Imperial College London launches I3-Lab, a circular economy research facility backed by £1M from the IOTA Foundation
The facility will advance bias-free AI algorithms, circularity in industrial robots and electric vehicles, battery product passports, predictive analytic tools to detect pollution off-shoring, and more.
BERLIN. July 3, 2024 — IOTA, the non-profit organization driving the development of an open, feeless, and highly scalable distributed ledger technology (DLT) for Web3 applications and digital economies, is announcing the launch of a state-of-the-art facility, Imperial IOTA Infrastructures Lab at Imperial College London (I3-Lab).
The I3-Lab is backed by an endowment of £1 million from the IOTA Foundation with additional funding from Imperial College London. It will be a beacon for so-called translational research, which is an inquiry moving basic scientific discoveries more quickly and efficiently into practice. The I³-Lab puts DLT at the heart of the circular economy as well as includes an incubator for sustainable business models and digital tools based on servitization. These models will decouple economic growth from resource consumption and promote shared access to goods, services, and materials, helping societies shift away from conventional sole-ownership models.
The I3-Lab has also secured grants for projects including:
Autofair, a Horizon Europe project to combat bias-free AI algorithms
iCircular3, which aims to improve circularity in industrial robots, electric vehicles, and outdoor power products
CoDiet, which will address diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity through diet-monitoring tech and personalized nutrition
Initiatives advancing battery passport tech in response to the upcoming EU Battery Regulation, predictive analytic tools to detect off-shoring of pollution, and more
The 25-member Lab will consist of five PhD students and several senior researchers. The IOTA Foundation’s Applied Research Team, led by Dr. William Sanders, IOTA’s Director of Applied Research, will be working and exchanging knowledge with them. The I3-Lab marks the latest development in the relationship between IOTA and Imperial. IOTA has previously gifted a £1 million grant to the founding of the I3-Lab for circular economy research within Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering. The Foundation also endowed £155,000 toward designing a congestion control algorithm, a new design paradigm for DLTs.
IOTA’s DLT is already being used in projects that are innovating new economic models, such as the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline and Digital Product Passports.
“The I3-Lab marks a major stride in addressing the global climate crisis,” says Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “Only when we see the value in bringing together experts in fields such as science, technology, philanthropy, DLT, and regulation will we be able to help businesses and consumers realize the potential of circular economy models and change behavior across the board.”
For more information, check out IOTA’s blog post here: https://blog.iota.org/iota-imperial-i3-lab-launch/
About Imperial College London
Imperial College London is one of the world's leading universities. The College's 20,000 students and 8,000 staff are working to solve the biggest challenges in science, medicine, engineering, and business. Imperial is the world's fifth most international university, according to Times Higher Education, with academic ties to more than 150 countries. Reuters named the College as the UK's most innovative university because of its exceptional entrepreneurial culture and ties to industry.
About IOTA
The IOTA Foundation is a global non-profit foundation that develops next-generation decentralized technologies for a new digital economy in a connected world. It redesigns the way people and devices connect to share information and value, removing middlemen. The Foundation collaborates with a global ecosystem and partners to research and develop technologies that deliver sustainable, real-world impact. Together, they are shaping a new digital economy, removing unnecessary friction and unlocking human potential.
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