Research@DCU Faculty of Engineering & Computing

Congratulations to Sara Morrissey

2008-05-02T18:49:00.008+01:00

Congratulations to Sara Morrissey who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Sara's thesis is "Data-Driven Machine Translation for Sign Languages".

She completed her PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT), and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Andy Way.

Sara is now working as a post-doctoral researcher with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), at DCU. In this post Sara will work with Prof. Harold Somers on Machine Translation for Patients with Limited English. She will also continue her sign language work, as well as working with minority spoken languages.

Brief description of Project:
With only ~1% of the Irish non-Deaf population being able to communicate in Irish Sign Language (ISL), most Deaf people not being confident in their English skills, and very few public services available through ISL, Deaf people face communication and comprehension barriers on a daily basis. A lack of interpreter availability coupled with confidentiality issues, as well as the English-language dependency of subtitling and teletype system mean that these services cannot always overcome these barriers. This thesis presents the development of data-driven machine translation (MT) technology using DCU’s MaTrEx MT system to address these communication problems. We have created a bidirectional multi-lingual translation system for sign languages (SLs) in the domain of airport information that includes gesture recognition and animation technology components to translate both to and from SLs.

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

Congratulations to Karolina Owczarzak

2008-04-25T18:45:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Karolina Owczarzak who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Karolina's thesis is "A Novel Dependency-Based Evaluation Metric for Machine Translation".

She completed her PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT), and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Josef van Genabith and Professor Andy Way.

Karolina will soon begin her new post as a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, working on evaluation methods for automatic summaries.

Brief description of Project:
In the development of Machine Translation (MT) systems, automatic evaluation metrics allow developers to conduct frequent, fast, and cost-effective evaluations of their translation models. However, most of the metrics rely on a comparison of word strings, measuring only the surface similarity of the candidate and reference translations. A candidate translation expressing the source meaning accurately and fluently will be given a low score if the lexical and syntactic choices it contains, even though legitimate, are not present in at least one of the references. This thesis presents a method that automatically evaluates the quality of translation based on the labelled dependency structure of the sentence, rather than on its surface form. This lets us compare the translation and the reference on the level of shallow semantic relations, and the score obtained in this way reflects human judgment of translation quality better than most existing metrics.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland (EI) and Microsoft Ireland.

DCU and UCD combine to seek commercial research advances in new technologies

2008-04-15T15:57:00.005+01:00

A unique €16.4m technology partnership between UCD and DCU, supported by Cork’s Tyndall Institute, and funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), aims to tame twenty-first century media information overload, facilitate improved health, and ensure that our environment is meeting tough standards being set to deliver a better quality of life.

SFI has provided €11.8m to the research centre called CLARITY, while industry and social partners are providing more than €4.6m in cash, facilities, services and personnel. IBM, Vodafone, Ericsson and Fidelity Investments are among the multinationals supporting this ambitious world-class project, as well as national agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Marine Institute and the National Museum of Ireland.

The centre will be led by UCD’s Professor Barry Smyth. The Deputy Director will be DCU’s Professor Alan Smeaton as the two universities share responsibility for the new SFI research centre, CLARITY.

Building on research breakthroughs achieved with financial support from SFI and industry investments over the past four years, the centre will focus on empowering citizens through new technologies to harvest, refine and make use of the deluge of different kinds of information in the modern world.

Professor Alan Smeaton said: “With the use of smart sensing devices in the physical world - for example testing our health and wellness, the air we breathe and the water we drink, combined with new technologies to help us find the right information from the digital world - CLARITY will develop a new generation of smarter, more proactive information services and products which are set to improve our quality of life.

“These will include new ways to monitor the impact of exercise on health, technologies to support our aging population, innovative social and interactive media services to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the digital media sector, and technology that can automatically monitor the quality of our environment.”

This is a large-scale academic-industry collaboration with more than 90 full-time researchers and more than ten industrial partners, including major multinationals as well as emerging Irish companies.

CLARITY will develop a sustainable pipeline of 10 patents a year of high quality intellectual property (IP) with clear commercial potential. The educational-research development of the project will produce up to 45 new PhD graduates by 2012, providing Irish industry with access to critical knowledge capital, and contributing significantly to the Government target of doubling PhD output by 2013.

The President of DCU Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski said, ”This is DCU’s third CSET award from SFI marking the university’s distinctive leadership in Ireland’s research revolution at third level institutions in recent years. CLARITY is also fulfilling a vital national requirement for quality research collaboration between institutions, focussed on commercial breakthroughs to the benefit of the Irish economy.”

DCU has won two other major CSET awards. The €23m Biomedical Diagnostics Institute was established in 2005 aiming to produce commercially viable “early warning” diagnostic devices for life threatening illnesses. Last year DCU won another €17m from SFI for a CSET next generation localisation, with multinational partners contributing a further €13m. This will underpin Ireland’s world-leading position in the localisation industry – the preparation of manuals and information materials in the local language where new technology products are used.

Economic background to CLARITY
The economic importance of personalised health is now recognised worldwide. For example the negative impact of obesity alone was estimated in 2005 to be about €4 billion. New disruptive technologies that become part of the emerging “wellness” concept will become hugely important in socio-economic terms. New products incorporating wearable sensors will initially be used on sports and exercise clothing and then trickle down to more common, everyday wear and will become commonplace over the next few years. The CLARITY team already has a significant track record in this field.

Climate change is now focusing attention on the environment as never before. It is estimated that the cost of tackling this issue will be of the order of €1 trillion. Under the next phase of the National Development Plan (2003-2013) the Irish Government have set aside €4.7 billion for water services alone. CLARITY researchers will build on existing links with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Marine Institute to develop new technologies to monitor targets effectively, unattended over extended periods. Investment in wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring is happening world-wide.

In the digital media sector a recent Forfas report says: “indications are that the market size for digital media was worth at the very least $965 billion in 2004. Furthermore, estimates suggest that it will be worth at least $1.48 trillion by 2009, representing growth of more than 53% in the period.” It also says that “wireless and mobile service revenues for voice and data are expected to grow from $388 billion in 2003 to $529 billion in 2010, while wireless and mobile data services alone, are expected to grow from $55 billion in 2003 to $235 billion in 2010.”

