Digital Commons Network^™

How Do We Encourage The Lowest Appropriate Level Of Technology To Solve Human Needs In Our Design Solutions, Ceri Almrott, Santiago Perez

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

As product design education evolves, the focus has shifted from creating tangible objects to delivering comprehensive product-service systems. Achieving a truly human-centred approach in student practice requires rethinking how we educate future designers and engineers. This paper examines the development of a European Low-Tech Hackathon, where students worked within a specific context of human and technological constraints. The Hackathon challenged participants to create solutions with a minimal technological footprint, aligning with sustainability principles and the core values of Low-Tech. It offers a unique lens through which to explore how technological education must adapt to contemporary demands for product and service …

Students’ Perceptions Of International Faculty Members In Higher Education, Pearlean Chadha

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This paper investigates university student perceptions of international faculty members in the context of an Irish higher education institution. Though international student numbers are rising in Ireland, classrooms continue to predominantly comprise Irish and EU students. However, the faculty has growing number of non-EU lecturers due to many economic and social factors. This study uses a quantitative survey method with a sample of business students from TU Dublin. The survey, based on the study by Yao et al. (2012), employed a 7-point Likert scale to explore student perceptions of their interactions with international faculty members in both online and offline …

Genwriter: Reducing Gender Cues In Biographies Through Text Rewriting, Shweta Soundararajan, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Gendered language is the use of words that indicate an individual’s gender. Though useful in certain context, it can reinforce gender stereotypes and introduce bias, particularly in machine learning models used for tasks like occupation classification. When textual content such as biographies contains gender cues, it can influence model predictions, leading to unfair outcomes such as reduced hiring opportunities for women. To address this issue, we propose GenWriter, an approach that integrates Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to rewrite biographies in a way that obfuscates gender while preserving semantic content. We evaluate GenWriter by measuring gender bias …

The Modern Pilgrimage Of Umrah: The Convergence Of Spiritual Devotion And Pop-Consumer Culture In Indonesia, Syamsu Madyan, Habil Abyad, Imam Wahyudi Karimullah

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study explores Umrah’s significant growth as a religious tourism model in Indonesian Muslim society. The discussion examines factors that influence that growth, from the increased income levels of Indonesian middle-class Muslims to the Umrah propaganda generated by the wave of social media. This study will also capture Umrah as a solution for Indonesian Muslims to the long waiting queue for Hajj quota in Indonesia, as it is seen as a good opportunity for religious commodification through the touristic market being exercised by stakeholders such as policymakers and travel agencies. As the Umrah tourist market will be analysed in this …

Marketing Management Of Cemetery-Based Religious Sites To Improve The Economic Level Of Society, Dian Mohammad Hakim, Imam Wahyudi Karimullah, Winarto Winarto, Maskuri Maskuri

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study discussed the potential of cemetery-based religious tourism as an economic development strategy, with the Sunan Ampel Cemetery in Surabaya, Indonesia, as a case in point. By analysing its marketing management strategies, the study demonstrates that successful tourism development requires more than just pulling in tourists; it requires an integrated approach that includes infrastructure and technology development, stakeholder collaboration, and local community involvement. With close to two million visitors each year, Sunan Ampel is an excellent example of the huge economic gains from successful religious tourism efforts. This paper emphasises the need to convert historical religious sites from passive …

Critical Race Theory And Higher Education In Ireland: An Exploration Of The Experiences Of Black Minority Ethnic Social Care Students, Margaret Fingleton

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This paper examines the experiences of Black Minority Ethnic students studying in higher education in Ireland, contextualizing them by key global events that occurred over the last decade. The research was underpinned by the core principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT) with a particular focus on the tenets of storytelling and intersectionality. Based on a qualitative approach, a participatory research methodology informed all phases of the study. Using a combined semi-structured interview/storytelling method, twenty-one female social care students in five higher education institutions participated in the study. In collaboration with a participatory advisory group, reflective thematic analysis was utilised to …

Spirituality And The Quest For Transcendence On The Portuguese Way Of St. James, José Luís Braga, Miguel Pazos Otón, Isabel Borges

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is a kind of proto tourism in a world where the number of pilgrimages has increased considerably. In the past the only motivation for such pilgrimages was religious, today we are witnessing the emergence of new motivations, such as cultural and even sporting ones. The research questions that guide this study are the following: Are faith and religion still strong enough motivations to justify pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela? Are there points of convergence between religious and secular pilgrims? Can the Camino be a means of awakening religious vocations? In short, what is the …

