IRELAND: Country looks to academe to re-ignite economy

28 November 2010

In an audio-research lab strewn with guitars, Dan Barry and his colleagues at the Dublin Institute of Technology fiddle with a computerised tool that can comb the Irish Traditional Music Archive and locate a jig by its tempo or other traits. An Irish company has already licensed the technology, and the researchers are hoping other companies will follow suit, writes Goldie Blumenstyk for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A cross town, on University College Dublin's sprawling campus, Emmeline Hill, a rising-star geneticist, devotes one day a week to her own commercial venture, a year-old university start-up company called Equinome. It sells a blood test to locate the 'speed gene' in thoroughbreds. Now that the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s has been knocked on its back by the government's debt burden, and Ireland's national budget is in crisis, Irish universities are working harder than ever to produce dividends from their research.
Full report on The Chronicle of Higher Education site

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