The Tyndall Explorer 2021 program brought together six competing teams from university and industry sectors across Ireland for this national deep technology pre-accelerator. The program was led by David McGovern and Patrick Morrissey of the SFI Research Centre, Irish Photonic Integration Centre (IPIC), based at Tyndall National Institute and Helen Fullen of Alinea who directed the program. Explorer was launched earlier this year as a collaboration between IPIC, Tyndall, the IPCEI European cluster collaboration, international high-tech photonics OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, and IQE with support from SFI, Munster Technological University, DCU, National University of Ireland, Galway, Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork.
In the final showcase, six competing finalists presented their applications, which spanned across various innovative technology areas.
AIC is an AI-based platform leveraged with novel machinelearning algorithms to provide users with recommendations/ predictions of different features related to public health care. AIC applications include predicting the safest time and routes of closed spaces indicating the risk level of Covid-19 contagiousness, asthma and wheezing attacks indoors.
Enegma provides novel solutions for application-level energy consumption measurement, monitoring, modelling, and optimization for applications on modern computing platforms such as supercomputers, high-performance computing clusters, and cloud computing infrastructures.
Atlantic Photonic Solutions (APS) is a photonics start-up that uses light to resolve biological problems. APS has focused on the global parasite/host problem of sea lice on farmed salmon and have discovered a “sweet spot wavelength” which affects the sea lice without harming the salmon.
InPhoSS is a gas sensing platform providing high-resolution real-time gas measurements. With growing concern worldwide about pollution resulting from human activity, emissions monitoring has become increasingly important. InPhoSS offers a real-time and accurate method to measure these pollutants.
CreativeConnections is a platform that changes the way online creators and brands find and match with each other by streamlining the search for brand ambassadors. CreativeConnections benefits both the brands and online creators by focusing on improving their respective businesses.
INSPIRES employs micro-transfer printing technology to miniaturise bulky and expensive optical spectroscopy systems to chip-sized, low-cost devices. INSPIRES seeks to identify high-value applications to meet market demands of sensitivity, speed, compactness, or volume production capability to realize such products.
APS were announced as the winners of the Tyndall Explorer Program 2021. The APS team leveraged the program to help to further develop their commercialization plans and to expand their customer discovery and market engagement activities. The program helped connect this innovative team to a wide network, which will enable the company to address new markets and to use their patented technology in additional applications. Furthermore, APS have secured EU funding to commercialize their patented process.
The next Explorer program is now seeking early stage photonics and microelectronics-based ideas that have the potential to develop into scalable start-ups and address current societal challenges. The participating teams will learn from commercialization and technology experts to better understand prospective customer needs, help de-risk their deeptech ventures through product and customer validation, and prepare the teams for grant funding and investment. In addition, teams will be supported by industry mentorship from international experts to help bring their idea from concept to pitch. The program also assists teams in gaining both national and international exposure and facilitates access to the investing community.
Explorer will be releasing details on https://www.tyndall.ie/explorer for its next program from October 2021. If you have queries regarding Explorer, please contact a member of the team by emailing explorer@tyndall.ie.
Originally published by Photonicsociety.org.