New collaborations with the industry in the regional research programme

Data mining, foundry technology and customization of products. Now it has been decided which three research projects that will be included in the third round of the regional research programme, which is run in cooperation between Region Jönköpings län, Jönköping University and the industry sector.

– We are seeing that the research projects within this programme nurture the region’s innovation and that they enable an increased cooperation between companies. It is therefore gratifying for us at Region Jönköpings län to be able to contribute to a third round of the programme, says Ulrika Geeraedts, Director of Regional Development at Region Jönköpings län.

The new projects are connected to four different research groups at Jönköping University. The project PROACT belongs to Product Development and is aimed at creating new methods for efficient customization of products. Another project, New Generation of Foundry Sands, belongs to the research group Materials and Manufacturing and is aimed at developing the foundry technology to obtain higher quality casting products.

The third project, named DATAMINE, is a collaboration project between the research groups Computer Science and Informatics at the School of Engineering and Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping International Business School. It concerns, for example, how companies can personalize their offers by analyzing large amounts of data (data mining) and thereby gather information on customers’ preferences and the like.

– Today, personalization is critical for the competitiveness of the companies in many industries, for example within e-commerce. In our project, we will develop improved methods for the data analysis underlying personalization. But the most innovative part of the project is the development of new algorithms for robot journalism, that is, automatic generation of individually customized news and other texts. That way we will contribute to the transformation of the media business, which is already ongoing, says Ulf Johansson, Professor at the School of Engineering, who will lead the project.

The regional research programme was created 2014 by Jönköping University and Region Jönköpings län with two main purposes – to increase the research volume in the region and to develop the collaboration between the university and the regional industry sector.

– The programme has contributed to the establishment of a number of new collaborations between JU researchers and the business sector of the region. I believe that this way of jointly financing research and development will give the region of Jönköping a clear competitive advantage in the future, says Lars Niklasson, Vice President at Jönköping University.

Each year since 2015, three new research projects have been started for a three-year period of close cooperation with the participating companies. In the projects that have now been selected for a start in the beginning of 2017, 12 companies in total are engaged.