Confucian Virtue Ethics And Tourists’ Response To Spiritual Destinations: Ho Chi Minh City, An Sor Model Approach, Nguyen Van Si, Vo Duy Minh

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study aims to identify key factors that impact tourists’ responses, such as electronic word of mouth, and revisit intention to spiritual destinations. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this study introduces ritual propriety in Confucian Virtue Ethics as a new ‘stimulus’, along with destination image and tourism facilities. In addition, this study introduces spiritual belief and gratitude as two new ‘organisms’ together with destination attachment. The quantitative analysis of 470 spiritual tourists’ responses in Ho Chi Minh City confirmed that ritual propriety, destination image, and tourism facilities as ‘stimuli’, impact gratitude, spiritual belief, and destination attachment as ‘organisms’, resulting …

Invited Paper: Augmenting Pilgrimage With Ai: Walking The Kumano Kodō Iseji With A Digital Companion, Wayne E. Arnold, John A. Shultz

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Can a pilgrimage feel sacred when walking it alongside an artificial intelligence? In early 2025, we set out with a custom-built AI companion to walk the 170km Kumano Kodō Iseji route, exploring how digital tools might reshape one of Japan’s oldest pilgrimage paths. Rather than replacing the traditional experience, the AI deepened it by providing real-time translations, historical context, and even companionship during long stretches of remote trail. This field reflection explores how AI, when thoughtfully programmed and intentionally used, can augment sacred travel without diminishing its meaning. Walking with AI allowed us to engage more fully with the layered …

Improving The Readability Of Dementia Information Documents Using Chatgpt, Jonathan Turner, Damon Berry, Julie Doyle, Harish Kambampati, Orla Moran, Suzanne Smith, Michael Wilson, Dympna O'Sullivan

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

There is much information available on dementia, but information may not be written at an appropriate level for a lay reader. One aim of the CoDESIGN project is to simplify information available for those who have lower levels of literacy. We investigate the potential to simplify documents to reflect the literacy abilities of the reader. We report on the ability of ChatGPT to modify documents to such target reading levels while retaining the accuracy and completeness of the documents, while avoiding the introduction of errors. Results suggest that human supervision is required before documents can be made available to readers.

Turnitin To Improve Your Written English, Valerie Hascoet

Case studies: Digital Education

Irish Cultural Studies is a 5 credits module offered by Language Studies to all Erasmus and exchange students in TU Dublin. One assessment consists of a portfolio of reviews that students write about places they have visited and about activities that they have elected to do during their stay in Ireland. This work includes background research and short readings of their choice. Most students are not native speakers of English, but not all want to follow a traditional English class. Irish Cultural Studies allows them to practise their English skills without specific language-focused evaluation.

Tellecollaboration Task L2l, Susanna Nocchi, Morgana Valentina

Case studies: Digital Education

The Italian Telecollaboration project began in 2021 as a partnership between Language Studies at TU Dublin, DCU, and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. DCU is no longer involved and the initiative now continues as a collaboration between TU Dublin students of Italian and Università Cattolica students of English. The Telecollaboration is offered as a 2 ECTS module in Università Cattolica (see Collaborative Online International Learning) while at TU Dublin it is integrated into the language interaction assessment for the Italian Language 2A module, within the IBL degree. During Semester 2, students from both universities work in pairs …

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Articles

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

Fostering Undergraduate Research A Practice-Based Approach, Muireann Okeeffe, Tim Kovar, Robert Tully, Ruth Harris, Sue Norton, Emma Obrien, Deirdre Mcgrath Mcgrath, Rachelle O'Brien, Evin Mccarthy, Liam Mcglynn, Ceri Almrott, Connell Vaughan, Aija Freimane, Con Kennedy, Jesús Urda, Pearl O’Rourke, Clare Bell, Deirdre Kennedy, Sinead Mcdonald, Robbie O Connor

Compendium

This Compendium has its origins in the Undergraduate Practice-Based Research Community of Practice (CoP) established as an outcome to a Faculty of Arts & Humanities Teaching and Learning symposium that highlighted the importance of practice-based learning, including research, at undergraduate level.

The examples in this Compendium describe research that is focused on active-learning goals that help in creating a richer learning experience for students, assisting them to become more capable and effective learners across a range of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities.

