RINCE appoints two research officers to support its research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.