SFI Funding Success for DCU

Details of a new €31.2 million investment in an SFI Equipment Call were announced today by Micheál Martin, TD, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The goal of this 2007 Equipment Call is to accelerate and enhance research output and quality from both SFI and non-SFI-funded researchers through a significant investment in additional resources and infrastructure in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

As part of this, DCU researchers received more than €3,000,000 for vital research equipment. This is far in excess of the funding received by other, similar sized, Universities.

Speaking at the board meeting, Minister Martin, commented "SFI has made outstanding progress in 2007 and has established itself as an organisation with an international reputation for funding quality research. Operating at the heart of Ireland’s knowledge economy, it is making excellent progress in implementing Government policy to establish Ireland as an international location for scientific research. SFI actively encourages researchers to collaborate with industry and to date over 300 companies are involved in various levels collaboration with SFI backed researchers".

Measures such as the SFI Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs), where DCU has been very successful this year (see link) and Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) provide the mechanisms for new innovative research and entrepreneurial leadership and real opportunities for re-shaping Ireland’s economy through science. These collaborations therefore, are central to the Government’s long-term economic strategy in building Ireland’s new knowledge-driven economy” he concluded.

A full breakdown of the SFI Equipment Call awards is available here.

Microsoft Postgraduate Research Scholarships awarded to DCU students

In 1995, Microsoft Corporation together with a US-based philanthropic trust established an endowment fund to support postgraduate research scholarships within the School of Computing at DCU.

The scholarship provides additional financial support for postgraduate research students carrying out excellent research. The research involved may be, but is not necessarily, in an area aligned with Microsoft Corporation’s business interest.

The School of Computing, on behalf of the endowment, awards the scholarship to suitable students on an annual basis. The recipients of the scholarship are expected to provide a brief report on their research during their year in receipt of the scholarship, and to make a short presentation to the school.

For the academic year 2007—08, the Research Committee of the School of Computing at DCU, together with input from Microsoft Ireland, has awarded four students with a Microsoft Postgraduate Scholarship for 2007/08.

Two full scholarships worth €3221 will be awarded to:

• Aiden Doherty (supervisor: Prof. Alan Smeaton) – automatic structuring and augmentation of a lifeLog of images
• Gavin O’ Gorman (supervisor: Dr. Stephen Blott) – overlay networks for message routing control

In addition, two half scholarships of €1610 will be awarded to:

• John Tinsley (supervisor: Prof. Andy Way) – exploiting parallel tree banks to improve data-driven machine translation
• Bipin Kumar (supervisor: Dr. Martin Crane) – modelling fluid flow and its interaction with coastal structures

Liam Cronin, Academic Engagement Manager in Microsoft Ireland, commented: "Education is one of the most important pillars for Ireland's continued economic development. It's vital that we support the connection between the world of education and the world of business, to ensure we continue to bring new ideas and expertise, that can help drive innovation and entrepreneurship. Our support for Dublin City University and the postgraduate research students in the School of Computing is recognition of the importance of that link."

We wish to thank Microsoft for their continued generous support of the research carried out in the School of Computing.

For further information on these scholarships, please contact the School of Computing Research Convenor, Prof. Andy Way, away@computing.dcu.ie.

In photo, R-L: Liam Cronin, John Tinsley Gavin O'Gorman, Bipin Kumar, Aiden Doherty and Andy Way

Congratulations to Ronan Barrett

Congratulations to Ronan Barrett who successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Ronan's thesis is "Investigations into the Model Driven Design of Distribution Patterns for Web Service Compositions".

He completed his PhD in the Software and Systems Engineering group, School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Claus Pahl.

Ronan is now working for Ericsson as a Researcher in the Ericsson Ireland Research Centre (EiRC). His work there explores different distributed network management architectures, specifically in a broadband access network context.

Brief description of Project:
Increasingly, distributed systems are being used to provide enterprise level solutions with high scalability and fault tolerance. These solutions are often built using Web services that are composed to perform useful business functions. Acceptance of these composed systems is often constrained by a number of non-functional properties of the system such as availability, scalability and performance. There are a number of distribution patterns that each exhibit different non-functional characteristics. These patterns are re-occurring distribution schemes that express how a system is to be assembled and subsequently deployed. Traditional approaches to development of Web service compositions exhibit a number of issues. Firstly, Web service composition development is often ad-hoc and requires considerable low level coding effort for realisation. Such systems often exhibit fixed architectures, making maintenance difficult and error prone. Additionally, a number of the non-functional requirements cannot be easily assessed by examining low level code. In this thesis we explicitly model the compositional aspects of Web service compositions using UML Activity diagrams. This approach uses a modeling and transformation framework, based on Model Driven Software Development (MDSD), going from high level models to an executable system. The framework is guided by a methodological framework whose primary artifact is a distribution pattern model, chosen from the supplied catalog.

Our modeling and transformation framework improves the development process of Web service compositions, with respect to a number of criteria, when compared to the traditional handcrafted approach. Specifically, we negate the coding effort traditionally associated with Web service composition development. Maintenance overheads of the solution are also significantly reduced, while improved mutability is achieved through a flexible architecture when compared with existing tools. We also improve the product output from the development process by exposing the non-functional runtime properties of Web service compositions using distribution patterns.

This project was generously funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET).