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

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

Funding Success for Nanomaterials Processing Laboratory

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

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.

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.”

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

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).