About us
Technologies for a future digital society

Our world has become increasingly digitised, affecting how we communicate, manage our finances, access healthcare and even interact with household devices.
With more of our information held digitally and connected across multiple devices as well as in the cloud, significant new challenges are emerging. How can we process, transmit and secure the large volumes of information created by citizens, enterprise and government?

How can digital devices communicate at even higher rates, in a way that is secure? And as we collect more data, how do we deal with the challenges of storing, and analysing this?
How can we accelerate the global adoption of resulting technical innovations to deliver economic impact?

We seek to answer these questions, and in doing so, transform Belfast into a world-leading centre of enterprise and innovation.
ECIT, launched in 2004, is the anchor tenant at the Northern Ireland Science Park and is led by Professor John McCanny.

This unique research and innovation campus is home to almost 200 people, including academics, students, engineers and business development staff.
They work closely with world-leading companies and entrepreneurs, taking a business focussed and entrepreneurial approach to research.
Host to the award-winning UK national Innovation & Knowledge Centre for cyber security, The Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT)
ECIT also houses The Centre for Wireless Innovation which is redefining wireless communication and sensing systems and The Centre for Data Science and Scalable Computing which is addressing the challenges relevant to the big data phenomenon.


Bringing together a critical mass of excellent researchers from a wide range of disciplines in world-class facilities to tackle some of the greatest global issues of our age.
Global research institutes