*Picture: L-R Prof Alan Smeaton, DCU, Deputy Director of CLARITY CSET; Prof Frank Gannon, Director General SFI; and Prof Barry Smyth, UCD, Director of CLARITY CSET

CIPA welcomes Research Officer Dr. Tarik A. Chowdhury

2008-04-10T09:51:00.001+01:00

Welcome to Tarik A. Chowdhury, who has recently been appointed as Research Officer for the Centre for Image Processing & Analysis (CIPA), RINCE.

Tarik received his B.Eng. degree from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh in 1998 and his M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Dublin City University (DCU), in 2003 and 2006, respectively. He comes to DCU from a position as an Assistant Professor in BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. His main research interests are in the area of image processing and medical imaging.

Research Student Graduation

2008-03-31T16:19:00.004+01:00

Congratulations to all of the DCU students who graduated on Saturday. There are 8 students graduating from the Faculty of Engineering & Computing with PhDs, while one student will graduate with a Masters by research. Great credit is due to these students for their tireless work over the last number of years.

In total, 2 research students graduated from the School of Computing, with a further 5 graduating from the School of Electronic Engineering, and a further 2 from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. You can get more information about the projects of some of these students here.

DCU Graduate named Handballer of the Year

2008-02-20T21:19:00.006Z

DCU graduate Dr. Eoin Kennedy has been named as Vodafone GAA Handballer of the year for 2007. This is Eoin's fourth All Star award, having previously been awarded the honour in 2002, 2004 and 2005. The award was presented by the President of the Irish Handball Council Tom Walsh at a reception in Dublin's Westbury Hotel.

This marks yet another year of success for the St. Brigid's Clubman, who collected a Grand Slam of titles, taking the All-Ireland 60x30 Singles and Doubles crowns, in addition to Hardball Singles and Doubles honours. Eoin is only the third player ever to manage this feat.

Eoin's list of achievements is phenomenol. As well as more than a dozen Irish senior handball titles, he has won World, United States and Canadian championships. He has led Ireland against the basque country under compromise rules, and in 2007 was the catalyst to Ireland's victory over the US in the Casey/Lawlor Cup.

Eoin has managed to combine these athletic feats with academic and professional excellence. After graduating with a BEng in Electronic Engineering, Eoin went on to pursue doctoral research in the School of Electronic Engineering at DCU. Under the supervision of Dr. Marissa Condon, he graduated with a PhD in 2005. The lecturing experience and research portfolio which Eoin had built up during his time at DCU helped him to secure a lecturing post in NUI Maynooth, where he has worked since completing his PhD. At the end of this month, Eoin will begin his new role as Power System Analyst within the Generation Analysis group in Eirgrid. This post will involve forecasting and planning for Ireland's future electricity needs.

Funding Success for Nanomaterials Processing Laboratory

2008-02-19T12:09:00.000Z

The Nanomaterials Processing Laboratory (NPL) at the School of Electronic Engineering has been awarded close to €1 million research funding in recent months.

The NPL, which draws researchers from the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) and the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology (NCPST), is led by Prof. Patrick McNally. Prof. McNally was recently awarded an EU Framework Programme (FP7) STREP Grant of €225,509. The project entitled "Investigation of Si wafer damage in manufacturing processes (SIDAM)" runs from 2008 to 2010. Collaborators include CEIT (Spain), University of Freiburg (Germany), ANKA Synchrotron (Germany), Bede Scientific (UK) and the University of Durham (UK).

Prof. McNally also received a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Equipment Grant for the acquisition of a Mini Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) System in December 2007. In addition, Prof. McNally and his colleague Dr. Stephen Daniels were awarded an Enterprise Ireland (EI) Commercialisation Fund Technology Development Grant for a project entitled "Development of prototype devices for flexible white-light emitters based on copper halide technology". The project runs from December 2007 to November 2010. The value of the project is €390,000.

Importantly, these funding agencies use international experts to review grant proposals, so this success represents a strong endorsement of the NPL's research activities by their fellow researchers across the globe. In addition, funding for the commercialisation of research findings, such as that recently secured by the NPL is an important stepping stone in Ireland's move to a knowledge-based economy.

SFI Funding Success for DCU

2008-01-28T18:56:00.001Z

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

2008-01-21T16:00:00.003Z

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

2008-01-15T16:16:00.004Z

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).

RINCE appoints two research officers to support its research

2007-12-22T12:06:00.001Z

RINCE has appointed two new research officers to support its research. Dr. Prince Anandarajah and Dr. Ormond are working closely with the High Speed Devices and Systems Centre (HSDS) and Network Innovations Centre (NIC) respectively. In March 2008 they will be joined by a third reseach officer who will join the Centre for Image Processing & Analysis (CIPA) Centre within RINCE.

Invention Disclosure Awards 2007

2007-12-14T15:21:00.000Z

DCU has made 35 Invention Disclosure Awards to recognise researchers who work with Invent, the Innovation and Enterprise Centre of DCU, in the commercialisation of their research.

Particularly interesting to this faculty is that Dr. Kevin Robinson, Prof Paul Whelan & Dr. Nicholas Sezille from the Centre for Image Processing and Analysis (CIPA - RINCE) and the School of Electronic Engineering won the best overall invention disclosure in the category of ICT/Engineering.

Other researchers whose invention disclosures were recognised include:

Prof. Alan Smeaton & Peter Kehoe - School of Computing
Prof. Liam Barry & Dr. Aleksandra Kaszubowsk - School of Electronic Engineering
Francis Olbanji Lucas & Prof. Paddy McNally - School of Electronic Engineering
Dr. Stephen Daniels & Prof. Paddy McNally - School of Electronic Engineering
Dr. Kevin Robinson, Prof Paul Whelan & Dr. Nicholas Sezille - School of Electronic Engineering
Dr. Victor Law & Dr. Stephen Daniels - School of Physical Sciences & School of Electronic Engineering
Dr. Harry Esmonde - School of School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering
Nigel Kent, Prof. Antonio Ricco, Prof. Brian MacCraith & Dr. Brian Corcoran - BDI & School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering

Presenting the awards, Professor Eugene Kennedy, Vice-President for Research, thanked all of the researchers for contributing to another very successful year for DCU. He also emphasised the fact that the protection of intellectual property need not interfere with publication of research results, as long as they are both handled in the correct way. Best advice is always to consult with Invent if you think you have a discovery which has commercial potential.

