Digital Commons Network^™

Quality Business Leadership Summit: Panel Discussion With Afternoon Session Speakers, Janet Woodcock, Jane Wyatt, Anders Vinther, Maureen Larkin, Cathal Elliott, Pat O'Mahony

Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science

This paper provides a summary (via transcript) of the afternoon panel discussion from the inaugural Quality Business Leadership Summit, held on 01-May-2024 at Technological University Dublin.

The Quality Professional As The Business Leader, Pat O'Mahony

Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science

This paper provides Pat O’Mahony’s remarks on the subject topic from the inaugural Quality Business Leadership Summit, held on 01-May-2024 at Technological University Dublin. Specifically, O’Mahony discusses the importance of quality, quality in other sectors, making the link with patients, six traits of quality business leadership, observations from the day’s discussions, ‘next step’ challenge to quality leaders and building a coalition of the willing.

How To Speak Cgmp And $Gmp: Compliance Understood By Senior Management, Anders Vinther

Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science

This paper provides Anders Vinther’s remarks on the subject topic from the inaugural Quality Business Leadership Summit, held on 01-May-2024 at Technological University Dublin. Specifically, Vinther discusses what is good Quality Business Leadership, quality as a value which requires speaking a new language, ICH Q10, QRM, KM, financial risk score, and operational excellence.

From Quality Management To Quality Business Leadership: The Critical Role Of Leadership, Employee Engagement And Trust For Innovation And Continuous Improvement, Ashley O'Donoghue, Colin Hughes, Anne Greene (Editor)

Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Regulatory Science

This paper introduces Volume 1, Issue 2 of JAPRS and explores the inter-related concepts of Transformational Leadership and the 6 Quality Business Leadership Traits

Making Space For Spatial Thinking In Steam Education: Teacher Professional Development Modules, Remke Klapwijk, Gavin Duffy, Eleni Lagoudaki, Natalia Segura Caballero, Rohit Mishra, Caiwei Zhu, Marten Westerhof, Ergi Bufasi, Chloe Leung, Styliani Malkogeorgou, Ting Jun Lin, Estefania Gamarra, Trang Nguyen

Books/Book chapters

This guide provides seven modules to train primary school teachers, STEAM (Science, Teachnology, Engineering, Art and Math) coaches, makerspace coaches and policy makers to foster spatial thinking in classroom and STEAM programs. The modules focus on topics such as: improving students self-concepts, using spatial language and gestures as tools to improve spatial thinking, ways to use integrated STEAM activities such as design thinking and maker education to foster spatial thinking, new ways to engage children in spatial math puzzles and assignments using evidence-based teaching strategies including the application of materials and classroom dialogue, as well as a module on spatializing …

New Dimensions In Dining: A Review Of The Gastronomic Evolution Of 3d Printed Foods From 2013-2024 And Beyond., Roisin Burke

Articles

The development of 3D food printing is evolving, particularly in high-end restaurants, since 2013 when the first complex 3D printed chocolate concept for gastronomy was developed. In 2014, several 3D food printers were launched specifically to suit requirements from the culinary sector. These technology companies often partnered with renowned chefs who developed recipes, showcased the printers and served their food products in their restaurants. Chefs often worked in teams with e.g. food designers, technologists, engineers, and nutritionists to create dishes for events and for their own restaurant customers. From Michelin starred restaurants, pop-up events to pizzerias, 3D food printers were …

Investigating Gender Bias In Large Language Models Through Text Generation, Shweta Soundararajan, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have swiftly become essential tools across diverse text generation applications. However, LLMs also raise significant ethical and societal concerns, particularly regarding potential gender biases in the text they produce. This study investigates the presence of gender bias in four LLMs: ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, Llama 2 7B, and Llama 2 13B. By generating a gendered language dataset using these LLMs, focusing on sentences about men and women, we analyze the extent of gender bias in their outputs. Our evaluation is two-fold: we use the generated dataset to train a gender stereotype detection task and measure gender …

A Global Model-Agnostic Rule-Based Xai Method Based On Parameterized Event Primitives For Time Series Classifiers, Ephrem T. Mekonnen, Luca Longo, Pierpaolo Dondio

Articles

Time series classification is a challenging research area where machine learning and deep learning techniques have shown remarkable performance. However, often, these are seen as black boxes due to their minimal interpretability. On the one hand, there is a plethora of eXplainable AI (XAI) methods designed to elucidate the functioning of models trained on image and tabular data. On the other hand, adapting these methods to explain deep learning-based time series classifiers may not be straightforward due to the temporal nature of time series data. This research proposes a novel global post-hoc explainable method for unearthing the key time steps …

Design Considerations For Self-Management Technologies For People Living With Dementia And Informal Carers – Perspectives Of Healthcare Professionals And Charity Workers, Dympna O'Sullivan

Conference papers

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to decline in memory, language, reasoning, and the ability to perform daily activities. It is linked to poorer quality of life for the person with dementia and their informal (unpaid) carers. While early intervention and access to adequate care are critical in slowing dementia's progression and better managing associated symptoms, dementia is frequently only diagnosed at an advanced stage and care is often fragmented. To better understand how to meet the complex needs of persons living with dementia and their informal carers, 10 healthcare professionals and 10 charity workers from relevant community and …

Design Considerations For Self-Management Technologies For People Living With Dementia And Informal Carers - Perspectives Of Healthcare Professionals And Charity Workers, Dympna O'Sullivan, Julie Doyle, Orla Moran, Michael Wilson, Siobhan Oneill, Jonathan Turner, Suzanne Smith

Conference papers

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to decline in memory, language, reasoning, and the ability to perform daily activities. It is linked to poorer quality of life for the person with dementia and their informal (unpaid) carers. While early intervention and access to adequate care are critical in slowing dementia's progression and better managing associated symptoms, dementia is frequently only diagnosed at an advanced stage and care is often fragmented. To better understand how to meet the complex needs of persons living with dementia and their informal carers, 10 healthcare professionals and 10 charity workers from relevant community and …

Climate Targets Versus Longterm Performance - How Effective Is B2 Retrofit In The Race To 2030?, Seamus Harrington, Mark Mulville

Conference papers

Ireland’s Climate Action Plan details a roadmap of measures that align with the European Union’s ambition to achieve a net-zero target carbon emissions by 2050. It seeks to play a key role in delivering energy efficiency in Ireland and follows a Europe wide approach to reduce energy consumption across the building sector. In this context, Ireland has introduced the National Retrofitting Scheme which has set a goal of retrofitting 500,000 existing homes to a Building Energy Rating (BER) of B2 by 2030. The route to attaining this rating is dependent on the pre-works BER of individual properties.

This research paper …

Materiality And The Machine. Maximising Material Experiences In The Age Of Ai, Ceri Almrott, Keith Colton, Mark Ennis, Ina O'Connor

Conference Papers

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies are expected to significantly impact the future of design, but traditional design methods are still important. Material Intelligence (MI) is crucial for product designers, and a structured four-year approach to undergraduate design education centred around experiential learning through MI is presented. The approach emphasises hands-on experimentation, integrates MI into the core curriculum, and prioritises interdisciplinary collaboration to produce innovative, functional, and sustainable design solutions.

Getting To The Point: Contrasting Directness And Warmth In Motivational Embodied Conversational Agents, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Enhancing long-term engagement with conversational agents remains a significant challenge. Controlling the perceived warmth or directness of an agent’s personality through the style of its generated text could be used to increase user likeability. This paper reports an investigation of a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of a motivational embodied conversational agent to measure user perception of and attitudes towards warmth in interaction style. Results show a significant effect of users preferring an agent with a "more direct" personality for this scenario, though this effect is in many ways nuanced.

Building Services Engineering September/October 2024

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Empirical Investigation Of Withdrawal Capacity Of Staple For Experimental Design Of Irish Timber, Afnan Nafees, Patrick Mcgetrick, Aimee Byrne

Conference papers

Sitka spruce is the main tree species grown in Ireland, covering over 50% of the forest area. Despite this, Ireland imported €1.8 billion worth of wood products in 2020 mostly from UK, China, US and Sweden. One of the factors that currently limits the specifying of Irish grown timber in construction applications is the lack of data relating to its structural performance. Expanding the use of this locally available material in construction will add economic and environmental benefits, creating new opportunities for employment. In order to effectively use Irish timber for structural purposes, a comprehensive analysis of its inherent properties …

Comparing The Roles Of Secondary Schools And Universities In The Formation Of British Cabinet Ministers1922-2022, John William Hogan, Sharon Feeney

Articles

The role played by the education system in the creation and reproduction of governing elites, and its countervailing potential to create a more meritocratic and egalitarian society, has been a topic of enduring concern. However, these debates have been rendered opaque by an inability to directly compare elite formation systems both within and between countries. To resolve this problem, we employ elite formation quantitative indices to compare the roles of the secondary school and higher education systems, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the formation of its political elite – cabinet ministers – between 1922–2022. …

A Hierarchical Framework For Interpretable, Safe, And Specialised Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ammar Abbas

Doctoral

Safety-critical systems, which are crucial for human safety and the environment, are difficult to control and operate. Traditional controllers need precise models of these complex systems, which is hard to develop. \acrfull{drl} offers a potential solution by learning from interactions rather than detailed models, but it faces limitations such as non-transparent decision-making and an expensive, unsafe learning process. Additionally, a key challenge in DRL is ensuring effective decision-making in rare situations.

This thesis proposes a novel approach called the \acrfull{prop_frame} that enables safe and reliable control of critical systems. SRLA combines probabilistic modelling with reinforcement learning to create an interpretable …

Road To Sustainability: Developing A Sustainability Performance Measurement Framework For City Logistics From A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective, Xu Zhang

Doctoral

Sustainability assessment in city logistics has been a perpetual and salient agenda among city managers and logistics industry practitioners, especially in light of the promotion of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). Research studies to date have tried to assess city logistics operations’ sustainability performance and their impact, but most endeavours have ended in vain due to elusive sustainability goals, inconsistent indicator quality, ambiguous stakeholder responsibility, and poor data availability on city levels.

To address these challenges, this study is advocating for a collaborative sustainability reporting and assessment process among public and private …

Navigating Global Engineering Education Accreditation: Assessing Ethical Integration And Charting Pathways For Progress, Shannon M. Chance, J Seniuk Cicek, A R Bielefeld, S Hladik, Diana Adela Martin, D M Riley

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Accreditation in engineering has been widely adopted, enabled by notable harmonization among accrediting bodies worldwide. This alignment, facilitated by accords among nations and regions, fosters a shared understanding of expectations critical for the globalized engineering profession. While ensuring graduates are equipped with essential skills for international collaboration, engineering education grapples with defining and instilling ethics, and the problematic nature of this endeavor is complicated by vague and ambiguous terminology within accreditation documents. Addressing this gap requires navigating power dynamics among education, accreditation, and licensure alongside creating localized, meaningful educational experiences. This paper overviews one section from the forthcoming Routledge International …

Innovative Designs Of 3d Scaffolds For Bone Tissue Regeneration: Understanding Principles And Addressing Challenges, Mohamed Selim, Hamouda M. Mousa, G. T. Abdel-Jaber, Ahmed Barhoum, Abdalla Abdal-Hay

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Meeting the escalating demands in biomedical applications has spurred the creation of diverse scaffolds, where the selection of materials and manufacturing techniques stands as a linchpin in fostering bone tissue formation. These scaffolds provide a fundamental structural framework that supports cell growth and differentiation. It is vital for tissue repair, addressing various biological requisites such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, and mechanical properties becomes imperative. This comprehensive review discusses recent advancements in the techniques for manufacturing 3D scaffolds tailored specifically for bone tissue engineering applications. Stereolithography, fused deposition modelling, selective laser sintering, binder jetting, electron beam melting, and bioprinting (including laser-based, inkjet …

Comparing Thin And Volume Regimes Of Analog Holograms For Wavefront Sensing, Emma Branigan, Andreas Zepp, Suzanne Martin, Matthew Sheehan, Szymon Gladysz, Kevin Murphy

Articles

Two analog holographic wavefront sensors, for measurement of defocus, have been fabricated as both thin and volume phase transmission holograms in a self-developing photopolymer. This represents the first reported direct comparison of hologram regimes when designed for wavefront sensing. An analysis of the effect of crosstalk in the presence of one other aberration mode (astigmatism X (0/90°), coma X (horizontal), and primary spherical aberration) was carried out with each version of the sensor. The performance of thin and volume analog holographic wavefront sensors was characterized under emulated conditions associated with moderate atmospheric turbulence.

Cyber Resilience, Risk Management, And Security Challenges In Enterprise-Scale Cloud Systems: Comprehensive Review, Abdiaziz Abdi, Hajar Bennouri, Anthony Keane

Conference Papers

The cyberthreat landscape is constantly evolving with the rapid development of cloud computing. Today, businesses and consumers rely heavily on cloud infrastructure, which provides high availability and resilient systems. However, cloud and IoT platforms contain vulnerabilities that can compromise data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, leading to disruptions in service operations. These significant challenges pose serious threats such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, data breaches, faulty hardware, and application failures with high costs. IBM reports that the average cost of a data breach worldwide is approximately US$4.5 million per incident. This highlights the need for adequately designed resilience systems with high availability and …

Inclusion4eu: Towards A Framework Of Inclusive Software Design Processes And Practices, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Emma Murphy, John Gilligan, Anna Becevel, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

This research is based on a trans-European research project aimed at enhancing software design and engineering practices to promote inclusivity, involving stakeholders from academia, industry, and disability advocacy services. To explore the nature and meaning of inclusion, a number of different approaches to inclusion are outlined, including models of equitable design (Accessible Design, Inclusive Design, Universal Design, and Design for All), User Design processes (Co-Production, Co-Creation, User-Centred Design, Co-Design, and Participatory Design), and Software Engineering Methodologies (Linear, Spiral, and Agile). These three categories of models are combined to form a three-dimensional environment in which software development projects can be mapped …

Designing Self-Management For And With Persons Living With Dementia Osullivan, Dympna, Dympna O'Sullivan, Michael Wilson, Damon Berry, Orla Moran, Siobhan O,Neill, Ciaran Nugent, Jonathan Turner, Julie Doyle

Articles

Promoting high quality of life for persons living with dementia has emerged as a central goal in global public health agendas. The emphasis has shifted from extending life to actively enhancing overall well-being by postponing or preventing additional disability. This represents a departure from traditional medical perspectives on dementia to a more socially-oriented approach, placing a strong focus on wellbeing.

In parallel, the concept of self-management for people with living dementia has emerged, where this is a person-centred approach in which the individual is empowered and has ownership over the management of their life and condition. Practice recommendations for person-centered …

A Comparative Analysis Of Shap, Lime, Anchors, And Dice For Interpreting A Dense Neural Network In Credit Card Fraud Detection, Bujar Raufi, Ciaran Finnegan, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Financial institutions heavily rely on advanced Machine Learning algorithms to screen transactions. However, they face increasing pressure from regulators and the public to ensure AI accountability and transparency, particularly in credit card fraud detection. While ML technology has effectively detected fraudulent activity, the opacity of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can make it challenging to explain decisions. This has prompted a recent push for more explainable fraud prevention tools. Although vendors claim to improve detection rates, integrating explanation data is still early. Data scientists recognize the potential of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques in fraud prevention, but comparative research on their effectiveness …

Emerging Cyber Risks & Threats In Healthcare Systems: A Case Study In Resilient Cybersecurity Solutions, Abdiaziz Abdi, Hajar Bennouri, Anthony Keane

Conference Papers

The exponential growth of digitalisation in healthcare and the ongoing threat of cybersecurity breaches are significant and cast a shadow over the industry’s progress. As the cost of data breaches reaches unprecedented levels, reaching an average of US$10.93 million in 2023 alone, and the frequency of attacks escalates, evidenced by a staggering 60% increase in phishing incidents between 2022 and 2023 reported by Smarttech247, Healthcare infrastructure is at a critical intersection. In this paper, we address the complex relationship between harnessing the potential of digital systems to improve and combating the escalating risks posed by cyber threats. The cyberattack on …

Building Sevices Engineering July/August 2024

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Title: List Of 132 Papers Citing One Or More Skin Lesion Image Datasets, Neda Alipour, Ted Butke, Jane Courtney

Other resources

This document is provided as a supplementary digital resource to accompany the article Skin Type Diversity in Skin Lesion Datasets: A Review. The following list contains 132 papers that were identified during a systematic review of papers that use one or more skin lesion image datasets. A partial list of these papers appears in Table 1 of the aforementioned article. The full list is provided here for reference.

Exploring The Activities Of Religious Ministers And Festival Tourism At The Christmas Celebration In St. Lalibela, Ethiopia: A Photo-Based Essay, Dagnachew Nega, Alexander Trupp, Yen Pek Teh

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Religious festivals represent potential for religious tourism, offering unique cultural and spiritual experiences at destinations. Among the methods for promoting religious festivals as a driver for religious tourism is the use of Photo-based essay tools. While this method is not widely explored in academic research, it holds great promise for tourism and events studies. Photographs have a great value in catching the minds of tourists and creating motivation to travel. This photo essay focuses on the religious ministers at the Christmas celebration in Lalibela, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Ethiopia. Six photo categories were identified. Each category has its …

Pilgrimage In The Covid-19 Era: Uncovering Supply Side Challenges And Opportunities In Media Representations, Reni Polus, Ismail Shaheer, Naresh P. Nayak

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage travel, a common practice across major religions, has historically exhibited remarkable resilience to global crises, owing to the unwavering conviction of its followers. However, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a significant departure from this trend, disrupting pilgrimage tourism, unlike any event since World War II. Despite extensive research on the pandemic’s impact on tourism, limited attention has been directed towards understanding its specific effects on pilgrimage travel. This study seeks to address this gap by examining the challenges and opportunities faced by pilgrimage tourism suppliers in the aftermath of COVID-19. To obtain a comprehensive global perspective, we collected and analysed …