Digital Commons Network^™

Making Tradable White Certificates Trustworthy, Anonymous, And Efficient Using Blockchains, Nouman Ashraf, Sachin Sharma, Sheraz Aslam, Khursheed Aurangzeb

Articles

Fossil fuel pollution has contributed to dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate, and this trend will continue as fossil fuels are burned at an ever-increasing rate. Many countries around the world are currently making efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and one of the methods is the Tradable White Certificate (TWC) mechanism. The mechanism allows organizations to reduce their energy consumption to generate energy savings certificates, and those that achieve greater energy savings can sell their certificates to those that fall short. However, there are some challenges to implementing this mechanism, such as the centralized and costly verification and control …

The First Annual Teaching And Research Showcase Poster Tu Dublin – The Proof Is In The Pudding – Using Perceived Stress To Measure Short-Term Impact In Initiatives To Enhance Gender Balance In Computing Education, Alina Berry, Sarah Jane Delany

Other resources

The problem of gender imbalance in computing higher education has forced academics and professionals to implement a wide range of initiatives. Many initiatives use recruitment or retention numbers as their most obvious evidence of impact. This type of evidence of impact is, however, more resource heavy to obtain, as well as often requires a longitudinal approach. There are many shorter term initiatives that use other ways to measure their success.

First, this poster presents with a review of existing evaluation measures in interventions to recruit and retain women in computing education across the board. Three main groups of evaluation come …

Automation, Ai, And Future Skills Needs: An Irish Perspective, Raimunda Bukartaite, Daire Hooper

Articles

This study explores insights from key stakeholders into the skills they believe will be necessary for the future of work as we become more reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) and technology. The study also seeks to understand what human resource policies and educational interventions are needed to support and take advantage of these changes.

Understanding And Quantifying Human Factors In Programming From Demonstration: A User Study Proposal, Shakra Mehak, Aayush Jain, John D. Kelleher, Philip Long, Michael Guilfoyle, Maria Chiara Leva

Conference papers

Programming by demonstration (PbD) is a promising method for robots to learn from direct, non-expert human interaction. This approach enables the interactive transfer of human skills to the robot. As the non-expert user is at the center of PbD, the efficacy of the learned skill is largely dependent on the demonstrations provided. Although PbD methods have been extensively developed and validated in the field of robotics, there has been inadequate confirmation of their effectiveness from the perspective of human teachability. To address this gap, we propose to experimentally investigate the impact of communicating robot learning process on the efficacy of …

Reality Analagous Synthetic Dataset Generation With Daylight Variance For Deep Learning Classification, Thomas Lee, Susan Mckeever, Jane Courtney

Conference papers

For the implementation of Autonomously navigating Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) in the real world, it must be shown that safe navigation is possible in all real world scenarios. In the case of UAVs powered by Deep Learning algorithms, this is a difficult task to achieve, as the weak point of any trained network is the reduction in predictive capacity when presented with unfamiliar input data. It is possible to train for more use cases, however more data is required for this, requiring time and manpower to acquire. In this work, a potential solution to the manpower issues of exponentially scaling …

Addressing The "Leaky Pipeline": A Review And Categorisation Of Actions To Recruit And Retain Women In Computing Education, Alina Berry, Susan Mckeever, Brenda Murphy, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue around the world. For example, in the UK and Ireland, less than 20% of the student population in computer science, ICT and related disciplines are women. Similar figures are seen in the labour force in the field across the EU. The term "leaky pipeline"; is often used to describe the lack of retention of women before they progress to senior roles. Numerous initiatives have targeted the problem of the leaky pipeline in recent decades. This paper provides a comprehensive review of initiatives related to techniques used to boost recruitment and improve …

Generating Reality-Analogous Datasets For Autonomous Uav Navigation Using Digital Twin Areas, Thomas Lee, Susan Mckeever, Jane Courtney

Conference papers

In order for autonomously navigating Unmanned Air Vehicles(UAVs) to be implemented in day-to-day life, proof of safe operation will be necessary for all realistic navigation scenarios. For Deep Learning powered navigation protocols, this requirement is challenging to fulfil as the performance of a network is impacted by how much the test case deviates from data that the network was trained on. Though networks can generalise to manage multiple scenarios in the same task, they require additional data representing those cases which can be costly to gather. In this work, a solution to this data acquisition problem is suggested by way …

