Engineering Commons^™

Improving Visual Inspection Reliability In Aircraft Maintenance, Victor Hrymak, Patrick Codd

Conference papers

Visual inspection is a fundamental safety critical task in the air transport industry. This study investigates how a visual search strategy with a specific eye scanning pattern can be used to improve the observation of aircraft defects during visual inspection tasks. N=100 aircraft maintenance technicians were recruited and N=48 were allocated to a control condition. This group conducted pre-flight visual inspections on aircraft, using their normal custom and practice. The remaining N=52 experimental group participants were trained to use a specific eye scanning pattern during their pre-flight inspection called systematic visual search. Prior to inspections, the number of observable defects …

A Critical Analysis Of The Application Of Visual Programming To Increase Efficiency In Bim Object Metadata Delivery Workflows During The Delivery Phase Of An Asset, Kieran Lakhera O'Shea, Davitt Lamon

Reports

Uniclass 2015 data generally seems to be overlooked in favour of the more valuable COBie data when discussion begins about BIM model metadata and, at present, few studies are devoted to it and its delivery through automated methodologies. Classification is a key part of the BIM process – without the ability to distinguish one object from another a BIM model lacks the definition required for implementing downstream applications such as functional simulations, compliance checking and other automated technologies. The use of classification data is, of course, not the only way of identifying objects but it is currently the only standardised …

Printable Dielectric Elastomers Of High Electromechanical Properties Based On Sebs Ink Incorporated With Polyphenols Modified Dielectric Particles, Zhanxu Liu, Bangze Zhou, Chenchen Li, Yuhao Wang, Shipeng Wen, Yanfen Zhou, Liang Jiang, Fenglei Zhou, Tony Betts, Stephen Jerrams

Articles

In this work, a recently developed 3D additive processing technology termed electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing was employed to fabricate dielectric elastomer (DE) films by using styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene (SEBS) inks with the addition of high dielectric titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. In order to improve the dispersibility of TiO2 in the SEBS matrix, extracted walnut polyphenols were utilized for surface modification of TiO2 nanoparticles labelled wp-TiO2. The effect of the applied voltage on the ink jet morphology of the obtained SEBS based inks during EHD printing was analyzed. The prepared films had precision patterned shapes and their morphology was studied. It revealed that the …

Bim - Route For The Qs Into The 4d And 5d Digitised Workflow, 1st Ed., Dermot Kehily Dr

Other

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has the potential to increase effi ciency in the construction industry by changing traditional 2 Dimensional (2D) information exchange to a method of delivery that promotes collaboration and integration across the construction supply chain. From a Quantity Surveyor (QS) perspective, BIM offers capabilities to generate Quantity Take-Off (QTO) directly from a 3 Dimensional (3D) model. This paper outlines the 4 Dimensional (4D - Planning) and 5 Dimensional (5D - Cost) process. It also addresses some of the issues that the QS may come up against when generating and using BIM quantities and some diffi culties when …

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 …

Fractal Graphene Patch Antennas And The Thz Communications Revolution, Jonathan Blackledge, A. Boretti, L. Rosa, S. Castelletto

Conference papers

Fractal antennas have and are continuing to receive attention in regard to the futureof wireless communications. This is because of their wide- and multi-band capabilities, theopportunity of fractal geometries to drive multiple resonances, and, the ability to make smallerand lighter antennas with fewer components and radiative elements with higher gains. Smallscale (i.e. on the micro- and nano-scale) and ultra high frequency (in the Terahertz or THz range)fractal antennas composed of Graphene have the potential to enhance wireless communicationsat a data rate that is unprecedented, i.e.∼1012bits per second. A Fractal Graphene antennais a high-frequency tuneable antenna for radio communications in the …

Codec-Aware Video Delivery Over Sdns, Obinna Izima, Ruairi Defrein, Ali Malik

Conference papers

To guarantee quality of delivery for video streaming over software defined networks, efficient predictors and adaptive routing frameworks are required. We demonstrate an agent that predicts video quality of delivery metrics in a scalable way using a bespoke codec-aware learning model. We also demonstrate the integration of this agent with an adaptive framework for centrally controlled software-defined networks that re-configures network operational paths in response to the learning agent, ensuring that good quality of delivery of video is maintained during periods of congestion. The demo scenario highlights the feasibility, scalability and accuracy of the framework

Computational Solutions Based On Bayesian Networks To Hierarchize And To Predict Factors Influencing Gender Fairness In The Transport System: Four Use Cases, Gemma Dolores Molero, Sara Poveda-Reyes, Ashwani Kumar Malviya Ashwani Kumar Malviya, Elena García-Jiménez, Maria Chiara Leva, Francisco Enrique Santarremigia

