Business
ECIT aims to combine research of the highest international quality with an environment that actively promotes the translation of research ideas into wider economic value and impact.
This includes creating spin-out companies, assisting external (spin-in) companies, working with InvestNI and UKTI to promote Foreign Direct Investment and working with companies nationally and internationally to promote technology transfer of research. As such, it is unique, when compared with other UK universities and indeed most universities worldwide. Its active facilitation of economic impact is facilitated through its own in-house commercial and business development team as well as a significant team of industry experienced engineering staff who have permanent contracts analogous to those in high technology companies.
Meet our commercial team
Research Translation
Industry engagement is at the heart of CSIT.
Our unique has seen us develop longstanding advisory and industrial collaborations with global partners including Altera, Allstate, BAE Systems, Cisco, Citi, Direct Line Group, First Derivatives, IBM, Infosys, Intel, McAfee, Roke, Seagate and Thales.
This unique Open Innovation model allows research to translate to industry in an agile way, ensuring demonstrable technology is in the hands of end users quickly.
Recent examples include:
- Partnering with BAE Systems on video based semantic analysis of crowd behaviour for the UK Defence and Security Accelerator
- Thales has used our novel Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) technology in a demonstrator for electronic component anti-counterfeiting
- Thales and Dell EMC have both used our practical post-quantum cryptography architectures and software libraries in demonstrators as a first step to commercialisation
- A collaboration with TES Group, led to the discovery of a critical vulnerability affecting critical national infrastructure networks globally. As a result the vendor developed a patch ensuring the vulnerability cannot be exploited by hackers
- We worked with Linz AG, an electrical distribution company in Austria, to reveal several problems and vulnerabilities in Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks
- We have developed open source tools for testing the security of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) devices
Creating New Ventures
CSIT Spin-out companies include Affyon, Ditaca, Titan IC, Liopa, Sensurity and Cognition Video, which are delivering new benchmarks for content inspection, visual speech recognition, intrusion detection and platforms for automatic and intelligent image and video processing.
• Titan IC Ltd now employs over 20 staff, has secured £4m investment
• Liopa Ltd now employs 8 staff, has secured over £1m in investment
• Ditaca is developing new retrofit appliance and cloud enabled cyber security solutions for industrial control systems
Capacity Building in Industry
Our capability is bridging the gap between research and impact, and assist with direct contract innovation with companies.
Significant examples include:
• Working with B-Secur to refine the accuracy of their ECG authentication technology
• Developing new mechanisms for carrying out compliance regulations at one of the largest global financial services companies – its first ever engagement with an academic research centre outside the United States
• Collaborating with Allstate to apply cyber security research to the problem of detecting anomalous and fraudulent insurance claims