Thirteen cross-disciplinary case studies are presented in this compendium that seek to both contribute to this …

Enhancing Professional Development For Third Space Roles: Reflections On The Added Value Of Learning Circles, Linde Moriau, Réka Matolay, Emma Mckenna, Andrea Toarniczky, Judit Gáspár, Márta Frigyik, Catherine Bates

Articles

This paper explores how Learning Circles can support higher education staff in navigating the complexities of contemporary educational landscapes with greater confidence, creativity, and efficacy. It presents qualitative research rooted in the three-year Erasmus+ project CIRCLET, involving five European universities. Learning Circles were implemented as a core component of professional development programmes, aiming to foster quality integration of Community Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) in academic practice. Drawing on a collaborative autoethnographic research design, we reflected on our experiences as Learning Circle designers, facilitators, and participants to identify manifestations of professional growth emanating from our project activities. We build on …

Child Protection And Disability: An Anti-Oppressive Reading, Susan Flynn Dr

Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies

Existing research alludes to complex inequalities within child protection systems for disabled children and disabled parents. An established risk of maltreatment that is higher for disabled children than for majority population peers converges with intersecting inequalities in the child protection arena. These include discrepancies around professional responses and service outcomes. Practice shortcomings, under-resourcing, practical impasses and knowledge deficits are also an enduring concern. Further, inequalities in child protection service outcomes and involvement for intellectually disabled parents are well documented. Thus, child protection and welfare casework with disabled children and disabled parents is fraught with complexities. This is due to the …

Submission To Ireland’S Electoral Commission- An Coimisiún Toghcháin’S Consultation On Education And Public Engagement Strategy, Brendan K. O'Rourke, Ewan Macdonald, Richard Woodward

Other Resources

An Coimisiún Toghcháin’s establishment and its work is very welcome in a world where democracy is being buffeted by many forces that are undermining it. There is a lack of trust and trustworthiness in the media (O’Neill, 2018). The public sphere is being fractured in the splintering niches of media (Nechushta,2024), in the filter bubbles, echo chambers & behavioural manipulations of the online world (Nguyen, 2020; Zuboff, 2022) and in the increasingly homosocial interactions of most people’s everyday face-to-face encounters. This submission uses, in addressing some of the main issues in democratic participation, the concept of the ‘endarkenment’ danger in …

Techniques & Technologies To Support Sustainable Education In The Academic Sphere: Pedagogy 5.0, Ivaylo Peev, Todor Todorov, Lucía Morales, Lia Pop

Books

The Second book of reports and papers is a result of the collaborative work of the European Common Laboratory for Pedagogical Action-Research and Student-Centred Learning (ELaRA), guided by Technological Education for Smart Development, Sustainability and Transdisciplinarity (TESST to Guide the European Research Institute), members, and would not have been possible without the kind support provided by the European University of Technology.The co-organisers' team from the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), Technological University Dublin (Ireland), the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), represented by book editors – Dr Ivaylo Peev, Todor Todorov, …

Confidence-Based Knowledge Distillation To Reduce Training Costs And Carbon Footprint For Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation, P. J. Wall, Rejwanul Haque, Maria Zafar

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

No abstract provided.

‘Ein Eigentümlicher Apparat’/ An Extraordinary Machine?': An Experiment Feeding Kafka’S ‘In Der Strafkolonie’ (‘In The Penal Colony’) Into Machine Translation Engines And Generative Ai, Dr Michael Kane

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

No abstract provided.

Understanding Social Biases In Large Language Models, Ojasvi Gupta, Stefano Marrone, Francesco Gargiulo, Rajesh Jaiswal, Lidia Marassi

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Background/Objectives: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, LLAMA, and Mistral are widely used for automating tasks such as content creation and data analysis. However, due to their training on publicly available internet data, they may inherit social biases. We aimed to investigate the social biases (i.e., ethnic, gender, and disability biases) in these models and evaluate how different model versions handle them. Methods: We instruction-tuned popular models (like Mistral, LLAMA, and Gemma), and for this we curated a dataset constructed by collecting and modifying diverse data from various public datasets. Prompts were run through a controlled pipeline, and responses were …

