Three UCD researchers have been awarded funding to partner with French counterparts on collaborative research projects under the Ulysses Scheme announced by the Embassy of France in Ireland and the Irish Research Council.
Ulysses supports Franco-Irish research projects and is funded and administered by the Irish Research Council in Ireland in collaboration with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of France in Ireland and Campus France.
The Ulysses scheme — named after James Joyce’s famous novel to celebrate the Joycean links
between Ireland and France — aims to foster new collaborations and facilitates the exchange of
innovative ideas and approaches between researchers based in Ireland and France, by providing critical seed funding across all disciplines.
Selected projects are also supported by strategic partners, namely EirGrid, Réseau de Transport
d'Électricité, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and ADEME — the French Environment and Energy Management Agency.
The following projects led by UCD researchers will be supported by the Ulysses Scheme:
Who suffers more from paperwork? Comparing administrative burdens across Ireland and France as barriers to the implementation of the National Climate Action Plans: Margaret Samahita, UCD School of Economics, will employ tools to visualise the impact of administrative processes on Ireland and France achieving their climate targets, as set out in Ireland’s 2023 National Climate Action Plan and France’s PNACC (Plan National d’Adaptation au Changement Climatique). The project aims to identify opportunities for reducing and simplifying administrative processes to help deliver climate actions. This project is funded by SEAI and ADEME.
Women, agency and the promotion of Franco-Irish cultural relations, 1850-1950: Judith Harford, UCD School of Education, will examine educational institutions and key women who were central to the promotion of Franco Irish cultural relations in the period 1850-1950. This includes Mary Ryan (1873-1961), a student at St Angela’s College Cork, run by the Ursuline Order, who became the first Irish woman to hold a professorship and who was awarded the Legion d'honneur in 1935. The project will analyse the role of the French religious teaching orders on the development of higher education for women in Ireland, and high-profile élite schools and colleges for females, influenced by French educational ideas. This project is funded by EirGrid and RTE France.
Complexity in Rank-Metric Codes and Semifields for Cryptographic Applications: John Sheekey, UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics, will address important open questions arising from practical applications of discrete mathematics in communications. In particular, issues regarding the efficiency and security of digital communication and data storage are usually addressed using linear algebra over finite fields, in many cases specifically relying on the theory of operations in finite field extensions. These questions are well studied, but there remains much room for improvement and innovation. This project will innovate by replacing field extensions with algebraic objects known as semifields, and their related structures of rank-metric codes. While these objects are more complicated from an algebraic point of view, it has recently been shown that they can surprisingly have lower complexity from a computational point of view. Furthermore they share many of the key properties of fields.