CeADAR 2025 – A Year of Acceleration, Partnership and Real-World Impact
As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on our efforts over the year. Below you will find a summary of some of the ways in which CeADAR has been helping Irish businesses and public sector organisations to be more innovative, productive and competitive on the world stage.
As we gear up to expand our support offering in 2026, I would like to thank all our members, clients, and partners as well UCD and our funders Enterprise Ireland, IDA and the European Commission for another busy and successful year.
Together we continue to strive towards building an AI enhanced ecosystem that showcases Ireland’s position as an innovative country, creating positive impact globally.
Best wishes
John Lonsdale
CeADAR CEO
Ireland’s National AI Agenda
Reinforcing our commitment to supporting national AI development, CeADAR partnered with industry, government, academia and European partners throughout 2025.
The Government announced their intention of launching the National Artificial Intelligence Office (NAIO) in August 2026 and indicated CeADAR as a key partner in its development.
In May, CeADAR and Equal1 signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to work together on the establishment of a national Edge AI and Quantum Computing testbed to enable Ireland to develop and deploy AI-QC platforms and services.
Further enhancing Ireland’s AI capabilities, CeADAR was announced as co-lead in the development of the AI Factory Antenna in Ireland (AIF-IRL Antenna), backed by the EU and Ireland’s Department of Further & Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.
Ensuring the continued development of Trustworthy AI, CeADAR contributed to EU Commission work on the Code of Practice on the Marking and Labelling of AI-Generated Content, a major step toward ensuring transparency and trust in the use of artificial intelligence across Europe.
CeADAR’s Industry Impact
CeADAR again delivered a successful Ecosystem Accelerator Programme, in partnership with NovaUCD as part of the European Digital Innovation Hub for AI in Ireland, funded by Enterprise Ireland and the European Commission. In 2025 we welcomed nine new start-ups into the Programme, strengthening Ireland’s innovation pipeline with fresh talent and ambitious ideas. In addition, it was announced this year that the Start-ups that participated in 2024 have raised over €1.7million in investment.
CeADAR’s flagship annual European Digital Innovation Hub for AI event, hosted in partnership with the Enterprise Europe Network, was a vibrant learning and networking space for Start-Ups, SMEs and public sector organisations to explore practical routes to AI deployment.
The EDIH for AI programme this year has driven over 80 engagements with companies as well as delivered training in AI and the EU AI Act to over 3,500 learners, supporting professionals across all sectors to develop AI literacy and confidence.
This year’s Work Ready Graduate cohort delivered 12 successful engagements with industry, graduates and CeADAR mentors, helping companies innovate and acquire new capabilities.
National and EU Project Impact
CeADAR’s AI2Peat team secured a major win under the Future Digital Challenge National Challenge Fund, highlighting how mission-driven AI research can deliver measurable environmental and societal impact.
CeADAR has led the Intelligence Work Package in the European ICOS Project for the duration of the three-year project which completed at the end of 2025. ICOS consisted of 24 partners and designed and delivered the ICOS MetaOS, an intelligent, open, and modular operating system for the continuum, validated in real environments and released as open source under Apache 2.0, fully aligned with CNCF standards: In addition the team has published over 10 journals and over 30 conference papers, created five exploitable assets, and contributed to multiple open-source projects, including, dataClay, our OASIS intelligence layer, Apache Zenoh, and MetaOS itself. https://www.icos-project.eu/about-icos
Under the leadership of CeADAR, the MANOLO Project continues to work towards delivering a complete stack of trustworthy algorithms and tools to help AI systems reach better efficiency and seamless optimization in their operations, resources and data required to train, deploy and run high-quality and lighter AI models in both centralised and cloud-edge distributed environments. CeADAR presented the latest findings in September at the prestigious AI, Data and Robotics (ADRA) Forum 2025 in Norway.
Other significant EU projects CeADAR is involved with will continue through 2026 including ADT4Blue, CyclOps, MARE, PANORAIMA, UPCAST, INDICATE, 2DBioPad and OCEI.