Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparative Study Of The Effect Of Sensor Noise On Activity Recognition Models, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

To provide a better understanding of the relative strengths of Machine Learning based Activity Recognition methods, in this paper we present a comparative analysis of the robustness of three popular methods with respect to sensor noise. Specifically we evaluate the robustness of Naive Bayes classifier, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest based activity recognition models in three cases which span sensor errors from dead to poorly calibrated sensors. Test data is partially synthesized from a recently annotated activity recognition corpus which includes both interleaved activities and a range of both temporally long and short activities. Results demonstrate that the relative …

Cultural Policy And The Creative City: Legitimation Discourses, Culture And The State, Tara Byrne

Doctoral

This thesis addresses cultural policy. It proposes that the creative city urban development paradigm is a useful perspective from which cultural policy can be analysed in order to reveal the imperatives, pressures, contingencies and deficits within it and the state, vis-à-vis the market. The thesis, therefore, rests on three analytical pillars: the general field of cultural policy, the specific construct of the creative city paradigm, and an investigation of relations between these domains through a study of policy texts in Scotland, Finland and Ireland. Using Michel Foucault’s discourse formation theory and Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld, system, legitimation and colonisation, …

Understanding Presence, Affordance And The Time/Space Dimensions For Language Learning In Virtual Worlds, Susanna Nocchi, Françoise Blin

Articles

Notwithstanding their potential for novel approaches to language teaching and learning, Virtual Worlds (VWs) present numerous technological and pedagogical challenges that require new paradigms if the language learning experience and outcomes are to be successful. In this presentation, we argue that the notions of presence and affordance, together with the time/space dimensions of interactions in virtual worlds (e.g. Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope, Foucault’s (1984) heteropia, and Lemke’s (2000) heterochrony), provide new insights into language learners’ trajectories as they attempt to carry out tasks that are designed to make use of virtual worlds’ characteristics and potentialities. We explore and analyse a critical …

The School Completion Programme And The Development Of Human Rights Education In Ireland., Caroline O'Neill

Dissertations

This study explores the effectiveness of the School Completion Programme (SCP) in helping to achieve the three goals of the National Children’s Strategy (2000-2010) which are that children:

• Will have a voice in matters which affect them

• Their lives will be better understood

• They will receive quality supports and services to promote all aspects of their development

The research involved interviewing children who attend the schools involved in the Programme and have participated in the supports at some stage in their educational lives. The findings provided me with a valuable insight into how these children experience their …

Towards A Better Specification Of The Store Environment Stimulus: An Augmented Stimulus-Organism-Response (Sor) Model That Captures Brand Expressiveness, John Murray

Conference proceedings

Abstract: This paper proposes an augmented SOR model which facilitates design/architect practitioners when they review store concepts. The paper contributes to the knowledge base of designers/architects when making deliberate brand expressions in development of the store environment. The global nature of the SOR model, it is argued, does not allow for discrimination between consumer interpretations of store brands; nor does it propose a realistic means of engaging design-architect practitioners at the concept proofing stage of development. This conceptual paper argues that retail branding studies benefit from inclusion of more flexible frameworks founded on separable and integral design-architecture and brand communicative …

Using Gardner’S Theories Of Intelligence In The Teaching Of Early Childhood Education, Eileen Mcpartland

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This small-scale qualitative study was carried out to examine a perceived gap in the teaching and learning experiences of a group of students in a two-year childcare course of a specific College of Further Education. The distinction between teaching and learning will be discussed, while acknowledging Gardner's theories and encouraging cross-curricular interactions within the Further Education setting. Students were asked to identify how they thought they learnt material in the context of Gardner's Theories of Multiple Intelligences to see if it would assist them in addressing a persistent assessment problem. The research involved an individual interview at tutorial, a follow-up …

Enhancing Listening And Spoken Skills In Spanish Connected Speech For Anglophones, Elena Paz Vizcaya

Doctoral

Native speech is directed towards native listeners, not designed for comprehension and analysis by language learners. Speed of delivery, or economy of effort, produces a speech signal to which the native listener can assign the correct words. There are no discrete words in the speech signal itself therefore there is often a linguistic barrier in dealing with the local spoken language.
The creation, development and application of the Dynamic Spanish Speech Corpus (DSSC) facilitated an empirically-based appreciation of speaking speed and prosody as obstacles to intelligibility for learners of Spanish. “Duologues”, natural, relaxed dialogues recorded in such a manner that …

Narrative Imagination: A Design Imperative, Robert Tully

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

Each generation entrusts the collective future to the next. Just like the oral traditions of our past continue to manifest in our consciousness, we need to tell stories today that will free the imagination. Designers in particular need to develop the ability to articulate the imagined possibilities that the narrative imagination can create. In order to appreciate the complexity of interactions that are occurring in a spatial or object orientated context we need to think about the imagination as a vehicle to discover and explore these new possibilities. To do this we need to enhance our capacity to access the …

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 …

Issues In Designing A Corpus Of Spoken Irish, Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, Alessio Frenda, Brian Vaughan

Conference papers

This paper describes the stages involved in implementing a corpus of spoken Irish. This pilot project (consisting of approximately 140K of transcribed data) implements parts of the design of a larger corpus of spoken Irish which it is hoped will contain approximately 2 million words when complete. It hoped that such a corpus will provide material for linguistic research, lexicography, the teaching of Irish and for development of language technology for the Irish language.

Speech & Multimodal Resources: The Herme Database Of Spontaneous Multimodal Human-Robot Dialogues, Jing Guang Hang, Emer Gilmartin, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Nick Campbell

Conference papers

This paper presents methodologies and tools for language resource (LR) construction. It describes a database of interactive speech collected over a three-month period at the Science Gallery in Dublin, where visitors could take part in a conversation with a robot. The system collected samples of informal, chatty dialogue – normally difficult to capture under laboratory conditions for human-human dialogue, and particularly so for human-machine interaction. The conversations were based on a script followed by the robot consisting largely of social chat with some task-based elements. The interactions were audio-visually recorded using several cameras together with microphones. As part of the …

Designing And Implementing A Platform For Collecting Multi-Modal Data Of Human-Robot Interaction, Brian Vaughan, Jing Guang Han, Emer Kilmartin, Nick Campbell

Articles

This paper details a method of collecting video and audio recordings of people inter- acting with a simple robot interlocutor. The interaction is recorded via a number of cameras and microphones mounted on and around the robot. The system utilised a number of technologies to engage with interlocutors including OpenCV, Python, and Max MSP. Interactions over a three month period were collected at The Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin. Visitors to the gallery freely engaged with the robot, with interactions on their behalf being spontaneous and non-scripted. The robot dialogue was a set pattern of utterances to engage interlocutors …

Faculty Requirement For A Portuguese Language Optometry Program: Experience And Challenges Of The Mozambique Eye Care Project, Diane Wallace

Conference Papers

Faculty recruitment for a Portuguese-language optometry program: experiences and challenges of The Mozambique Eye Care Project

Ms Diane Wallace BOptom, MPA

University of KawZulu Natal, South Africa

Purpose

The Mozambique Eyecare Project (MEP) is a unique institutional collaboration in a programme for the development, implementation and evaluation of a regional optometry training model for Portuguese-speaking Africa. The Project was initiated in February 2009 with the first cohort of undergraduate students beginning classes at Lúrio University in Northern Mozambique. This is the first Portuguese-language optometry program in Africa, and with no professionally qualified optometrists locally, faculty had to be recruited from …

The Presence Of Regional Accents In Electrolarynx Speech And The Resultant Effect On Overall Intelligibility., Brian Madden, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

During voiced speech, the larynx provides quasi-periodic acoustic excitation of the vocal tract. In most electrolarynxes, mechanical vibrations are produced by a linear electromechanical actuator, the armature of which percusses against a metal or plastic plate at a frequency within the range of glottal excitation. In this paper, a phonological analysis of a section of results from an online perceptual intelligibility test was performed which compared speech produced using a novel hands-free electrolarynx and a commercially available electrolarynx. A portion of the test consisted of a closed-set format containing a selection of four sets of four random CVC audio samples …

An Investigation In The Development Of Europe's Erasmus Internship Policy, Frank Cullen

Articles

The involvement of the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology in international mobility for work placement has experienced exponential growth over the past five years with the assistance of European Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus funding for European internships. The main purpose behind the European Commission funding ventures for internship (experiential learning) is to enhance the students’ cultural awareness, cultivate their language skills and develop their professionalism in their field of study. This paper provide an overview of the development of Erasmus internship and relationship between the the European Commission, the HEA, and DIT.

What Is The Pensee Sauvage And Is It Still Alive In Modern Society?, Mark William Farrell

Articles

The culinary process has changed somewhat down through the ages but not to any great extent. The raw materials are still similar but innovation and creativity has been applied to them to give the finished product varying degrees of taste, texture, sensory and aesthetic pleasure. Fundamentally the tools which we use to interpret or rate our food are the very same apparatus which animals use to define theirs. The anthropology of sensory perception is essentially the same for animals and man in an evolutionary perspective (Pasquet, Simmen & Pagezy, 2000). It reflects the capacity of the animal or primitive human …

On Creativity, Kerry Meakin

Articles

A review of available literature on creativity was undertaken to determine the definition of creativity, the common traits displayed by those perceived as being creative and how those traits may possibly be nurtured. The word ‘creativity’ has been used by politicians as if it is tangible commodity that must be developed in time of economic recession. Indeed, Dublin City Enterprise Board, a local government authority are in the process of staging ‘Idea Generation’ workshops, “this workshop not only shows you what ideas are good ideas but also introduces you to the concepts of thinking laterally” (Dublin Regional Authority, 2011). The …

A Review Of Situation Identification Techniques In Pervasive Computing, Juan Ye, Simon Dobson, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Pervasive systems must offer an open, extensible, and evolving portfolio of services which integrate sensor data from a diverse range of sources. The core challenge is to provide appropriate and consistent adaptive behaviours for these services in the face of huge volumes of sensor data exhibiting varying degrees of precision, accuracy and dynamism. Situation identification is an enabling technology that resolves noisy sensor data and abstracts it into higher-level concepts that are interesting to applications. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the nature and characteristics of situations, discuss the complexities of situation identification, and review the techniques that are most …

Phase-Distortion-Robust Voice-Source Analysis, Alan O'Cinneide

Doctoral

This work concerns itself with the analysis of voiced speech signals, in particular the analysis of the glottal source signal. Following the source-filter theory of speech, the glottal signal is produced by the vibratory behaviour of the vocal folds and is modulated by the resonances of the vocal tract and radiation characteristic of the lips to form the speech signal. As it is thought that the glottal source signal contributes much of the non-linguistic and prosodical information to speech, it is useful to develop techniques which can estimate and parameterise this signal accurately. Because of vocal tract modulation, estimating the …

Motionless Monotony: New Nowheres In Irish Photography, Colin Graham

Articles

‘But my mind was too confused … so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity … What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes. I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, it seemed, built of glimmer and mist … the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping.’ …

Academic Development Perspectives Of Blended Learning, Roisin Donnelly, Claire Macavinney

Books/Book Chapters

Technological advances in every aspect of today’s higher education environment create a forum for academic developers to re-examine existing delivery methods for professional development. Within the context of this case study, the term ‘academic developer’ is taken to encompass the role of learning technologist. In order to be responsive and accommodate the changes, traditional instruction methods are being extended to encompass the range of Web 2.0 tools available. Debate is ongoing in the area of blended learning as to the ultimate effectiveness of technology integration. Through exploration of the experiences of two academic developers involved in the design and delivery …

Translation And Distortion Of Linguistic Identities In Sinophone Cinema: Diverging Images Of The ‘Other, Henry Leperlier

Books/Book Chapters

In today’s globalized market, Asian films are being increasingly exported; often,

multilingual movies deal with more complex societal issues and catch the interest of

a foreign audience interested in having an open door, one might say multiple doors,

into another society. The nearly complete lack of a system enabling such an audience

to be made aware of the complex multilingual and multilingual characters in such

movies ends up providing a distorted and simplified view of Chinese, Taiwanese,

Hong Kong and Singaporean societies as reflected in its cinemas.

This chapter examines all the resulting issues and cultural misunderstandings that can occur …

Child Language In The Early Years, Maire Mhic Mhathuna

Books/Book chapters

This chapter describes how children acquire their first language in the early years. Some children also acquire a second language in early years setting and the processes and adult supports that assist them are described. These include dynamic scaffolding and environmental supports. The main theories of first and second language acquisition are reviewed and the importance of supportive facilitation by nurturing adults is emphasised.

Social Network Analysis Of Passage Tomb Intervisibility, Frank Prendergast

Conference Papers

Passage tombs are widely regarded as the most homogenous prehistoric funerary monument class on the island in terms of their morphology, ornamentation, assemblage of finds, landscape siting and spatial clustering. Contextually, the archaeological classification of Irish megalithic tombs has identified court, portal and passage types as Neolithic with wedge tombs constructed in the later Bronze Age. The small number of single Neolithic burials (Linkardstown type) is excluded from this case study. The writer has examined the island's passage tomb tradition from five perspectives - spatial cohesion, symbolism in elevation/height, landscape setting and vista, archaeoastronomy and intervisibility. Tomb intervisibility in the …

Articulations Of Irish Language Poetry As Multimodal Texts, Brenda Duggan

Conference Papers

Abstract

In October of last year, visual communication students at Technological University Dublin took part in an exhibition of Irish language literature texts that were imaginatively extended, exploring an array of new literacies. Taking the Irish language texts as a starting point for this project, students creatively explored print, visual, digital and material modes to extend the meaning of the poetry.

This paper explores, from a social semiotic perspective the creative potential this multimodal work offers design pedagogy in how we frame and articulate meaning across both print and digital media design education. With an emphasis on an ensemble of …

The Reporting Of Edmond O’Donovan: Literary Journalism And The Great Game, Michael Foley

Books/Book chapters

Edmond O'Donovan was a well known war correspondent in late Victorian Britain. However, he was also an Irish nationalist and member of the Fenians. This chapter examines a best selling book he wrote about his travels on Central Asia. The book examined the people and politics central to the politics and foreign policies of Britain and Russia. O'Donovan died the year following publication covering Britain's imperial adventures in North Africa.

Engaging With The Community, Ellen Hazelkorn, Elaine Ward

Books/Book chapters

This article focuses on how higher education institutions (HEIs) engage with their external community, contribute to social and economic development, and underpin civil society and democracy. The external community consists of a wide-range of stakeholders from business and industry, the public, private and non-governmental sector, and civil society. While many HEIs have historically had a strong association to their city or nation, today the health of society and the economy is inextricably tied to greater collaboration between “town” and “gown”. The article has five main sections: i) Introduces the social and public responsibility of higher education, ii) Describes the policy …

Storyspace: A Story-Driven Approach For Creating Musuem Narratives, Annika Wolff, Paul Mulholland, Tevor Collins

Publications

In a curated exhibition of a museum or art gallery, a selection of heritage objects and associated information is presented to a visitor for the purpose of telling a story about them. The same underlying story can be presented in a number of different ways. This paper describes techniques for creating multiple alternative narrative structures from a single underlying story, by selecting different organising principles for the events and plot structures of the story. These authorial decisions can produce different dramatic effects. Storyspace is a web interface to an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. We describe how the narrative component …

The Challenges Faced By Portuguese-Speaking Universities In Africa, Stephen Thompson, Jorge Ferrao

Articles

A common challenge faced by members of the Association of Portuguese Language Universities (AULP) and by other higher education institutions around the world is providing access to up-to-date and relevant academic literature. In an age where more research is being published than ever before, institutions need to move with the times and recognise that we should change our approach to tertiary education. This report considers how a university based in a Portuguese speaking country can use e-learning to overcome some of the barriers presented by language in higher education.

Recommendations For “Kiwi” Exploring Different Techniques For Recommendations In A Kazakh Online Video Website, Tair Kuanyshev

Dissertations

The aim of this project is to build a recommender system for an online website based on an empirical study using real-world data. The real world data was taken from the website Www.kiwi.kz which is an online video sharing website, providing online video, broadcast and radio to users since 2009. The research problem sought to develop the most suitable recommender system for an online video sharing website and to evaluate the effectiveness of this model on the real world data. This research attempts to develop the recommender system which will suggest possibly interesting video clips for users on an online …