Articles

: Previous studies have highlighted inequalities and gender differences in the transport system. Some factors or fairness characteristics (FCs) strongly influence gender fairness in the transport system. The difference with previous studies, which focus on general concepts, is the incorporation of level 3 FCs, which are more detailed aspects or measures that can be implemented by companies or infrastructure managers and operators in order to increase fairness and inclusion in each use case. The aim of this paper is to find computational solutions, Bayesian networks, and analytic hierarchy processes capable of hierarchizing level 3 FCs and to predict by simulation …

Adequately Generating Captions For An Image Using Adaptive And Global Attention Mechanisms., Shravan Kumar Talanki Venkatarathanaiahsetty

Dissertations

Generating description to images is a recent surge and with latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, it can be one of the prominent applications to bridge the gap between Computer vision and Natural language processing fields. In terms of the learning curve, Deep learning has become the main backbone in driving many new applications. Image Captioning is one such application where the usage of Deep learning methods enhanced the performance of the captioning accuracy. The introduction of the Encoder-Decoder framework was a breakthrough in Image captioning. But as the sequences got longer the performance of captions was affected. …

Improving A Network Intrusion Detection System’S Efficiency Using Model-Based Data Augmentation, Vinicius Waterkemper Lodetti

Dissertations

A network intrusion detection system (NIDS) is one important element to mitigate cybersecurity risks, the NIDS allow for detecting anomalies in a network which may be a cyberattack to a corporate network environment. A NIDS can be seen as a classification problem where the ultimate goal is to distinguish between malicious traffic among a majority of benign traffic. Researches on NIDS are often performed using outdated datasets that don’t represent the actual cyberspace. Datasets such as the CICIDS2018 address this gap by being generated from attacks and an infrastructure that reflects an up-to-date scenario.

A problem may arise when machine …

An Evaluation On The Performance Of Code Generated With Webassembly Compilers, Raymond Phelan

Dissertations

WebAssembly is a new technology that is revolutionizing the web. Essentially it is a low-level binary instruction set that can be run on browsers, servers or stand-alone environments. Many programming languages either currently have, or are working on, compilers that will compile the language into WebAssembly. This means that applications written in languages like C++ or Rust can now be run on the web, directly in a browser or other environment. However, as we will highlight in this research, the quality of code generated by the different WebAssembly compilers varies and causes performance issues. This research paper aims to evaluate …

Machine Learning For Auditory Hierarchy, William Coleman

Dissertations

Coleman, W. (2021). Machine Learning for Auditory Hierarchy. This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Technological University Dublin. Audio content is predominantly delivered in a stereo audio file of a static, pre-formed mix. The content creator makes volume, position and effects decisions, generally for presentation in stereo speakers, but has no control ultimately over how the content will be consumed. This leads to poor listener experience when, for example, a feature film is mixed such that the dialogue is at a low level relative to the sound effects. Consumers can complain that they must turn …

Study Of Mm-Wave Fixed Beam And Frequency Beam-Scanning Antenna Arrays, Zeeshan Ahmed

Dissertations

Millimeter-wave frequencies are anticipated to be widely adapted for future wireless communication systems to resolve the demand of high data-rate and capacity issues. The millimeter-wave frequency range offers wide spectrum and a shift for most newly developing technologies as the microwave and lower frequency bands are becoming overcrowded and congested. These high frequency bands offer short wavelengths which has enabled the researchers to design and implement compact and adaptable antenna solutions. This research focuses on the implementation, transformation and modification of antenna structures used in lower frequency bands to millimeter-wave applications with high gain and multi-band and wideband performances.

The …

Analysis Of Power Quality Constrained Consumer-Friendly Demand Response In Low Voltage Distributions Network, Chittesh Veni Chandran

Dissertations

Load management using demand response (DR) in a low voltage distribution network (LVDN) offers an economically profitable business platform with peak load management. However, the inconvenience caused to the consumer in depriving their devices and the low levels of associated incentive have contributed to lower consumer acceptance for DR programs in the community. However, with the increasing number of controllable consumer loads, a residential-level DR program is highly plausible in the short to medium term. Further, additional DR capabilities (including ancillary services) are likely to improve the remuneration potential for participants in DR. Considering the perspective of a distribution network …

Cough Monitoring Through Audio Analysis, Thomas Snella

Dissertations

The detection of cough events in audio recordings requires the analysis of a significant amount of data as cough is typically monitored continuously over several hours to capture naturally occurring cough events. The recorded data is mostly composed of undesired sound events such as silence, background noise, and speech. To reduce computational costs and to address the ethical concerns raised from the collection of audio data in public environments, the data requires pre-processing prior to any further analysis.

Current cough detection algorithms typically use pre-processing methods to remove undesired audio segments from the collected data but do not preserve the …

A Hybrid Neural Network For Stock Price Direction Forecasting, Daniel Devine

Dissertations

The volatility of stock markets makes them notoriously difficult to predict and is the reason that many investors sell out at the wrong time. Contrary to the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and the random walk theory, contribution to the study of machine learning models for stock price forecasting has shown evidence of stock markets predictability with varying degrees of success. Contemporary approaches have sought to use a hybrid of convolutional neural network (CNN) for its feature extraction capabilities and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network for its time series prediction. This comparative study aims to determine the predictability of stock …

Identifying Significant Features For Player Evaluation In Nfl Comparing Anns And Traditional Models, Ronan Walsh

Dissertations

The evaluation of player performance in sports is popular and important in modern sports, enabling teams to use real data in the construction of their rosters. This dissertation proposes to apply machine learning algorithms to predicting the player evaluations from a leading NFL analytics company who use a combination of statistics and expert evaluation. In addition, it will investigate what features are significant in the evaluation of a position. Data for the dissertation is obtained from multiple online sources - Pro Football Reference and Pro Football Focus (the the NFL analytics company). These data sets are combined and analysed before …

Identifying Roles Of Software Developers From Their Answers On Stack Overflow, Dean Power

Dissertations

Stack Overflow is the world’s largest community of software developers. Users ask and answer questions on various tagged topics of software development. The set of questions a site user answers is representative of their knowledge base, or “wheelhouse”. It is proposed that clustering users by their wheelhouse yields communities of similar software developers by skill-set. These communities represent the different roles within software development and could be used as the basis to define roles at any point in time in an ever-evolving landscape of software development. A network graph of site users, linked if they answered questions on the same …

Can Generative Adversarial Networks Help Us Fight Financial Fraud?, Sean Mciver

Dissertations

Transactional fraud datasets exhibit extreme class imbalance. Learners cannot make accurate generalizations without sufficient data. Researchers can account for imbalance at the data level, algorithmic level or both. This paper focuses on techniques at the data level. We evaluate the evidence of the optimal technique and potential enhancements. Global fraud losses totalled more than 80 % of the UK’s GDP in 2019. The improvement of preprocessing is inherently valuable in fighting these losses. Synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and extensions of SMOTE are currently the most common preprocessing strategies. SMOTE oversamples the minority classes by randomly generating a point between …

Performance Comparison Between A Distributed Particle Swarm Algorithm And A Centralised Algorithm, Ciarán O’Loughlin

Dissertations

Particle Swarm optimisation (PSO) is a particular form of swarm intelligence, which itself is an innovative intelligent paradigm for solving optimization problems. PSO is generally used to find a global optimum in a single optimisation function. This typically occurs on one node(machine) but there has been a significant body of research into creating distributed implementations of the PSO algorithm. Such research has often focused on the creation and performance of the distributed implementation in an isolated manner or compared to different distributed algorithms.

This research piece aims to bridge a gap in the existing literature, by testing a distributed implementation …

On The Mandelbrot Set For I**2 = ±1 And Imaginary Higgs Fields, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

We consider the consequence of breaking with a fundamental result in complex analysisby lettingi2=±1wherei=√−1is the basic unit of all imaginary numbers. An analysis of theMandelbrot set for this case shows that a demarcation between a Fractal and a Euclidean object ispossible based oni2=−1andi2= +1, respectively. Further, we consider the transient behaviourassociated with the two cases to produce a range of non-standard sets in which a Fractal geometricstructure is transformed into a Euclidean object. In the case of the Mandelbrot set, the Euclideanobject is a square whose properties are investigate. Coupled with the associated Julia sets and othercomplex plane mappings, this …

Development Of A Smart Energy Community By Coupling Neighbouring Community Microgrids For Enhanced Power Sharing Using Customised Droop Control, Sandipan Patra, Madichetty Sreedhar, Malabika Basu

Articles

This article aims to develop a smart isolated energy community (EC) by coupling the neighbouring rural community microgrids (CMGs) with enhanced droop control for efficient power sharing. This recommended solution employs a power management (PM) based droop-control to enable independent neighbouring CMGs to share power on an available basis by not constraining CMG inverters to equal power sharing. During the grid-connected mode, the droop control may have different power setpoints of each CMG. However, during the standalone mode of operation, the power setpoint should be defined according to their power rating and availability to maintain the system stability. In this …

Above And Beyond: Ethics And Responsibility In Civil Engineering, Shannon Chance, Rob Lawlor, Inês Direito Direito, John Mitchell

Articles

This exploratory study investigates how nine London-based civil engineers have enacted ‘global responsibility’ and how their efforts involve ethics and professionalism. The study assesses moral philosophies related to ethics, as well as professional engineering bodies’ visions, accreditation standards, and requirements for continuing professional development. Regarding ethics, the study questions where the line falls between what an engineer ‘must do’ and what ‘would be good to do’. Although the term ethics did not spring to mind when participants were asked about making decisions related to global responsibility, participants’ concern for protecting the environment and making life better for people did, nonetheless, …

Feature Fusion Of Raman Chemical Imaging And Digital Histopathology Using Machine Learning For Prostate Cancer Detection, Trevor Doherty, Susan Mckeever, Nebras Al-Attar, Tiarnán Murphy, Claudia Aura, Arman Rahman, Amanda O'Neill,, Stephen P. Finn, Elaine Kay, William M. Gallagher, William G. Watson, Aoife Gowen, Patrick Jackman

Articles

The diagnosis of prostate cancer is challenging due to the heterogeneity of its presentations, leading to the over diagnosis and treatment of non-clinically important disease. Accurate diagnosis can directly benefit a patient’s quality of life and prognosis. Towards addressing this issue, we present a learning model for the automatic identification of prostate cancer. While many prostate cancer studies have adopted Raman spectroscopy approaches, none have utilised the combination of Raman Chemical Imaging (RCI) and other imaging modalities. This study uses multimodal images formed from stained Digital Histopathology (DP) and unstained RCI. The approach was developed and tested on a set …

Event-Driven Servers Using Asynchronous, Non-Blocking Network I/O: Performance Evaluation Of Kqueue And Epoll, Lorcan Leonard

Dissertations

This research project evaluates the performance of kqueue and epoll in the context of event-driven servers. The evaluation is done through benchmarking and tracing which are used to measure throughput and execution time respectively. The experiment is repeated for both a virtualised and native server environment. The results from the experiment are statistically analysed and compared. These results show significant differences between kqueue and epoll, and a profound impact of virtualisation as a variable.

A Comparison Of Instructional Efficiency Models In Third Level Education, Murali Rajendran

Dissertations

This study investigates the validity and sensitivity of a novel model of instructional efficiency: the parabolic model. The novel model is compared against state-of-the-art models present in instructional design today; Likelihood model, Deviational model and Multidimensional model. This models is based on the assumption that optimal mental workload and high performance leads to high efficiency, while other models assume that low mental workload and high performance leads to high efficiency. The investigation makes use of two instructional design conditions: a direct instructions approach to learning and its extension with a collaborative activity. A control group received the former instructional design …

A New Mmc Topology Which Decreases The Sub Module Voltage Fluctuations At Lower Switching Frequencies And Improves Converter Efficiency, Shahab Sajedi

Doctoral

Modular Multi-level inverters (MMCs) are becoming more common because of their suitability for applications in smart grids and multi-terminal HVDC transmission networks. The comparative study between the two classic topologies of MMC (AC side cascaded and DC side cascaded topologies) indicates some disadvantages which can affect their performance. The sub module voltage ripple and switching losses are one of the main issues and the reason for the appearance of the circulating current is sub module capacitor voltage ripple. Hence, the sub module capacitor needs to be large enough to constrain the voltage ripple when operating at lower switching frequencies. However, …

A Two-Level Information Modelling Translation Methodology And Framework To Achieve Semantic Interoperability In Constrained Geoobservational Sensor Systems, Paul Stacey

Doctoral

As geographical observational data capture, storage and sharing technologies such as in situ remote monitoring systems and spatial data infrastructures evolve, the vision of a Digital Earth, first articulated by Al Gore in 1998 is getting ever closer. However, there are still many challenges and open research questions. For example, data quality, provenance and heterogeneity remain an issue due to the complexity of geo-spatial data and information representation.

Observational data are often inadequately semantically enriched by geo-observational information systems or spatial data infrastructures and so they often do not fully capture the true meaning of the associated datasets. Furthermore, data …

Automated Tracking Of Hand Hygiene Stages, Rashmi Bakshi

Masters

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) estimates that 2.5 millioncases of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs) occur each year in the European Union. Handhygiene is regarded as one of the most important preventive measures for HAIs. If it is implemented properly, hand hygiene can reduce the risk of cross-transmission of an infection in the healthcare environment. Good hand hygiene is not only important for healthcare settings. Therecent ongoing coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of hand hygiene practices in our daily lives, with governments and health authorities around the world promoting goodhand hygiene practices. The WHO has published …

Image Transmission Over Resource-Constrained Low-Power Radio Networks, Paschal O'Connor

Masters

The transmission of large amounts of data over resource-constrained radio frequency (RF) networks is impacted by regulatory constraints and can affect reliability due to channel congestion. These barriers limit the use case to specific applications. This research extends the use case scenario to include the transmission of digital images over such networks which to date has not been widely documented. To achieve this, the overall data volume needs to be reduced to manageable limits. Drawing on previous theoretical work this research explored, developed and implemented novel image compression techniques suitable for use in resource-constrained RF networks.

A compression technique was …