Cross-Cutting Activity 2
In today’s landscape, the powerhouse of scientific progress lies within research institutes and R&D companies. These entities drive innovation in their own manner—pioneering studies and developing groundbreaking products and technologies, respectively. Imagine how far innovation could advance by harmonizing research trajectories and perspectives with market strategies aimed at shaping sustainable solutions. This is the aim of iNEST’s Cross-Cutting Activity 2 (CC2): dismantling the entrenched barriers that divide the worlds of research and production.
According to iNEST, the key to realize this ambitious vision lies in creating a truly shared working environment—one that transcends mere intellectual exchange to encompass physical collaboration spaces. This is the vision behind the concept of a Lab Village, a dynamic hub of joint laboratories where people coming from both academia and industry converge to co-create cutting-edge products, services, and artifacts. By identifying areas of common interest, universities and companies manage to define scientific and technological roadmaps that bring into play their respective strengths: the research expertise of academia and the strategic acuity of industry pioneers.
Within Spoke 9, the mission of CC2 is to elevate the interaction and synergy between industry and research in the area of Trieste, promoting a vision of the city as a cornerstone for sustainable and effective technology transfer. This is indeed a great opportunity to exploit the scientific potential of Trieste, the most research-oriented area in Europe. Tech transfer is useful for both research and industry, but it needs a continuous and effective dialogue between researchers and innovators.
TCube: empowering tech transfer with generative AI
To unleash the full potential of Trieste as a leading innovation hub, CC2 is pioneering the creation of a dual-level Lab Village, consisting of:
- a virtual platform to match the world of research with the industrial ecosystem;
- a network of sites and actors devoted to innovation, in order to showcase the platform and its processes, as well as train people to its usage.
TCube (Trieste Tech Transfer) is the name of the virtual platform that Spoke 9 is developing with the support of RES. It is a web platform that leverages generative artificial intelligence to enable natural language interactions and requests. TCube aims to connect researchers with industry: starting from a specialized knowledge base, its goal is to abstract technical content and present it to a general audience. TCube is capable of staying constantly updated through the automatic uploading of scientific content or by user uploads. All interactions with registered users can then be used to further evolve and improve TCube.
The main goals of TCube are abstraction and translation. Starting with known numerical methods and their current applications, TCube will broaden their scope to include other potential applications in the same industrial sector, as well as in different industries (abstraction). After that, the platform will make these methods usable by enterprises, especially SMEs, by translating them into industrial needs (translation).
This will be a great challenge for TCube, which will have to extend prior knowledge beyond its original domain.
The development of TCube is coordinated by SISSA, with the support of the University of Trieste. The Venezia Giulia Chamber of Commerce and Confindustria Alto Adriatico are partners of the initiative; other agreements are being signed. Since 5th December 2024, the pilot version of the platform—trained with the specialized knowledge of Spoke 9 researchers—is online at tcube.sissa.it.
TCube teaser
Details
Cross-Cutting Activity 2 starts in month 1 and ends in month 40.
Its leader is the University of Udine (UniUD).