Congratulations to Philip Kelly

2007-11-23T18:15:00.007Z

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

The title of Philip's thesis is "Pedestrian Detection and Tracking using Stereo Vision Techniques".

He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Noel E. O’Connor.

Philip is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher with the CDVP.

Brief description of Project:
Accurate detection and tracking of pedestrians are two essential components required by a variety of applications that include, amongst others, Ambient Intelligence, automated surveillance, image compression and content-based multimedia storage and retrieval. Given this large number of potential applications, pedestrian detection and tracking has become an extremely active research area in computer vision. This has resulted in a significant amount of prior art proposing pedestrian segmentation techniques using a myriad of approaches. Many of the person detection techniques described so far in the literature work well in controlled environments, such as laboratory settings with a small number of people. This allows various assumptions to be made that simplify this complex problem. The performance of these techniques, however, tends to deteriorate when presented with unconstrained environments where pedestrian appearances, numbers, orientations, movements, occlusions and lighting conditions violate these convenient assumptions. Recently, 3D stereo information has been proposed as a technique to overcome some of these issues and to guide pedestrian detection.

This thesis presents such an approach, whereby after obtaining robust 3D information via a novel disparity estimation technique, pedestrian detection is performed via a 3D point clustering process within a region-growing framework. This clustering process avoids using hard thresholds by using bio-metrically inspired constraints and a number of plan view statistics. This pedestrian detection technique requires no external training and is able to robustly handle challenging real-world unconstrained environments from various camera positions and orientations. In addition, this thesis presents a continuous detect-and-track approach, with additional kinematic constraints and explicit occlusion analysis, to obtain robust temporal tracking of pedestrians over time.

This project was generously funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

DCU to lead Multi-Million Euro Research in High-Tech Automatic Language Translation

2007-11-13T15:35:00.000Z

Dublin City University is to lead a multi-million euro research partnership funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) that will develop the next generation of high tech automatic language translation.

This five-year research programme will transform an important sector of Ireland’s global software business – localisation - as well as a key driver of the global content distribution industry.

DCU is collaborating in the project with academic partners, UCD, UL and TCD, and with renowned global technology leaders, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Dai Nippon Printing, and Idiom Technologies as well as key Irish SMEs, Alchemy, VistaTech, SpeechStorm and Traslan.

The Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Michael Martin, today announced the award of €16.8m to the project by SFI, and the industry partners are contributing €13.6m in materials, research services and additional funding.

Ireland already has a substantial global footprint in the localisation industry – the process of adapting digital content, download manuals, software and other materials, to different languages and cultures.

The President of DCU, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, said: ”This welcome funding is a great endorsement of DCU’s international research capability. It means that DCU is now leading two SFI Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) – in biomedical diagnostics and localisation technology – that have won the largest-ever SFI funding in the state”

The Irish project will tackle three critical problems for the Localisation Industry:

Volume: The amount of content to be translated and localised to the destination culture and environment is growing rapidly and massively outstrips the supply of human translators.
Access: Powerful, small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs require novel technologies integrating speech and text to support “on the move” delivery of, and access to multilingual information.
Personalisation : A new demand has rapidly emerged for the adaptation of a huge amount of multilingual content now available on the web, for individual needs . It needs “instant” localisation and personalisation to meet the demands of the users.

Professor Josef van Genabith, Director of the new Centre said: "Localisation as an industrial process was developed in Ireland. We have a unique concentration of university- and industry-based research and development expertise in language technologies, machine translation, speech processing, digital content management and localisation. The research centre is going to pool that expertise and develop the next generation of language and content management technologies to support and develop the localisation industry.”

European Software Process Improvement Conference 2008

2007-11-08T13:21:00.000Z

The School of Computing, DCU will host the 15th European Software Process Improvement Conference (EuroSPI 2008) from 3rd to 5th of September 2008.

EuroSPI conferences present and discuss results from software process improvement (SPI) projects in industry and research, focusing on the benefits gained and the criteria for success. Leading European universities, research canters, and industry are contributing to and participating in this event.

EuroSPI 2008 will be the 15th of a series of conferences to which international researchers contribute their lessons learned and share their knowledge as they work towards the next higher level of software management professionalism.

The conference will be jointly chaired by Dr. Rory O'Connor (School of Computing, DCU) and Dr Nathan Baddoo (University of Hertfordshire).

International Conference on Business Innovation and Information Technology

2007-11-07T20:54:00.000Z

DCU is proud to host the International Conference on Business Innovation and Information Technology

The new and unique International Conference on Business Innovation and Information Technology aims to provide a premier forum for the presentation and discussion of business innovations associated with Information Technology (IT). We invite contributions from industry and academia as well as encourage postgraduate researchers to submit their work.

Submissions may be any of the following:
- research paper
- short paper
- experience report

Contributions must be submitted here.

Held in Dublin, Ireland on 24th and 25th of January 2008, the conference focuses on real-world business applications and innovations associated with information technology. Therefore, contributions should highlight the benefits and invitations driven by information technology in organisations. The idea of the conference is to provide a forum and platform for both researchers and practitioners to exchange knowledge and ideas and learn from each other.

Practitioners and researchers present findings and experience. In addition to the official program, there is plenty of opportunity for informal discussions and networking.

Contributions are selected on the basis of abstracts. Abstracts will be evaluated for originality, significance and contribution. All authors of accepted contributions are expected to present at the conference. All accepted and presented contributions will be invited to submit a full paper, which will be published in the conference proceedings after the conference.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Innovative Business Models and E-Commerce Solutions
- Regulatory and Privacy Issues
- E-Government
- Information Systems and Business Processes
- System Development and Software Engineering
- Advanced Information Technologies

It is planned to publish in the Springer Series “Lecture Notes in Business Information Systems (LNBIP)”. As accepted papers are published in the conference proceedings, contributions must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere.

Important Dates:
Abstract Submission Deadline: 30 November 2007
Notification of acceptance: 12 December 2007
Deadline Early Registration: 31 December 2007
Submission Online Version of Full Paper: 11 January 2008
Conference Date: 24-25 January 2008
Indicative Publication Date for Proceedings: May 2008

Conference Chairs
Dr. Markus Helfert, School of Computing, Dublin City University
Dr. Regina Connolly, Business School, Dublin City University

The conference is supported by Dublin City University and Science Foundation Ireland

Research Student Graduation

2007-11-05T17:14:00.000Z

Congratualtions to all of the DCU students who are graduating today and tomorrow. There are 13 students graduating from the Faculty of Engineering & Computing with Masters by research, and a further 20 students graduating with PhDs. Great credit is due to these students for their tireless work over the last number of years. Ireland's future as a knowledge based economy will be heavily influenced by innovative Engineers and Computer Scientists such as these.

In total, 13 research students graduated from the School of Computing, with a further 10 graduating from the School of Electronic Engineering, and a further 10 from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. You can get more information about the projects of some of these students here.

DCU Researchers Win Top International Paper Prize

2007-10-25T15:45:00.000+01:00

DCU laser micromachining researchers have won the top application prize for their published paper on laser micromachining at the NI Days Worldwide Virtual Instrumentation Conference in London.

Over the last five years Dr. Dermot Brabazon, Dr. Ahmed Issa and Prof. Saleem Hashmi of the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and the Materials Processing Research Centre (MPRC) have developed two laser micromachining processes which allow for the production of channels and voxels with highly repeatable micrometer level resolution. Devices fabricated with this developed technology can be used for applications such as microfluidic lab on a chip, strain measurement, sub-micrometer cooling systems and various photonic guiding systems.

The paper was entitled, Laser System Automation using LabVIEW and PCI E-Series Board for 3D Internal Micromachining. This work illustrated the sophisticated automated 3D Nd:YVO4 and CO2 laser micro fabrication facilities that were developed. In order to achieve the precise control, CAD processing, laser firing, 3D sample movement and thermal field modelling software were developed. In addition, in order to characterise the high efficiency achieved from these processes, an in house built automated channel and voxel profiler was used.

NI Days, which has been running for the past decade, gives engineers and scientists from across the UK & Ireland an opportunity to learn how the latest developments in computer-based measurement and automation increase productivity and lower cost through graphical system design and virtual instrumentation

The prize includes flight and accommodation to NI Week in Austin, TX, next year, a plaque and LEGO Mindstorms NXT.

Congratulations to Puspita Deo

2007-10-19T12:26:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Puspita Deo who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Puspita's thesis is "Heterogeneous Motorised Traffic Flow Modelling using Cellular Automata".

She completed her PhD in the Modelling & Scientific Computing Group, School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Heather Ruskin.

Brief description of Project:

Traffic congestion is a major problem in most major cities around the world with few signs that this is diminishing, despite management efforts. In planning traffic management and control strategies at urban and inter urban level, understanding the factors involved in vehicular progression is vital. Most work to date has, however, been restricted to single vehicle-type traffic. Study of heterogeneous traffic movements for urban single and multi-lane roads has been limited, even for developed countries and motorised traffic mix, (with a broader spectrum of vehicle type applicable for cities in the developing world). The aim of the research, was thus to propose and develop a model for heterogeneous motorised traffic, applicable to situations, involving common urban and interurban road features in the western or developed world. A further aim of the work was to provide a basis for comparison with current models for homogeneous vehicle type.

A two-component cellular automata (2-CA) methodology is used to examine traffic patterns for single-lane, multi-lane controlled and uncontrolled intersections and roundabouts. In this heterogeneous model (binary mix), space mapping rules are used for each vehicle type, namely long (double-unit length) and short (single-unit length) vehicles. Vehicle type is randomly categorised as long (LV) or short (SV) with different fractions considered. Update rules are defined based on given and neighbouring cell states at each time step, on manoeuvre complexity and on acceptable space criteria for different vehicle types. Inclusion of heterogeneous traffic units increases the algorithm complexity as different criteria apply to different cellular elements, but mixed traffic is clearly more reflective of the real-world situation.

The impact of vehicle mix on the overall performance of an intersection and roundabout (one-lane one-way, one-lane two-way and two-lane two-way) has been examined. Investigation of performance metrics for heterogeneous traffic (short and long vehicles), can be shown to reproduce main aspects of real-world configuration performance. This has been validated, using local Dublin traffic data.

The developed model has potential to extend its use to linked transport network elements and can also incorporate further motorised and non-motorised vehicle diversity for various road configurations.

This project was funded by the School of Computing, DCU.

DCU Top of the Table for Research in Sunday Times University Guide

2007-09-30T15:58:00.000+01:00

DCU has been ranked as the top Irish University for Research in the recent Sunday Times University Guide. The guide, which was published on Sunday September 30th stated "Ireland’s youngest university, DCU, overtook Trinity, the oldest, to head the research category." DCU scored 100 points out of a possible 100 for research. The next highest University for research scored 93 points.

The Sunday Times noted that DCU's "350 academics attracted €91,429 each in research ". DCU's recent success in PRTLI 4, where the University attracted €23m in research funding made a major contribution to this. Under PRTLI 4 DCU were granted support for five specific research projects - three science and engineering projects and two humanities and social science based projects. These projects are carried out as part of national collaborative research programmes involving other third-level institudes.

DCU has consistently been rated highly in the Sunday Times University Guide. It won University of the Year in 2004 and was runner up in 2003 and 2006.

Click here for the Sunday Times University League Table 2007

Congratulations to Kealan McCusker

2007-09-20T18:27:00.000+01:00

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

The title of Kealan's thesis is "Cryptographic key distribution in wireless sensor networks: a hardware perspective".

He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Noel E. O’Connor.

Kealan is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher with the CDVP.

Brief description of Project:
In this work the suitability of different methods of symmetric key distribution for application in wireless sensor networks are discussed. Each method is considered in terms of its security implications for the network. It is concluded that an asymmetric scheme is the optimum choice for key distribution. In particular, Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) is proposed as the most suitable of the various asymmetric approaches. A protocol for key distribution using identity based Non-Interactive Key Distribution Scheme (NIKDS) and Identity-Based Signature scheme is presented. The protocol is analysed on the ARM920T processor and measurements were taken for the run time and energy of its components parts. It was found that the Tate pairing component of the NIKDS consumes significant amounts of energy, and so it should be ported to hardware. An accelerator was implemented in 65nm CMOS technology and area, timing and energy figures have been obtained for the design. Initial results indicate that a hardware implementation of IBC would meet the strict energy constraint of a wireless sensor network node.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland (EI) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

Embark Postgraduate Scholarship Success

2007-09-19T17:20:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Huang Jing and Houman Zahedmanesh who have been awarded Embark Postgraduate Research Scholarships. We look forward to working with the new students over the coming years.

Huang Jing will be working with Dr. Xiaojun Wang (School of Electronic Engineering). Houman Zahedmanesh will be working with Dr Caitriona Lally (School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering).

Huang and Houman are two of only 7 non-EU citizens to be awarded the scholarship.

Other Embark successes for DCU are Xi Jiang (Physics), Deirdre Fox (Chemistry) and Ruth Larragy (Mol/Bio).

Background:
The Embark Postgraduate Research Scholarship Scheme is administered by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). It applies to Science, Engineering and Technology related research by individuals pursuing Masters or Doctorate qualifications in recognised third level establishments.

All students graduating with higher honours in science, engineering and technology are entitled to apply for funding. A decision to grant funding is based on the student’s academic record, research preparation and a personal statement.

PhD funding will be available for up to three years to outstanding students though, exceptionally, this time period may be revised to cater for students whose research demands longer time periods.

DCU was also successful in the the first round of the Embark Postgraduate Research Scholarship Scheme, the results of which were announced in March. The following successful applicants to this scheme will be hosted in the Faculty of Engineering and Computing, (supervisor and School in parentheses):
Oisín Mac Fhearaí (Dr. Mark Humphrys - School of Computing)
Didier Roche (Prof Heather Ruskin - School of Computing)
Robert Ryan (Dr Markus Helfert - School of Computing)
Georgiana Dinu (Prof Josef van Genabith - School of Computing)
Lorna Fitzsimons (Dr Brian Corcoran - School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering)
Stephen O'Brien (Prof Paul F Whelan - School of Electronic Engineering)

Congratulations to George Mitchell

2007-09-19T17:01:00.000+01:00

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

The title of George's thesis is "Evolutionary Computation Applied to Combinatorial Optimisation Problems ".

He completed his PhD at the school of Electronic Engineering's Artificial Life research group while under the supervision of Professor Barry McMullin. The Artificial Life research group forms part of the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE), a national centre for excellence in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) based at Dublin City University.

Brief description of Project:
George's thesis addresses the issues associated with conventional genetic algorithms (GA) when applied to hard optimisation problems. In particular it examines the problem of selecting and implementing appropriate genetic operators in order to meet the validity constraints for constrained optimisation problems. The problem selected is the travelling salesman problem (TSP), a well known NP-hard problem.

Following a review of conventional genetic algorithms, this thesis advocates the use of a repair technique for genetic algorithms: GeneRepair. George evaluated the effectiveness of this operator against a wide range of benchmark problems and compare these results with conventional genetic algorithm approaches. A comparison between GeneRepair and the conventional GA approaches was made in two forms: firstly a handcrafted approach compared GAs without repair against those using GeneRepair. A second automated approach was then presented which utilises a meta-genetic algorithm to examine different configurations of operators and parameters. Through the use of a cost/benefit (Quality-Time Tradeoff) function, the user can balance the computational effort against the quality of the solution and thus allow the user to specify exactly what the cost benefit point should be for the search.

Results identified the optimal configuration settings for solving selected TSP problems. These results show that GeneRepair when used consistently generates very good TSP solutions in an extremely efficient manner, in both time and number of evaluations required.

There are many areas in which the finding of this work could be applied. The findings have definite applications in permutation based problems found in mathematics, engineering and computer science contexts. There are many other areas of high complexity ( e.g. Synthetic Biology) which at present are in the early stages of research. One factor which inhibits research in these areas is the cost of computation, this factor could be addressed through the use of the techniques discovered in the course of this work.

Congratulations to Paul Ferguson

2007-09-18T18:00:00.000+01:00

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

The title of Paul's thesis is "Index Ordering by Query-Independent Measures".
He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Prof. Alan Smeaton.

Brief description of Project:
Rather than simply utilising more computing resources in order to perform retrieval on large text collections, we investigated ways in which to only search a limited amount of the collection at query-time, in order to speed up this retrieval process (as well as allowing retrieval to be carried out with limited computing resources). Although, in doing this we aimed to limit the loss in retrieval efficacy (in terms of accuracy of results).

In order to do this we identified a number of different query-independent measures that can approximate the documents' query-independent quality in the collection, rather than relying solely on a term-weighting approach to determine the importance of a document. In this way we can choose to limit the amount of information to search through, by eliminating the documents of lesser importance, which not only makes the search more efficient, but should also limit any loss in retrieval accuracy.

In our work we applied a number of traditional combination techniques, as well as machine learning approaches to the task of combining these measures together, to provide a more accurate overall measure. We also provided techniques to allow documents to be effectively eliminated from a sorted inverted index while retaining the same level of performance. This research should allow fast and effective retrieval of large collections of documents be carried out much more efficiently than using traditional retrieval techniques, while also retaining the same level of accuracy for a typical web user.

This project was generously funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

Congratulations to Ciarán Ó Conaire

2007-09-18T17:11:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Ciarán Ó Conaire who successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Ciarán's thesis is "Adaptive detection and tracking using Multimodal Information".

He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Noel E. O’Connor.

Brief description of Project:
The difficulty of fusing data from multiple sources of information for automated visual analysis was addressed in two areas of computer vision: adaptive detection and adaptive object tracking. The work on adaptive object detection explores a new paradigm in dynamic parameter selection, by selecting thresholds for object detection to maximise agreement between pairs of sources.

Object tracking, a complementary technique to object detection, was also explored in a multi-source context and an efficient framework for robust tracking, termed the Spatiogram Bank tracker, was proposed as a means to overcome the difficulties of traditional histogram-based tracking. While general frameworks for data fusion were developed, the fusion of thermal infrared video with standard visual video was specifically targeted. Potential applications include: pervasive human-computer interaction and automated surveillance.

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

Congratulations to Neil O'Hare

2007-09-17T17:49:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Neil O'Hare who successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Neil's thesis is "Semi-Automatic Person-Annotation in Context-Aware Personal Photo Collections".

He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Prof. Alan Smeaton.

Brief description of Project:

The MediAssist system is a prototype context-aware photo management system that facilitates browsing, searching and semi-automatic annotation of personal photos. Within this system, we developed an approach to semi-automatic person-annotation in personal photo collections that facilitates the annotation of people in a batch manner by suggesting person names for photos as users interact with the system.

We developed person classification and retrieval techniques based on analysis of the context of photo capture, such as the time and location, in addition to analysis of the image content of the photo. We used classification techniques to suggest names for faces detected in photos, and retrieval techniques to suggest faces for a query name. We implemented the proposed techniques and integrated them into the interface of the MediAssist prototype photo management system.

We successfully evaluated our person classification and retrieval techniques using the real photo collections of a number of users, and we also successfully evaluated the interactive annotation system with a number of users.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland.

Congratulations to Bart Mellebeek

2007-08-31T10:05:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Bart Mellebeek who has successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Bart's thesis is "TransBooster: Black Box Optimisation of Machine Translation Systems".

He completed his PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Andy Way and Professor Josef van Genabith.

Brief description of Project:

TransBooster is a new and modular approach to help Machine Translation (MT) systems improve their output quality by reducing the number of complexities in the input. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by proposing yet another approach to MT, we build on the strengths of existing MT paradigms while trying to remedy their shortcomings as much as possible. TransBooster is a wrapper technology that operates on top of an existing MT system. It reduces the complexity of the input text by a recursive decomposition algorithm which produces simple input chunks that are spoon-fed to the baseline MT system. In other words, TransBooster guides the baseline MT system through the input text and tries to help the system to improve the quality of its own translations through automatic complexity reduction. TransBooster has been successfully tested on baseline MT systems of different characteristics (Rule-based, Example-based and Statistical baseline systems) and was extended to be used as promising alternative to current Multi-Engine MT techniques.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland.

Success for Industry-Academia Partnership

2007-08-21T17:06:00.000+01:00

Enterprise Ireland have featured the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, DCU in a recent set of case studies on their Innovation Partnerships scheme. The case study focuses on the research work of Masters student James Wall. Mr. Wall is investigating the field of submersible motors.

This project allows for a synergistic interaction between industry and academia. According to Ben Breen, Head of R&D at ABS Production Wexford, “The innovation partnership is an economical way of getting vital research done, and for us, it means that James’ advanced knowledge can become an invaluable asset to ABS.” The benefits for DCU are clear: “The funding and support from the Innovation Partnership Programme was an enabler for the research that was undertaken……..Conducting this type of applied research means that we get to apply our skills to solving practical problems”, said Dermot Brabazon, a lecturer with DCU who supervised the project.

Both parties are so pleased with the outcome of the project that they will be re-applying for funding to upgrade Mr. Wall’s research to PhD level.

SurfEng07: Surface Engineering Symposium & Exposition Workshop 2007

2007-08-21T16:44:00.000+01:00

We are pleased to invite you to the "Surface Engineering Symposium & Exposition Workshop 2007" which will be held from Thursday 6th and Friday 7th September2007 at DCU, Dublin, Ireland.

The Surface Engineering Symposium and Workshop Exposition will be held in the Engineering Building of Dublin City University, on
Thursday 6th September2007 (Symposium- Dissemination of Research)
and
Friday 7th September2007 (Workshop Exposition - For those wishing to apply Surface Engineering out in Industry/Research)

This Symposium and Workshop Exposition is FREE to attend and the Registration Deadline is Wednesday 5pm August 22nd 2007.

There are two types of paper formats which you may choose;
1. Abstract Poster
or
2. Conference Paper
Note the deadline for papers is Wednesday 29th August 2007.

Please visit http://www.mecheng.dcu.ie/Surfeng2007/ for more information

Deadlines:
Registration for either/both Symposium /& Workshop Expo: Wednesday August 22nd 2007
Submission of Abstract paper: Wednesday 29th August 2007.
Submission of Conference paper: Wednesday 29th August 2007.
SurfEng Symposium start date: Thursday 6th September 2007

We look forward to welcoming you at DCU

DCU receives €23m Research Funding under PRTLI 4

2007-08-03T18:15:00.000+01:00

The Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin, TD formally announced the outcome of PRTLI Cycle 4 at 11.00 am today. Under this scheme, DCU will receive €23m in research funding. This funding is based on 5 inter-institutional proposals:

- Nanoscience and Nanoscale technologies for Ireland (NANOTEIRE)
- National Biophotonics & Imaging Platform [NBIP]
- National Programme on (Bio)pharmaceutical & Pharmacological Sciences
- Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS)
- National Programme of Research on Knowledge, Innovation, Society and Space (KISS)

Significantly, the funding includes projects from across DCU, including science/engineering and humanities/social sciences.

Of particular interest to the Faculty of Engineering and Computing are the Nanoteire and NBIP programmes.

Nanoteire
Nanoteire (Nanoscience and Nano scale technologies for Ireland ) will create a shared national infrastructural capability by significantly upgrading and enhancing the laboratories and capital equipment holdings needed to establish top tier graduate education opportunities in nanoscience and nanoscale technologies for Ireland.

The DCU team, which comprises Professor Liam Barry, Dr. Pascal Landais and Professor Patrick McNally of the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE), and members of the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology (NCPST), will focus on the theme, Ultrafast Photonic Processes and Interactions. To this end DCU will add very significantly to its high speed optical communications laboratories, nanomaterials growth and characterization facilities and high power laser facilities.

NBIP
Professor Paul F. Whelan of the Centre for Image Processing & Analysis (CIPA-RINCE), in conjunction with the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute at DCU has been awarded funding as part of the National Biophotonics & Imaging Platform (NBIP). The mission of the NBIP is to provide an integrated national access and training infrastructure in research, education, technology development and industry collaboration for the State’s investment in Biophotonics and Imaging.

Congratulations to George Awad

2007-07-18T11:10:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to George Awad who has successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of George's thesis is "A Framework for Sign Language Recognition using Support Vector Machines and Active Learning for Skin Segmentation and Boosted Temporal Sub-units".

He completed his PhD in the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Alistair Sutherland.

Brief Description of Research
This dissertation describes new techniques that can be used in a sign language recognition (SLR) system, and more generally in human gesture systems. Any SLR system consists of three main components: Skin detector, Tracker, and Recognizer. The skin detector is responsible for segmenting skin objects like the face and hands from video frames. The tracker keeps track of the hand location and detects any occlusions that might happen between any skin objects. Finally, the recognizer tries to classify the performed sign into one of the sign classes in our vocabulary using the set of features and information provided by the tracker.

In this work, we propose a new technique for skin segmentation using SVM (support vector machine) active learning combined with region segmentation information. Having segmented the face and hands, we need to track them across the frames. So, we have developed a unified framework for segmenting and tracking skin objects and detecting occlusions. Instead of dealing with the whole sign for recognition, the sign can be broken down into elementary subunits, which are far less in number than the total number of signs in the vocabulary. This motivated us to propose a novel algorithm to model and segment these subunits, then try to learn the informative combinations of subunits/features using a boosting framework. Our results reached above 90% recognition rate using very few training samples.

In summary, we propose a new paradigm to solve the SLR problem by discovering the subunits of the SL then learning the informative ones together with the informative features that can enhance the overall recognition accuracy. We believe that this approach is very promising to scale up the vocabulary of recognizing sign language without compromising the recognition accuracy.

This project was generously funded by the School of Computing, DCU and by Marie Curie Actions.

Computing PhD Student is finalist in Google Europe Anita Borg Scholarship for Women in Computing

2007-07-10T15:13:00.001+01:00

Congratulations to Sara Morrissey, a PhD student in the School of Computing, DCU, who recently became the only Irish finalist in the first Google Europe Anita Borg Scholarship Scheme for Women in Computing.

Following an application process involving essays on her own research and women in computing as well as two phone interviews, Sara was selected from a pool of almost 200 applicants as one of 31 finalists and awarded €1,000 to supplement her research funds for the next academic year. As a finalist, she was also privileged to represent women in computing and technical fields in Ireland at a Finalists’ Retreat held in Google Europe HQ in Zurich where she participated in information and networking sessions.

The award itself commemorates the work of Dr. Anita Borg (1949 - 2003) whose vision for the advancement of technology and her founding of the Institute for Women and Technology led her to become an excellent role model for young women in the field of computing today. This award is open to women in computing across Europe who are dedicated to full-time work in the area of Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Informatics or a similarly related field through an MSc or PhD.

Researching the area of Sign Language Machine Translation, Sara is currently coming into the final year of her PhD in the School of Computing and hopes to continue working in this area as well as furthering her interest in the area of women in computing.

2007 China Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies 28th - 29th August 2007

2007-07-09T16:52:00.000+01:00

DCU is proud to host the 2007 China Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies.

CIICT is an international conference focusing on topical research in the broad area of Information and Communications Technologies. The conference is jointly sponsored and organised by Chinese and Irish Universities with hosting alternating between China and Ireland. The first CIICT conference was hosted by Hangzhou Dianzi University in October 2006. The 2007 conference will be jointly sponsored and organised by Dublin City University and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, in association with Hangzhou Dianzi University. The conference will be hosted in Dublin City University, Ireland.

The conference aims are to strengthen science and technology research collaboration between China and Ireland and also to provide a platform for facilitating academic and industrial research interactions with other countries.

CIICT is jointly organised by Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE), Dublin City University, Ireland and State Key Lab of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China

Conference Dates: 28th-29th August 2007

International Symposium for Engineering Education, ISEE 2007 to be held at DCU

2007-07-08T16:22:00.000+01:00

We are pleased to invite you to the "International Symposium for Engineering Education, ISEE 2007" which will be held from 17th - 19th September 2007 at DCU, Dublin, Ireland. This conference is fully sponsored by various national and international educational bodies.
Note the deadline for papers is the 10th August 2007.
Please visit the Call for Papers at http://www.ndlr.ie/mecheng/isee.

Deadlines:
Submission of paper: Friday 10th August 2007
Notification of acceptance: Friday 17th August 2007
Last registration date: Wednesday 12th September 2007
Conference start date: Monday 17th September 2007

20th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training 3-5 July, 2007

2007-06-26T17:30:00.000+01:00

The 20th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training will be held in the School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland during the 3-5 July, 2007.

CSEE&T deals with the educational and training issues involved in ensuring that graduates and company staff are able to develop quality software in a cost-effective manner. Started in 1987 by Norm Gibbs at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), the Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training (CSEE&T) has become the premier annual conference focusing on education and training in software engineering. The conference has received the sustained support and sponsorship of IEEE - Computer Society, academia and industry. Responding to the global impact of software engineering practices, CSEE&T was held in Spain in 2003 and Canada in 2005.