A Systematic Review Of How Cloud Infrastructure And Gdpr Have Affected Digital Investigations In A Multinational Business Context, Stuart Fraser, A.Omar Portillo-Dominguez

Other

With cloud infrastructure becoming an ever more popular platform for business network implementations, and with ever-tightening data protection regulation, the ability to carry out digital investigations has become more difficult. This has led to areas of research that have looked to restore the balance to digital investigations in this environment. These areas include the use of blockchain, data tracing, and digital forensics as a service. With so many methods to consider, this article looks at how each method aims to return the balance and make it possible to carry out an investigation that complies with new privacy regulations (e.g., the …

The Evolution Of The Internet And Social Media: A Literature Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Isobel O'Reilly Dr, Aiden Carthy

Articles

This article reviews and analyses factors impacting the evolution of the internet, the web, and social media channels, charting historic trends and highlight recent technological developments. The review comprised a deep search using electronic journal databases. Articles were chosen according to specific criteria with a group of 34 papers and books selected for complete reading and deep analysis. The 34 elements were analysed and processed using NVIVO 12 Pro, enabling the creation of dimensions and categories, codes and nodes, identifying the most frequent words, cluster analysis of the terms, and creating a word cloud based on each word's frequency. The …

Towards A Blockchain Assisted Patient Owned System For Electronic Health Records, Tomilayo Fatokun, Avishek Nag, Sachin Sharma

Articles

Security and privacy of patients’ data is a major concern in the healthcare industry. In this paper, we propose a system that activates robust security and privacy of patients’ medical records as well as enables interoperability and data exchange between the different healthcare providers. The work proposes the shift from patient’s electronic health records being managed and controlled by the healthcare industry to a patient-centric application where patients are in control of their data. The aim of this research is to build an Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) system that is layered on the Ethereum blockchain platform and smart contract in …

Detecting Interlocutor Confusion In Situated Human-Avatar Dialogue: A Pilot Study, Na Li, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

In order to enhance levels of engagement with conversational systems, our long term research goal seeks to monitor the confusion state of a user and adapt dialogue policies in response to such user confusion states. To this end, in this paper, we present our initial research centred on a user-avatar dialogue scenario that we have developed to study the manifestation of confusion and in the long term its mitigation. We present a new definition of confusion that is particularly tailored to the requirements of intelligent conversational system development for task-oriented dialogue. We also present the details of our Wizard-of-Oz based …

Active Learning For Auditory Hierarchy, William Coleman, Sarah Jane Delany, Charlie Cullen, Ming Yan

Conference papers

Much audio content today is rendered as a static stereo mix: fundamentally a fixed single entity. Object-based audio envisages the delivery of sound content using a collection of individual sound ‘objects’ controlled by accompanying metadata. This offers potential for audio to be delivered in a dynamic manner providing enhanced audio for consumers. One example of such treatment is the concept of applying varying levels of data compression to sound objects thereby reducing the volume of data to be transmitted in limited bandwidth situations. This application motivates the ability to accurately classify objects in terms of their ‘hierarchy’. That is, whether …

Examining A Hate Speech Corpus For Hate Speech Detection And Popularity Prediction, Filip Klubicka, Raquel Fernandez

Other resources

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other …

Adapt At Semeval-2018 Task 9: Skip-Gram Word Embeddings For Unsupervised Hypernym Discovery In Specialised Corpora, Alfredo Maldonado, Filip Klubicka

Other resources

This paper describes a simple but competitive unsupervised system for hypernym discovery. The system uses skip-gram word embeddings with negative sampling, trained on specialised corpora. Candidate hypernyms for an input word are predicted based on cosine similar- ity scores. Two sets of word embedding mod- els were trained separately on two specialised corpora: a medical corpus and a music indus- try corpus. Our system scored highest in the medical domain among the competing unsu- pervised systems but performed poorly on the music industry domain. Our approach does not depend on any external data other than raw specialised corpora.

Quantitative Fine-Grained Human Evaluation Of Machine Translation Systems: A Case Study On English To Croatian, Filip Klubicka, Antonio Toral, Victor Manuel Sanchez-Cartagena

Articles

This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to- Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different paradigms: pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural. First, we design an MQM-compliant error taxonomy tailored to the relevant …

Is It Worth It? Budget-Related Evaluation Metrics For Model Selection, Filip Klubicka, Giancarlo Salton, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Projects that set out to create a linguistic resource often do so by using a machine learning model that pre-annotates or filters the content that goes through to a human annotator, before going into the final version of the resource. However, available budgets are often limited, and the amount of data that is available exceeds the amount of annotation that can be done. Thus, in order to optimize the benefit from the invested human work, we argue that the decision on which predictive model one should employ depends not only on generalized evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and F-score, but …

One-To-Cloud One-Time Pad Data Encryption: Introducing Virtual Prototyping With Pspice, Paul Tobin, Lee Tobin, Roberto Gandia Blanquer Dr, Michael Mckeever, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

In this paper, we examine the design and application of a one-time pad encryption system for protecting data stored in the Cloud. Personalising security using a one-time pad generator at the client-end protects data from break-ins, side-channel attacks and backdoors in public encryption algorithms. The one-time pad binary sequences were obtained from modified analogue chaos oscillators initiated by noise and encoded client data locally. Specific ``one-to-Cloud'' storage applications returned control back to the end user but without the key distribution problem normally associated with one-time pad encryption. Development of the prototype was aided by ``Virtual Prototyping'' in the latest version …

Design And Implementation Of An Archetype Based Interoperable Knowledge Eco-System For Data Buoys, Paul Stacey, Damon Berry

Conference papers

This paper describes the ongoing work of the authors in translating two-level system design techniques used in Health Informatics to the Earth Systems Science domain. Health informaticians have developed a sophisticated two-level systems design approach for electronic health documentation over many years, and with the use of archetypes, have shown how knowledge interoperability among heterogeneous systems can be achieved. Translating two-level modelling techniques to a new domain is a complex task. A proof-of-concept archetype enabled data buoy eco-system is presented. The concept of operational templates-as-a service is proposed. Design recommendations and implementation experiences of re-working the proposed architecture to run …

Propagating Degrees Of Truth On An Argumentation Framework: An Abstract Account Of Fuzzy Argumentation, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

This paper proposes a computational framework to reason with conflicting and gradual evidence. The framework is a synthesis of Dung’s seminal work in argumentation semantics with multi-valued logic. Abstract grounded semantics is used to identify the conditions under which a conclusion can be accepted, while multi-valued logic operators are used to quantify the degree of truth of such conditions. We propose a truth-compositional recursive computation based on the notion of irrelevant arguments, and we discuss examples using the major multi-valued logics: Godel’s, Zadeh’s and Łukasiewicz's logic.

Empirical Comparative Analysis Of 1-Of-K Coding And K-Prototypes In Categorical Clustering, Fei Wang, Hector Franco, John Pugh, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Clustering is a fundamental machine learning application, which partitions data into homogeneous groups. K-means and its variants are the most widely used class of clustering algorithms today. However, the original k-means algorithm can only be applied to numeric data. For categorical data, the data has to be converted into numeric data through 1-of-K coding which itself causes many problems. K-prototypes, another clustering algorithm that originates from the k-means algorithm, can handle categorical data by adopting a different notion of distance. In this paper, we systematically compare these two methods through an experimental analysis. Our analysis shows that K-prototypes is more …

Judging Emotion From Low-Pass Filtered Naturalistic Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

In speech, low frequency regions play a significant role in paralinguistic communication such as the conveyance of emotion or mood. The extent to which lower frequencies signify or contribute to affective speech is still an area for investigation. To investigate paralinguistic cues, and remove interference from linguistic cues, researchers can low-pass filter the speech signal on the assumption that certain acoustic cues characterizing affect are still discernible. Low-pass filtering is a practical technique to investigate paralinguistic phenomena, and is used here to investigate the inference of naturalistic emotional speech. This paper investigates how listeners perceive the level of Activation, and …

Adaptive Ofdm For Wireless Interconnect In Confined Enclosures, Vit Sipal, Javier Gelabert, Christopher J. Stevens, Ben Allen, David Edwards

Articles

This letter considers and recommends OFDM with adaptive subcarrier modulation as a suitable candidate for wireless UWB communication in computer chassis. A rigorous measurement campaign studies the guaranteed spectral efficiency. It concludes that enhancement of the existing WiMedia OFDM systems with a bandwidth of 528 MHz in order to support adaptive OFDM would enable data-rates above 1 Gbps over short ranges, i.e. the spectral efficiency would be doubled. Moreover, the guaranteed spectral efficiency is shown to increase with bandwidth, i.e. the guaranteed data-rate increases better than linearly with bandwidth.