Synthesising Cross-Speaker Data For Low-Resource Pathological Speech Recognition With Peft, Kesego Mokgosi, Milad Dadgar, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Dysarthric speech recognition is essential for enhancing communication and accessibility for individuals with speech impairments, yet its development is hindered by a scarcity of robust, speaker-specific datasets. This study explores low-resource dysarthric speech recognition through cross-speaker transfer using synthetic data and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We integrate SpeechT5 text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis with x-vector speaker embeddings to generate speaker-specific dysarthric speech, enabling model adaptation while preserving pathological speech characteristics such as prosodic irregularities. Experiments on the TORGO dataset show that mixed cross-synthetic data with LoRA fine-tuning achieves a WER of 0.17, representing a 71.7% improvement over the standard model (0.60 WER) without …

Mapping Engineering Ethics Education, R Tormey, T Børsen, Shannon Chance, T T Lennerfors, Diana Adela Martin, G Bombaerts

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Writing a handbook implies describing the fundamental information needed by those teaching or researching in a field. This is a challenging task when the field is still maturing. This handbook grew from the idea that we could ‘collaboratively write’ engineering ethics education. In this introduction, we define the field in three dimensions: engineering, ethics, and education. The latter dimension is divided into three parts: the subjects that shape the teaching of engineering ethics education, the understanding of learners and learning that informs the pedagogical choices made, and the fusion of these two in the pedagogical methods used in teaching engineering …

Accreditation Considerations In Engineering Ethics Education: Bridging Global Standards And Local Practices: Bridging Global Standards And Local Practices, Louise O'Gorman, Alison Gwynne-Evan, Leah Ridgeway, Marek Rebow, Shannon Chance

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Accreditation can drive curricular innovation and change in engineering and can have a role in encouraging students' development of ethics-related competencies. Despite engineering educators' competence in the technical aspects of design and research, there can be an element of discomfort in planning and delivering lessons relating to ethics that span social justice, diversity and inclusion, environmental sustainability, and ethical theories. Because engineering accreditation can encourage and/or require the inclusion of ethical content in accredited engineering courses, the recently published Routledge Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education dedicated an entire section to the topic. This paper critically assesses the handbook's accreditation section …

Personalized Persuasion In The Digital Age: A Data-Driven Approach To Effective Communication, Annye Braca

Doctoral

This thesis investigates the potential of Machine Learning (ML) to personalize persuasive marketing messages. It explores the identification of individuals receptive to specific persuasion techniques based on their psychometric profiles. By developing ML models that incorporate these profiles, the thesis aims to predict the impact of tailored messages and improve the effectiveness of marketing communication.

Machine Learning Applications In Epigenomics And Its Association With Health And Disease, Trevor Doherty

Doctoral

Epigenetic modifications can lead to altered phenotypes without a change in the DNA sequence itself. Disrupted gene expression regulated by epigenetic processes can result in cancers, autoimmune diseases and various other maladies. Machine learning (ML) involves the use of algorithms and models which are trained to learn patterns in data, and has demonstrated remarkable success in solving diverse, complex challenges. Epigenomic studies, such as those that use DNA methylation (DNAm) data, increasingly make use of ML techniques to process extremely high dimensional data obtained from high throughput platforms e.g., DNAm arrays. These datasets suffer from the curse of dimensionality, increased …

On The Benefits Of Directness In Virtual Characters For Motivational Interviews, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Understanding the factors influencing successful engagement with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) remains a significant challenge. This understanding could be used to personalise agents to users to improve interactions. Some studies have shown that simulating personalities in healthcare agents can improve effectiveness and engagement. However, it is not yet well understood how variations of agent personality can be leveraged to improve user engagement with Motivational Interviewing (MI) ECAs. Specifically how the balance between agent warmth and directness can be controlled in an MI agent to improve likeability and engagement. We conducted an online Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of …

Seeing Beyond The Anthropocene With Joyce And Beckett, Michael Kane

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

This article suggests that the literary works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett may offer a means of ‘seeing beyond the Anthropocene’. A close look at Joyce’s “The Dead” and the “Proteus” and “Penelope” episodes of Ulysses as well as at Beckett’s play Endgame and other works will show how these writers’ distinct ways of looking at the world, and the life and death of mortal human beings, provide radical critiques of (and perhaps alternatives to) anthropocentric idealism. Their insights are still highly relevant today as the ecological crisis demands a fundamental reorientation of the (post)human relationship with the earth.

Winter Solstice Phenomenon At Newgrange: Research Report 2024, Frank Prendergast

Articles

This report, commissioned by the National Monuments Service presents a comprehensive analysis of the high-resolution photographic and video recordings of the solar illumination inside the burial chamber at Newgrange passage tomb, located within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Brú na Bóinne – Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne.