From Daresbury to Northern Ireland - The Hartree Centre highlights UK-wide support for businesses

Recently, STFC’s Hartree Centre at Daresbury Laboratory teamed up with Siemens, Invest Northern Ireland and Ulster University in its first steps towards increasing engagement with businesses in Northern Ireland.

With a mission to highlight the benefits of advanced digital technologies to businesses, the ‘Intelligent Manufacturing’ and ‘Intelligent Innovation’ workshops were a fantastic opportunity to share industry knowledge, explore funding opportunities and stimulate new collaborations between the Hartree Centre and Northern Ireland businesses.

STFC’s Michael Gleaves, Deputy Director at the Hartree Centre said: “After supporting in excess of 350 successful collaborative digital transformation projects, we noticed that none were with businesses in Northern Ireland.  That’s why we’ve taken a proactive step towards increasing awareness and engagement of the support we offer in Northern Ireland, to ensure that when we say we support UK-wide businesses, we really mean it! We are excited to be working collaboratively with Invest NI, Ulster University and Siemens to explore and create opportunities that will enable businesses in Northern Ireland to benefit from the adoption and integration of advanced digital technologies and skills.”

STFC’s Hartree Centre
(Credit: STFC)

The workshops, which were held in Cookstown and Ulster University’s Magee and Jordanstown campuses, were attended by delegates from 49 Northern Ireland companies. They explored how local manufacturing companies can potentially tackle industry challenges using high performance computing, data analytics, AI and machine learning technologies, as well as how businesses from across the board can benefit from increased productivity through digitalisation, no matter what industry they are in.

Invest Northern Ireland’s Noel Brown said: “Invest NI has been encouraged by the level of interest and engagement among NI businesses in this series of workshops.  The great examples and case studies of how data analytics and AI have been used to enhance productivity and to solve real world business challenges has sparked considerable interest with the workshop participants.”  

Read about the workshops in more detail at the Hartree Centre website.