communicate with all members of the class efficiently through email or SMS. Classometer was certainly the most complete and polished package on display during the presentations, a testament to the tightly knitted and talented development team, but they failed to convince the judges as to the value of the idea itself, or the size of the market.

At the end of the judging process, the geoDealio.com was adjudged to be the winner, on the basis of their idea, execution and having gotten a few local businesses to sign up in the early stage. Congratulations on the guys on a very impressive result. It will be very interesting to see if geoDealio has legs, and whether John and the team take it forward.

Overall, Startup Weekend was a great experience – very empowering and invigorating: something I would highly encourage anybody with an entrepreneurial bent to participate in. Many thanks and well done to Sean Murphy (@seanrmurphy), Amy Neale (@amisnealis), Clint Nelsen (@clintnelsen) and everybody else concerned.

[Update – Ben Arent (@benarent) has published his photostream of Dublin Startup Weekend. It looks like all the participants are represented, including a few shots of team CauseHere.org.

Also, check out Sean Murphy’s post on the event published on the Web2Ireland site.]

Writing on his blog in today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman is characteristically optimistic about the European economic reaction to the Greek crisis:

The good news here is that for the first time in this crisis, European policy makers have gotten ahead of the curve, acting more strongly than almost anyone expected. That’s a shock, and it has awed the markets. But I still don’t think it’s nearly enough.

At least he didn’t mention Ireland…