On 1 September, Silicon Republic published a profile of Prof Madhusanka Liyanage, the University College Dublin professor who founded NetsLab — the Network Softwarization and Security Labs. The piece is about the future of network security. Luxima gets a mention in it, and we're quietly delighted.
Asked how research at the lab makes its way out into the world, Prof Liyanage names two spin-outs. One is GenShield AI, working on tools for testing and protecting AI-enabled systems. The other is us:
"Another good example is Luxima, which shows how we can take expertise developed in AI, automation, data management and trustworthy digital systems and apply it well beyond our traditional telecommunications and cybersecurity domains."
Why a network security lab builds product passports
It's a fair question, and the answer is in that sentence. NetsLab's day job is 5G and 6G security — AI-native defence, autonomous network resilience, the European Shield-6G project, a private mobile network and an AI-RAN testbed on campus, and researchers drawn from Ireland, Finland, Sri Lanka, India and Belgium. None of that is about textiles or furniture.
But strip out the domain and the underlying problem rhymes with ours. A Digital Product Passport is a claim about a physical object — what it's made of, where it came from, what happens to it at end of life — that a regulator, a retailer or a customer has to be able to trust years after it was written. Getting there means filling gaps in messy data automatically, keeping a record of where every field came from, and making the result verifiable rather than merely plausible. That is data management and trustworthy digital systems work, and it's what the lab has been doing for a decade.
Prof Liyanage describes wanting research to travel the whole distance: "from an academic idea, to an experimental prototype, to testbed validation, intellectual property, a commercial product and ultimately a technology that organisations can use." Luxima is the end of that pipeline for one particular idea — and it's live today, generating passports for producers in Ireland and the UK.
The line from the profile we keep coming back to, though, isn't about technology at all: "Building researchers is as important to me as building technology." Luxima exists because that turned out to be true.