National Software Directorate
January 28th, Dublin

By Neil Mills

The first SLIG General Meeting for 1998 took place on the 28^th January 1998. The event was hosted by the National Software Directorate (NSD) at Wilton Park House in Dublin.

The first speaker was Jennifer Condon, from the NSD. She outlined ways in which the NSD promote the Irish software industry as a global leader. These include: industry information/statistics, education, promotion, investment and strategic development. Further details can be found at <<http:\\www.nsd.ie>>.

Jennifer also outlined the ADI scheme which is targeted at Irish SMEs looking to develop localised products. Companies may apply for funding to assist in their localisation plans. Companies may apply for 35 – 50% of the localisation cost, up to a maximum of £250,000 from a total pool of £2.7 million. Applications are now welcome.

The second speaker was Martin Kerrigan, also from the NSD. Martin highlighted the existence of R&D units based across several Irish universities. Some of the current R&D projects include distributed/intelligent systems, hi-performance computing and Image and Video Analysis. Martin also mentioned that R&D support is now available to localisation companies.

The third speaker was Jill Pritchett from the Centre for Software Engineering at Dublin City University. Jill outlined their range of industry and company support services and spoke about the workshop on Language Translation developments that they are co-ordinating along with the National Centre for Language Technology at DCU.