Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Social Media Influencers (Smis) In Context: A Literature Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Isobel O'Reilly Dr, Aiden Carthy

Articles

This review focused on three main areas, "Social Media Influencers (SMIs) in Context, The Impact of SMIs on Adolescents, and Consumer Behaviour in a Digital Era – Generation Z in Perspective". This article aims to further the overall understanding of SMIs and outlines the impact of SMIs on adolescents‘ lives. Thus, the main objective of this literature review is to raise awareness within the marketing field about the influence of social media influencers on adolescents and how brands promote their products and content through social media influencers. The review comprised a regular search using electronic journal databases and secondary data …

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 …

Healthcare Professional Roles: The Ontology Model For E-Learning, Lorraine Carmody, Elizabeth Sherry, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

The paper aims to present the MEDeLEARN project, an ontology-driven virtual learning environment for Medical Information System training. The current training environment for healthcare professionals in the use of essential medical information systems in a large urban training hospital is based on conventional instructor-led training sessions. Problems arise due to the demanding nature of the hospital working environment, causing training to be cancelled or curtailed. This mode of training delivery is deemed to be inefficient and ineffective, with the danger of serious errors occurring as a consequence.

The project investigates whether a virtual learning environment can address the competency gap …

Emotional Speech Corpus Construction, Annotation And Distribution, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, John Mcauley

Conference papers

This paper details a process of creating an emotional speech corpus by collecting natural emotional speech assets, analysisng and tagging them (for certain acoustic and linguistic features) and annotating them within an on-line database. The definition of specific metadata for use with an emotional speech corpus is crucial, in that poorly (or inaccurately) annotated assets are of little use in analysis. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardisation for speech corpora, particularly in relation to emotion content. The ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) is the only cohesive attempt at corpus metadata standardisation performed thus far. Although not a comprehensive …

Technology-Aided Participative Methods In Environmental Assessment: An International Perspective, Ainhoa Gonzalez, Alan Gilmer, Ronan Foley, John Sweeney, John Fry

Articles

Provisions for citizen involvement in the assessment of potential environmental effects of certain plans, programmes and projects are present in current legislation. An international survey revealed that public participation is common practice in European and some other countries worldwide. However, a number of issues are observed to affect public involvement in EIA/SEA processes and expert opinion differs when evaluating the effectiveness of existing participative methods. Results suggest that technology-aided methods can improve traditional participation processes. In particular, GIS has the potential to increase community knowledge and enhance involvement by communicating information more effectively. Variable accessibility to technology and data quality …

Audio Data Verification And Authentication Using Frequency Modulation Based Watermarking, Jonathan Blackledge, Omar Farooq

Articles

An approach to watermarking digital signals using frequency modulation - ‘Chirp Coding’ - is considered. The principles underlying this approach are based on the use of a matched filter to reconstruct a ‘chirp stream’ code that is uniquely robust. The method is generic in the sense that it can, in principle, be used for a variety of different signal (the authentication of speech and biomedical signals, for example). Further, by generating a bit stream that is signal dependent, chirp coding provides a method of self-authentication, which has a wide range of applications including copyright protection and digital rights management. However, …

Increasing Effectiveness Of Public Private Partnerships In The Irish Construction Industry, Louis Gunnigan

Doctoral

By 2003 the first Irish Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects had reached the operational stage. Media reports were emerging of significant differences in the effectiveness of these projects.

This research set out to find a means by which effectiveness of PPPs could be increased and to develop a model that would assist PPP practitioners with this task in the future. Through a literature review, the Irish PPP process was mapped, the changes encountered in the introduction of PPP were investigated and a conceptual model – based on a traditional process model - was proposed. The model was tested by examining …