SFI Funding Success for DCU

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Postgraduate Research Scholarships awarded to DCU students

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

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

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

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

Two full scholarships worth €3221 will be awarded to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations to Ronan Barrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”