A Window Of Opportunity: Assessing Behavioural Scoring, Kenneth Kennedy, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany, Michael O'Sullivan, Neil Watson

Articles

After credit has been granted, lenders use behavioural scoring to assess the likelihood of default occurring during some specific outcome period. This assessment is based on customers’ repayment performance over a given fixed period. Often the outcome period and fixed performance period are arbitrarily selected, causing instability in making predictions. Behavioural scoring has failed to receive the same attention from researchers as application scoring. The bias for application scoring research can be attributed, in part, to the large volume of data required for behavioural scoring studies. Furthermore, the commercial sensitivities associated with such a large pool of customer data often …

A Crowdsourcing Approach To Labelling A Mood Induced Speech Corpus, John Snel, Alexey Tarasov, Charlie Cullen, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper demonstrates the use of crowdsourcing to accumulate ratings from na ̈ıve listeners as a means to provide labels for a naturalistic emotional speech dataset. In order to do so, listening tasks are performed with a rating tool, which is delivered via the web. The rating requirements are based on the classical dimensions, activation and evaluation, presented to the participant as two discretised 5-point scales. Great emphasis is placed on the participant’s overall understanding of the task, and on the ease-of-use of the tool so that labelling accuracy is reinforced. The accumulation process is ongoing with a goal to …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …

A Similarity Matrix For Irish Traditional Dance Music, Padraic Lavin

Dissertations

It is estimated that there are between seven and ten thousand Irish traditional dance tunes in existence. As Irish musicians travelled the world they carried their repertoire in their memories and rarely recorded these pieces in writing. When the music was passed down from generation to generation by ear the names of these pieces of music and the melodies themselves were forgotten or changed over time. This has led to problems for musicians and archivists when identifying the names of traditional Irish tunes.

Almost all of this music is now available in ABC notation from online collections. An ABC file …

Authentication Of Biometric Features Using Texture Coding For Id Cards, Jonathan Blackledge, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

The use of image based information exchange has grown rapidly over the years in terms of both e-to-e image storage and transmission and in terms of maintaining paper documents in electronic form. Further, with the dramatic improvements in the quality of COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) printing and scanning devices, the ability to counterfeit electronic and printed documents has become a widespread problem. Consequently, there has been an increasing demand to develop digital watermarking techniques which can be applied to both electronic and printed images (and documents) that can be authenticated, prevent unauthorized copying of their content and, in the case of printed …

A Machine Learning Approach To Hierarchical Categorisation Of Auditory Objects, William Coleman, Sarah Jane Delany, Charlie Cullen, Ming Yan Dr.

Articles

With the advent of new audio delivery technologies comes opportunities and challenges for content creators and providers. The proliferation of consumption modes (stereo headphones, home cinema systems, ‘hearables’), media formats (mp3, CD, video and audio streaming) and content types (gaming, music, drama & current affairs broadcasting) has given rise to a complicated landscape where content must often be adapted for multiple end-use scenarios. The concept of object-based audio envisages content delivery not via a fixed mix but as a series of auditory objects which can then be controlled either by consumers or by content creators & providers via accompanying metadata. …

Using Virtual Reality To Enhance Electrical Safety And Design In The Built Environment, Martin Barrett, Jonathan Blackledge, Eugene Coyle

Articles

Electricity and the inherent risks associated with its use in the built environment have long since been a priority for the electrical services industry and also the general public who must live and work in this environment. By its nature virtual reality has the advantage of being safe for both the user and equipment. In addition, it offers the user an opportunity to be exposed to a range of scenarios and conditions that either occur infrequently or are hazardous to replicate. This paper presents a prototype desktop virtual reality model, to enhance electrical safety and design in the built environment. …

Forty Years Of Movie Hacking: Considering The Potential Implications Of The Popular Media Representation Of Computer Hackers From 1968 To 2008, Damian Gordon

Articles

Increasingly movies are being produced which feature plots that incorporate elements of computer security and hacking, and cumulatively these movies are creating a public perception as to the nature of computer security. This research examines movies that feature hackers (and hacking) to identify if any common themes emerge from these movies in their representation of these issues. To achieve this, first a corpus of hacking movies is created, and then using a qualitative data analysis technique, guidelines are developed which distinguish those movies that actually have the potential to create a perception with the general public. The resultant dataset is …