Keynote speakers will discuss the software engineering scene and related educational and training developments in P.R. China (Prof. Yulin Wang), the nationally recognised graduate training programme at Fidelity Investments (Marie Moloney), and underlying dilemmas in software education (Prof. David Parnas). Globalisation is a particular focus this year, with twenty-six countries involved in the forty refereed papers being presented. Panel sessions, workshops and other events provide many further opportunities for the exchange of ideas.

Starting with CSEE&T 2006 in Hawaii, an Academy for Software Engineering Education and Training (ASEE&T) has been added to the program.

Details of the conference programme and other information can be found at:http://www.computing.dcu.ie/cseet2007

IRCSET Postdoctoral Fellowship Success

2007-06-12T10:39:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Zhen Liu, Timo Volkmer and Arijit Bhattacharya who were awarded Embark Postdoctoral Fellowships. We look forward to working with the new fellows over the coming years.

The Embark Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme is administered by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). It is open to researchers from all nations who are at an early stage of their postdoctoral research career and who wish to further their research in the sciences, engineering or technology, at an Irish research institution.

Zhen Liu will be working with Dr. Xiaojun Wang (School of Electronic Engineering). Timo Volkmer will be working with Professor Alan Smeaton (School of Computing and CDVP/AIC). Arijit Bhattacharya will be working with Dr. John Geraghty and Dr. Paul Young (School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Other Embark successes for DCU are Clare Hamilton (Mol/Bio), Patrick Hayden (Physics), Ewa Kazimierska (Chemistry) and Jofre Pedregosa Gutierrez (Physics).

DCU was also successful in the the first round of the Embark Postgraduate Research Scholarship Scheme, the results of which were announced in March. The following successful applicants to this scheme will be hosted in the Faculty of Engineering and Computing, (supervisor and School in parentheses):
Oisín Mac Fhearaí (Dr. Mark Humphrys - School of Computing)
Didier Roche (Prof Heather Ruskin - School of Computing)
Robert Ryan (Dr Markus Helfert - School of Computing)
Georgiana Dinu (Prof Josef van Genabith - School of Computing)
Lorna Fitzsimons (Dr Brian Corcoran - School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering)
Stephen O'Brien (Prof Paul F Whelan - School of Electronic Engineering)

Of note:
The second call for the Embark Postgraduate Research Scholarship Scheme is expected at the end of June. If you are interested in applying for this scheme, please consult the research pages of the three Schools (below) and contact your potential supervisor directly.

School of Computing Research Pages
School of Electronic Engineering Research Pages
School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Staff Pages

Biomedical Research Hits National Headlines

2007-05-14T21:13:00.000+01:00

An international team of DCU researchers have begun work on ways of producing synthetic hard and soft tissue for humans that could revolutionise treatment for people affected by disease and trauma.

The European Commission funded project, costing about €1.2m, is being coordinated by Dr. Lisa Looney, Director of the DCU Materials Processing Research Centre, and a senior lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.

Dr. Looney said: “There are several circumstances under which it is necessary to replace human tissue, either on a permanent or temporary basis. The current ‘gold standard’ in replacing both bone and vascular tissue is to use grafts of bone and soft tissue from other sites in the patient, but this can be problematic.

“Tissue may not be available, and the ‘double’ procedure of two operations, one to harvest the bone or soft tissue, and another to ‘fit’ it in the replacement site, incurs higher risk of infection, pain and prolongs hospital stays.

“Synthetic alternatives do exist, but haven’t found widespread application due to difficulties in producing the optimum material structure and properties, in a repeatable and controllable manner.

“The research at DCU will study a number of innovative manufacturing processes with a view to achieving this control and repeatability, while refining the architecture, strength and texture of the tissue substitutes and measuring living cells response to these new synthetic replacements.”
Obviously the techniques will differ for soft vascular tissue and bone replacements – the group is studying both.

Dr Looney is joined by other senior investigators in this work, Dr Garrett McGuinness, Dr Joseph Stokes and Dr Dermot Brabazon. DCU’s vascular health research centre is collaborating with the project as well as engineers in ITT Dublin.

The research is being funded under the EU’s Marie Curie Early Stage Training (EST) programme, and will be implemented by seven postgraduate level researchers over the next 3 years. These highly qualified young researchers have been recruited from across Europe (Poland, Spain (2), Hungary (2) and further afield (Turkey and China), from a range of disciplines (mechanical, biomedical and industrial engineering, biology and biotechnology)

The synthetic materials being used in the research are, for bone, calcium phosphate bioceramics mixed with various bio polymers and for vascular work, special polymers called hydrogels.

The Original Article is here.

This work has received extensive coverage in the national media:

Interview with Dr Lisa Looney of DCU RTE Radio 1 - Today Show with Pat Kenny 09-MAY-07

"DCU hosts 1.2m euro research into ceramic bone material" by Dick Ahlstrom Irish Times 10-MAY-07

Congratulations to Aisling Clarke

2007-04-12T17:19:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Aisling Clarke who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Aisling's thesis is "Optical Pulse Processing Towards Tb/s High-Speed Photonic Systems".

She completed her PhD in the Radio & Optical Communications Laboratory at the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Professor Liam Barry.

Brief description of Project:
Due to the continued growth of high-bandwidth services provided by the internet, there is a requirement to operate individual line rates in excess of 100 Gb/s in next-generation optical communications systems. In order to implement these high-speed networks, processing of information is required to be carried out optically as electronic processing capability is presently limited to 40 Gb/s. This project focussed on two important sub-systems of an optical communications network, transmitter and wavelength converter. A high-quality pulse source suitable for 80 Gb/s systems was developed and optical techniques were investigated to enhance the quality of the generated pulses (components used include a fibre Bragg grating and saturable absorber). In addition an 80 Gb/s wavelength converter was achieved by exploiting nonlinearities in a semiconductor optical amplifier in conjunction with wavelength shifted filtering. This research will aid in the development of next-generation optical networks, a necessity in today’s society to meet the demands of increased bandwidth at cost-efficient prices.

This project was generously funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Enterprise Ireland.