Tech Events by CONNECT Centre, Trinity College Dublin

A two-hour industry showcase closing out the three-year European ECO-eNET project, which has been combining advanced optical and wireless technologies with AI to make communication networks more energy-efficient and resilient. That is the infrastructure question sitting underneath AI, cloud and data-centre growth. The format is short research presentations, a live demonstration of networks adapting to changing conditions, a lab element and a networking reception. 16:00 to 18:00 at the CONNECT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, College Green. Free. Timed deliberately ahead of Data Centres Ireland 2026. Why go: a rare chance to see research-grade network technology demonstrated rather than described, with the people who built it in the room. Best for network, data-centre and infrastructure engineers, and anyone working on the energy cost of digital infrastructure.

Day one of IBM's Qiskit Fall Fest at Trinity, hosted by CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland research centre for future networks headquartered at TCD. The day runs from 10:00 to 15:30 in the O'Reilly Institute and covers quantum networks specifically rather than quantum computing in general: keynote talks, research discussions, a poster showcase from the groups working on this in Ireland, and the launch of Dennis McNulty's Quantum Wiki. Free to attend and open beyond the university. Why go: quantum networking in Ireland is a small field and most of the people doing it will be in this room for the day, in a format that leaves time to actually talk to them. Best for researchers, physics and CS postgrads, and engineers tracking where quantum communications is heading.

with Daniel M. Kuchta (Principal Hardware System Architect, IEEE Fellow, NVIDIA)

AI workloads are breaking the interconnect. As models scale, the bottleneck moves off the chip and onto the wire — and co-packaged optics is the industry's answer. Daniel M. Kuchta, Principal Hardware System Architect at NVIDIA and an IEEE Fellow, gives the guest lecture in the CONNECT Visiting Lecturer Series at Trinity College Dublin. He covers the state of co-packaged optical transceiver technology across both VCSEL and silicon-photonics approaches, how they fit the evolving Ethernet switch and computer I/O landscape, and what large-scale AI is doing to the performance, scalability and energy-efficiency requirements of modern data centres. Kuchta spent three decades at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center on optical interconnect, holds 40+ patents and 145+ publications, and chaired OFC. An hour with someone genuinely at the frontier of how AI infrastructure actually gets built — rare in Dublin, and free.