Speaker: Prof Martin Curley, chartered engineer and vice president, Intel Corporation At this year's Engineers Ireland Annual Conference in the Sligo Park Hotel (15-16 May), Intel's Prof Martin Curley told delegates that the core of engineering was bringing innovations to the fore that change lives for the better. He spoke about last year's Thought Leadership Conference of the Irish presidency, entitled 'Open Innovation 2.0'. The event was hosted by Intel, the European Commission, Dublin City Council, Trinity College Dublin and other universities. "The conference looked at resourcing Big Data as a growth opportunity for Ireland," said Curley. "In the last century, innovations came from flow of electrons, but now it's the flow of knowledge that will create wealth and societal innovations. This is the Big Data era and companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have ambitious visions about digitising all information on the planet." Curley said Intel has invested over €5 billion in Ireland over the past three years and that 45 Intel research and development laboratories across Europe are now managed from Ireland (employing 45,000 people in R&D in total). The company is also collaborating with the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC) on the new Intel parallel computing research centre. "We're working with ICHEC not only to advance state-of-the-art performance computing and Big Data, but also solve some real-world problems," said Curley. "You might have heard the expression, 'Grove giveth and Gates taketh', which describes how the hardware/software computing spiral has worked over the past number of decades," he continued. "But in the past number of years, the hardware has really outpaced software's capability to take advantage of the hardware." He said that Intel aims to create new breakthrough approaches in software and high-performance computing to take advantage of hardware advances. "This is one of the areas we'll focus on with ICHEC. We've already developed a great partnership where we've a new Intel processor, Xeon Phi, and we're looking at some remarkable proposals that were submitted by ICHEC to look at the significant speed-up of existing codes such as wet-weather codes or biological/chemical research codes. So, one of the outcomes of this collaboration might be even better weather forecasts, as Met Éireann is a client." Curley went on to outline the concept of the quadruple helix and Open Innovation 2.0 and he looked at the work being done in NUI Maynooth with the Innovation Value Institute, which he said was one of the world's best IT research centres. Martin Curley - Resourcing the Future of Big Data from Engineers Ireland on Vimeo.