Unique collaboration on ambitious IT research

With the opening of the new Centre of Excellence MT-LAB on 19 November, a new world-class basic-research collaboration has been initiated. Managing Director of CISS Kim Guldstrand Larsen is Vice Director of the new centre that will bring together Denmark's best researchers within the field of IT across research institutions.

Personal relations are the basis of the

collaboration

MT-LAB is established on the basis of a collaboration between Aalborg University, the Technical University of Denmark and the IT University of Copenhagen. Usually, the three research institutions are rivals competing about bringing home the largest number of industrial collaboration projects, but the new centre proves that the personal relations between the researchers and the potential residing in combining their competences are more important than their day-to-day rivalry.

Improving methods

Apart from combining the researchers' competences, what is special about the centre is also the freedom it allows them to work within basic research - something which is not always possible to do in their day-to-day work in which research to a very large degree is targeted to industrial needs in concrete industrial collaboration projeccts.

”A lot of the grants being allotted within the field of IT set out sensible requirements about collaborating closely with companies. Thus, we deal with the concrete problems in other projects. What is in focus here is the fact that we as researchers need to whet our skills and methods, and we have been missing that kind of basic research. Therefore, we realised we needed to work together in order to get this large a donation," Kim Guldstrand Larsen explains.

Basic research benefits researchers and society

Lars Erik Kann-Rasmussen, chairman of the board of the Villum Kann Rasmussen Foundation that granted the DKK 25 million that enabled the foundation of the centre, agrees.

”Their research needs to be original and innovative and at a high international level. We want the money from the foundation to make a difference, so that it assists innovative research groups who are in need of and capable of utilise considerable funding. The centre will perform basic research, but it will aim towards developing methods that will make complex software systems secure, stable and resource-economical, so that they can be used in a broad context. Both in the intelligent homes of the future, within the workspace, for digital health care, for mobile equipment and much more. We have great hopes that MT-LAB will bring forth considerable research results benefiting the world of research, but also in the long run benefiting people's everyday lives, trade and industry and the Danish society," he says.

Read more about the centre at MT-LAB's website.