The AIC is a cross-disciplinary research cluster that is based on four SFI Investigator Awards to researchers in Dublin City University and University College Dublin and a SFI cohesion award. The cohesion award was granted to enable collaboration not only between the research groups but also with industry, public sector bodies and other research organisations.

The mission of the AIC is to integrate leading edge research on adaptive Sensor Networks, Content Extraction and Adaptive Utilization by bringing together world- class researchers to collaborate on applied research that produces end-to-end demonstration systems and to develop closer collaborations with other research institutes, industry partners and public bodies.

The principal investigators are Prof. Dermot Diamond, Prof. Alan Smeaton both from DCU and Prof. Mark Keane, Prof. Barry Smyth and G.M.P. O’Hare all from UCD. The economic, social and commercial potential of these technologies has attracted the interest of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Ericsson, IBM and Changing Worlds as well as a number of government agencies. Core staff based in DCU supports the research team.

The research groups are based in the following centres:

• Centre for Digital Video Processing (DCU) – CDVP is a collaboration between the School of Computing and the School of Electronic Engineering. Their mission is to research and develop techniques and tools to automatically analyse and index digital video information and allow content-based operations such as browsing, searching, alerting, filtering and summarisation.
  
  
• National Centre for Sensor Research (DCU) – NCSR is a large-scale, multidisciplinary, sensor research centre focused on the science and applications of chemical sensors and biosensors.
  
  
• Smart Media Institute (UCD) – The SMI is a centre for advanced research in the Department of Computer Science. SMI coordinates UCD's research in multimedia, advanced internet applications, and artificial intelligence, networks and telecommunications.