I am very pleased to have received this humanities led commercialization grant from the AHRC. Our project aims to improve BORO Solutions commercial product and services by providing a novel approach to handling multi-level data structures. In so doing, we demonstrate the practical and commercial benefits of abstract methods from philosophy and formal ontology. I hope that the grant will pave the way for further collaborations.
Dr Carlo Nicolai, Reader in Logic, Department of Philosophy
31 July 2024
Dr Carlo Nicolai awarded King's first AHRC Research Commercialisation grant
The UKRI-backed scheme is designed to support innovative projects which will apply arts and humanities-led methodologies in a commercial context.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant has been awarded to Dr Carlo Nicolai from the Department of Philosophy to develop innovative commercial products and services derived from formal philosophy, that assist companies in structuring information and business systems.
This new grant follows on from Dr Nicolai’s AHRC Standard Research Grant (Early Career Route) on ‘Properties, Paradox, and Circularity. A new type-free account’
Dr Nicolai is the first recipient from King's for the AHRC Arts and humanities-led research commercialisation scheme.
The grant application was supported by the Arts and Science Research Office and Innovation@King’s and underscores King’s commitment to unlocking commercial opportunities for all areas of cutting-edge research.
The AHRC Research Commercialisation Grant is designed to provide research projects with a route to make research more sustainable, providing researchers with an opportunity to develop their work in a longer-term context and to a broader audience, beyond the cycle of repeatedly renewing funding applications.
This grant illustrates the diversity of research commercialisation underway across King’s College London. We are proud to support our research colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities to deliver innovative solutions to real-world problems facing industry.
Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, Vice President (Research & Innovation)
Over the six-month duration of the grant, Dr Carlo Nicolai in partnership with BORO Solutions Ltd. and Professor Salvatore Florio at the University of Oslo will demonstrate the commercial benefits of applying the formal methods and technical tools they have developed to real-world scenarios. The project aims to enhance commercial knowledge exchange by refining processes for handling and cleaning data in business systems.
Plans include the joint publication of an open-access handbook with BORO Solutions on GitHub. The handbook will offer guidance on unifying data structures in information systems and will explain how techniques refined in their previous research can be applied to real business cases.
In addition, the team will work on enhancements for BORO Solutions’ proprietary methodology, bCLEARer™, which underpins many of its information re-engineering products and services. The enhanced bCLEARer™ methodology will incorporate the formal methods developed through the research and will undergo rigorous testing using data from real commercial projects.
Innovation@King’s helps King’s researchers unlock commercial opportunities to develop, protect and create impact at scale from tomorrow’s innovations, today. Comprised of three teams, they provide end-to-end support and management of the innovation pipeline: the Translational Research Office, Industry Research Partnerships, and IP & Licensing.
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Reader in Logic